Joseph E. Morris

“ The road from Lucerne to Küsnacht, where it skirts this bay beyond the big, scrambling village of Meggen, is one of the pleasantest view-points within easy touch of Lucerne whence to enjoy across the water the noble mountain background that screens the south shore of the main lake. On a mild spring evening, when this splendid landscape is an ætherialized study in black and white; when the snowflakes and cowslips are pushing up in thousands through the quickly growing grass; when the host of margent rushes scarcely quivers in the stillness ”

“ Sempach itself, like Sursee, is a picturesque old town, with another quaint old gateway. The lake, though five miles long, is quite outside the mountains, though the splintered crags of Pilatus give a distant hint of Alpine splendour. The remaining nine miles or so to Lucerne are perhaps a trifle dull, and the entrance to the city is through the usual straggling suburb—out of all reasonable proportion to the place itself—that conducts us too frequently to a town in Switzerland. ”

“ The most immediately mountainous in character, because no other big Swiss lake, as already intimated,7 extends itself so deeply into the heart of giant hills, or is bordered so immediately by steep and rugged mountains. Thus Lucerne gains in surprise and mystery what it loses in simple graciousness; is dramatic and startling where other lakes are tranquil and merely soothing; and is certainly, to sum up, the most splendid and magnificent lake in the Alps, if not the most dignified and beautiful. ”

“ Its elements, though majestic, are exceedingly downright and simple, whereas those of the rest of the Lake of Lucerne are multiform, subtle, and complex. Whatever be the impression that it effects on the spectator, it is likely to accomplish this at once; it is no finer at the head than at the foot; and all that it has of grandeur (and nothing of the kind in the Alps is grander) is flashed upon us in a moment, in complete and final revelation, when first it comes into vision between the piers at Trieb and Brunnen. It varies, of course, in splendour as the day is bright or dull ”

“ The Land of Promise lies fair before us; but here, on the saddle of the Rigi, we still linger on the threshold, though the biting morning breeze come, pine-scented, through the forest, and though the musical cow-bells tinkle for ever on the "high mountain pastures, where day first appears." ”

“ Looking eastward from the quays or the lake at Lucerne across the shining expanses of water to the great background of snow-clad Alps—visualizing those Alps in memory as we sit22 later on at home, by the side of a winter fire—most of us have probably an impression only of a very lovely, and very magnificent, but also very vague and inchoate, huddle of confused and indefinite hills. ”

“ Arnold von Winkelried and Nicolas von der Flüe belong to Stans, and Stans, though actually set back a couple of miles or so from the margin of the lake, essentially belongs to the Bay of Alpnach; whilst even the little Lucernersee, though so humble in scenic splendour, leads at any rate to the quays of Lucerne itself, with its girdle of towers and ancient bridges, and with the banners in its Rathhaus that were wrested from the Austrian on the field of Sempach, and the armour there stripped from the dead body of Duke Leopold. ”

“ Like most little towns in this part of Switzerland—like Sarnen, Arth, and Altdorf—the place is delightfully quaint and old-fashioned, with its often painted houses, and its wide-projecting eaves. Above it towers the Stanserhorn, with perhaps more bulk than shape;48 whilst a mile or two down the valley, on the opposite shore of the lake, the graceful peaks of Pilatus give a welcome note of contrast. The church has a Romanesque tower; but the body, like most of those in the Alps, is Classical rebuilding. ”

“ This was an old centre for goat-whey cure, and the inns are delightfully old-fashioned of aspect; the whole appearance of the spot, indeed, is full of local character, whereas most other settlements on the Rigi are cosmopolitan and commonplace. The salvation of the place is its utter lack of view: you must scramble up steep grass slopes, towards the south, to the summit of the saddle, to enlarge your horizon in a few steps from a barrier of green hill-side to a prospect so vast that you seem suddenly to have before you all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory thereof. ”

“ It is bad enough that a hill should be desecrated by a single mountain28 railway: it is intolerable that it should be degraded by three! How many people ascend to the Rigi Kulm on a day of tolerable weather in August from either Vitznau or Arth-Goldau one would hardly dare to guess; how many are housed at night in one or other of the monster hotels—at Rigi Kulm, at Rigi Kaltbad, at Rigi Staffel, at Rigi Scheidegg—that oppress and burden its weary summits is a matter not to be dwelt on. ”

