THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND.—I.

Than, Monday, September 7, 1868.

Arran all, in spite of two great disadvantages, one casual,—that I

was so oppressed with a variety of cares on leaving home that I had almost lost the power of enjoyment,—and one natural,—that r.

am constitutionally impatient, and apt to lose the beauty of one- moment or scene in hurrying on towards another which is stilL distant,—I think I shall get the full benefit of my holiday. Already: Mr. Disraeli's pinchbeck patriotism has ceased to disturb my imagination ; his belief that he was on the eve of a policy which.

would " heal the sorrows of afflicted centuries," and was playing a great part in a truly " awful dispensation" with respect to the trial of the Irish Church by a reformed constituency, begin to seem rather silly than sickening ; and even the resolve of my own.

constituency to return a politician who admires all I most despise and despises all I most admire, is beginning to be remembered like a past headache which need trouble one no more, unless it be in what the Prime Minister calls the historical conscience.' Thera are, indeed, troubles which no mountains and no vistas of lake, how- ever lovely, will throw into the background ; but it is strange how much more easily the mind finds its true relation even to these in perfect rest amongst scenes, forms, and colours which raise instead of fretting the imagination, than amidst those constant and petty strains upon the attention which make up the mass of human business. Mr. Arnold reproaches us English that

" We see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and bustle by, And never once possess our soul Before we die."

But for my part, I think the one great magic of scenes of the higher- order of beauty is that they awaken and arrest the whole mind, and help, even compel, us sometimes " to possess our soul before we die." At least, this is my experience ; and I fancy it is in some degree the spell which draws so many of us to Wales, or Scotland, or Switzerland, or Norway, year after year.

I am not going to trouble you with a minute description of scenes described by thousands of travellers, but only to give you for two or three weeks an account of the more interesting moments of travel. I suppose nobody enjoys railway journeys, least of all this year when railway journeys have been very like the descriptions one reads of Indian dust storms. But we should have enjoyed the night passage to Dieppe on Saturday week, if poor human nature could enjoy anything without getting its natural sleep at the stated intervals. Itwas intolerable in the cabin, and we could not get a mat- tress on deck. Yet in spite of some amiable girls who quarrelled steadily as long as they could keep their eyes open with each other and with their governess, we enjoyed for some time the brilliant trails of moonlight on the still water, and the white gleams on the- passing sails of the Channel fishing boats. The quarrelsome girls themselves amused me not a little. One of them—I will call her " Sophia "—had been invited by the other's parents to spend six weeks, and the frankness of the young lady who was to play the part of hostess was very humorous. She took a very early opportunity of begging Sophia not to compel her to wish on the very first night of the sweet communion opening before them, that she (Sophia) might fall overboard, and so violently anticipate the fervently desired conclusion. Sophia, on her aide, was not much less compromising. Her stumpy and obstinate features are framed in my mind in the most glorious framework of gplour ; for early on Sunday morning, while the whole eastern horizon was shooting up bright orange rays on one side of us, and the full moon was setting in what seemed preternaturally large dimensions on the other side, a sturdy little tramp beside me revealed Sophia again on the alert, and ready to dispute with her schoolfellow and governess the right to the

first " wash " directly the stewardess should be sufficiently awake to prepare one for anybody. The last words which I heard

uttered by this vigorous young lady were an imprecation on her hospitable schoolfellow's light jacket. After we had landed at Dieppe, we chanced to go to the same inn, and the sun was by that time very powerful. The young lady who was to entertain Sophia expressed her intention of retiring to change her light jacket, on which Sophia exclaimed, "Bother her light jacket!" And so, encircled in my memory in the rarest colours of moonlight and of dawn, but with a nature and disposition formed expressly to bother intrepidly her friend's light jacket, or anything else that was hers, she remains to me a sort of type of the exceedingly limited humanity for which so glorious a theatre is so often provided on our earth.

We have no very delightful associations with Rouen or with Paris this year. At Rouen, indeed, the same bright moon which had irradiated Sophia's countenance rose glorious behind the double spire of St. Ouen's, most impressive of Norman churches ; but the pleasure this sight gave us was so closely followed by the only nightly terrors we have yet experienced,—punaises the French delicately and most accurately term them, for certainly they are punitive even of the desire for rest,—and this though our inn was strongly recommended by three concurrent authorities, that Rouen is at present a name of repulsion to us. Paris was hot to suffocation by day-time. One delightful drive we had by moonlight in the Bois de Boulogne, amidst troops of gaily lighted carriages, and beside a lake sprinkled with boats in which those coloured paper Ian- thorns with which I have seen the Grand Canal at Venice made to blaze like fire, shot merrily about. But beyond this, Paris was too suffocating to enjoy. The Jardin des Plantes was as dry and yellow as our own little lawn at home. The great hippopotamus was the only thing in Paris which seemed to care to open its mouth for anything but drink ; but it was obviously hungry, came up to the surface of its pond, and took great pains to open its enormous jaws wide enough to give the blue-bloused French ouvriers a chance of throwing their tributes of bread and cake into its mouth from the distance of fifteen yards or so at which the railing kept them.

We followed Mr. Arnold's steps to the grave of Heine in Mont- martre, for in some measure Mr. Arnold's fine verses on his grave, and in greater measure Heine's own strange genius, its mix- ture of German passion and Parisian wit, of cynical ribaldry and wild poetical fire had interested me in seeing even the place where his body lies. But the sight was one of pure melancholy. It was, indeed, a burial-place befitting a cynic rather than a poet. The stone, with merely " Henri Heine " on it, stands in a wilderness of dreary tablets and hideous monuments. Not a blade of turf is near it, or as far as we could see, is to be found in Montmartre at all. Where Mr. Arnold's " smooth- awarded alleys " are gone to, we could not imagine. There, indeed, are his avenues of limes " touched with yellow by hot summer," but the "shadow and verdure and cool " were nowhere, and I doubt if there is a blade of green grass in the place. The " crisp everlasting flowers, yellow and black, on the graves," were there, sure enough, and gave a singularly artificial effect to the signs of lamentation. The elaborate bead work, the wreaths of tinsel and of bugles, with their metallic glitter, and fade, company air, seemed to me to make Montmartre uglier and less homely even than our own dismal Kensal Green. As we fled from the fierce sun which beat down upon those hideous rows of theatrically dressed-up tombstones, I felt that Heine, the bitterest of cynics, was fitly buried here, but that the most magical of German poets,—in his magic of language surpassing, I think, even Goethe, —had found no fit resting-place. "Trim Montmartre!" says Mr. Arnold: I should have said " haggard Montmartre !" Even the Jews' burial-place at Prague, though it has a much more utterly forlorn and desolate, has not nearly so artificial and flaunt- ing an air as these long-necked tombs with their cheap bead neck- laces round them. However, Heine's black stone stood decently blank, and without any of the gewgaws of artificial grief clinging

to it, and seemed to me to mock the grimaces of mourning in its neighbourhood, as he would have mocked them when living.

What a contrast is Montmartre to the rustic, simple, and lovely little churchyard here at nun ! which I must go out of my proper order a little to mention in this connection. Of all the places that have managed to make death seem lovely and homelike, Thun has

succeeded best, better even than any of the lonely old yew-shaded English churchyards that 1 love so well. If there were a Swiss Wordsworth, he should lie here : it would be even a more glorious resting-place than his own at Rydal. Everybody knows Thun, which the unknown and homely poet Haman has, 1 think, not ill

characterized in one of his couplets, which I may translate thus,—

" In