“ High above the little mountain town, on a green pedestal of hill, is the stately, Classical parish church, commanding sweeping views across the wide sub-Alpine vale. Here, in the crowded burial-ground, I searched in vain in the early months of 1914 for memorials of any age—almost every cross or stone had been erected since I had last passed along this valley, in driving in the diligence from Meiringen to Lucerne, not quite a quarter of a century earlier. The old bone-houses stand nowadays mostly empty ”

“ Land where you can, or will, and you find your immediate environment scarcely wilder, if wilder at all, than the lower slopes of Pilatus or Rigi. It is only, in fact, in the upland vales of Switzerland—at spots like the Grimsel Hospice, or towards the summits of passes like the Simplon or the Splügen—that the ordinary wanderer, who is not a climber, will realize that abandon of wild and savage sterility that delights him in a hundred glens among the mountains of Scotland or Carnarvonshire, in Glen Sannox, or Glen Sligachan, in Llanberis, or Cwm Llydaw. ”

“ In gloom, or rain, or heat-haze, it is the one division of the lake that will fail to disappoint us, but perhaps it is also the one division that responds less readily to the vivifying influences of sunshine and blue sky. ”

“ If one happen to be older, or has seen the thing before, there is reason good enough to quit the train at Sursee, fifteen miles short of Lucerne, and approach Lucerne thence gradually, on bicycle or foot, by a zig-zag route of gradual introduction that is pursued, I suppose, by hardly anyone, and certainly not by Cook's tourist or Polytechnic student, each of whom has borrowed Atalanta's heels. Sursee itself, though entered by a medieval gateway, has little else to show in the way of particular antiquities. ”

“ Death in the form of a skeleton (Wordsworth's "Death the Skeleton") presents himself in turn to all kinds and conditions of men—in the great series at the old abbey church of La Chaise-Dieu (Haute-Loire) in France to actually not less than thirty-five, now setting his foot with timid determination on the trailing robe of a sacrosanct Pope; now greeting with mocking glance a Cardinal, who averts his head with hasty terror; now dancing with insolent familiarity in front of an aged man ”

“ The cliffs that drop directly to its eastern shore are63 indeed tremendous and unapproachable, but above them, as we know, are gentle Alpine pastures that are musical with cow-bells, and meadows that are fragrant with hay and flowers. The tops of distant snow-clad mountains, again, though visible from its waters, are really removed to immense distances, above it and beyond it, and though they ring it round in insuperable barrier, almost belong to another world. ”

“ The vale of the Reuss at Altdorf, and indeed as far south as Amsteg, where it is blocked, as it were, by the huge pyramid of the Bristenstock, and where the floor of the valley first begins to rise in earnest towards the far-away col of the St. Gothard, is merely a prolongation of the mountain basin of the Urnersee, with the substitution of flat green pasture for a pavement of crystal lake. Of the Bay of Uri itself I feel that I have said little, yet feel,62 with some sincerity, that there is little to be said. ”

“ One is rather apt to forget that the Switzerland of the days before the French Revolution—the Switzerland whose name is a synonym for liberty; the Switzerland of Sempach, Morat, and Morgarten—consisted only of the thirteen German-speaking states that are clustered mostly to the north and west of the original mountain nucleus of Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz.
With Flüelen, exactly at the head of the lake, we conclude our perambulation of the Vierwaldstättersee. I do not know that this little village has much of particular interest ”

“ The legend of Arnold von Winkelried, like that of Tell, has been questioned of recent years; it first appears, more than half a century after the supposed event, "in an interpolated notice in a Zurich chronicle (1438 or later) , and a popular song of the latter half of the same century." True or false it will bear retelling, and indicates correctly enough the national spirit, even though it err in narration of historical fact. After all, most children know it by heart: how Arnold von Winkelried, finding it impossible by any other means to break the serried Austrian ranks ”

“ So far the realm of legend. The realm of actual history is scarcely less astonishing, and attaches itself to legend by imperceptible ties. It is history that the city of Lucerne in the Middle Ages did actually prohibit the ascent of the mysterious hill: it is history that six priests in 1307 were condemned to several months26 of imprisonment for daring to visit the forbidden lake. ”

“ None the less it is well worth visiting, for the sake of its grand Renaissance choir stalls and sunny, silent cloister. Hence to Sempach you may find a pleasant, unfenced lane, through the open pastures and apple-orchards, that falls by easy gradients along the north shore of the placid lake. Sempach is one of the sacred political sites of Switzerland—like Morat, like Morgarten—for here was fought, in 1386, one of those great battles that vindicated her freedom, and linked11 her name for ever with England's as a synonym for liberty:
"Two Voices are there ”

“ The hill is really a whole agglomeration of hills—of which the Rigi Kulm (5,905 feet) is merely the culminating summit—which occupy very roughly the rectangular area that lies between the lakes of Lucerne, Zug, and Lowerz, and are formed largely of horizontal30 layers of red conglomerate, or pudding-stone, rock. The hill is thus distinctly of the lumpy type of mountain, as opposed to its rival, Pilatus, which belongs to the vertical, or peaked ”

“ But apart from towns like these, my general proposition will be acceptable, I think, to anyone who dwells, on the one hand, on places like Beauvais, or Cambrai, or Chartres, or, on the other, on bigger cities, such as Angers, or Orleans, or Tours. In Switzerland, which appears to me, much more than France, to be bursting with prosperity and redundant population, it seems on the whole harder to suggest a general rule. ”

“ If the history of William Tell itself is unauthentic, we must not demand authenticity for its visible memorials and sites. Gesler's Castle above Küssnacht—or the fragments that remain of it—certainly never belonged to Gesler; whilst the chapel at the head of the Hohle Gasse, or Hollow Way,38 was certainly rebuilt in 1644, and did not exist at all at the end of the fifteenth century. ”

“ Those36 who visit Lucerne only in the deadly oppression of the high season, when every lake-side quay swarms like an ant-hill, and every village rings like Babel, are apt to carry away wrong impressions of this still absolutely unimpaired lake. The playground at seasons is densely packed, but the place has received no permanent wrong; those who can reconcile Nature and a crowd will be happy here even in August, when ”

“ No one has done the place a permanent wrong. Who can claim as much for the holly steeps of Windermere—for the distorted Clarens shore of Lake Geneva?
Küssnacht itself is a large, typically Swiss, village, at the foot of the low pass—yet altogether too low to be dignified by the name of37 pass—that at this point intervenes between the basins of Zug and Lucerne. The place has this significance, that here for the first time, as we perambulate the lake, we encounter spots associated with the legend of William Tell. ”

“ In France I always reckon that a town of less than fifty thousand people is likely to retain untouched its medieval character, or at any rate its atmosphere of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Exceptions of course occur—I make one in the case of Aix-en-Provence, which seems to have been mostly rebuilt, though in very delightful fashion, as late as the eighteenth century. ”

“ Brunnen, which is called the port of Schwyz, and from which it is distant about three miles, is singularly crushed and over-weighted by the great hotels on the Seelisberg and the Axenfels, and has suffered perhaps more severely by the exploitation of its neighbourhood than any other single station on the lake. ”

“ The least comprehensible in bulk, because there is actually no point on its surface, or on its immediate margin, or perhaps indeed anywhere, whence it is possible to grasp its basin as a whole, as it is possible, for example, in a rough kind of way, to grasp the shape and dimension of such a much larger lake as Geneva from the vineyards in the neighbourhood of Aubonne. ”

“ But except from the marble roofs of Milan Cathedral there is perhaps33 no other generally recognized and easily accessible point of view from which it is possible, merely by turning the head, to command so long a line of crowding Alpine summits, extending from the Sentis, in the extreme east, to Pilatus in the west, for a distance of roughly one hundred and twenty miles—
"Hill peers o'er hill, and Alps o'er Alps arise." ”

“ Thus, there is said to be evidence that a religious observance of some kind was instituted in connection with Tell in the place where he lived in 1387; and it is stated, though not earlier than 1504, that a chapel was erected on the Tellsplatte, as the country people believed in commemoration of the landing there of William Tell, in 1388. The story as now commonly reported—that Tell40 refused to do obeisance to the Austrian Arch-duke's cap at Altdorf; that he shot the apple off his son's head at the brutal bidding of Gesler in the market-place of the same town ”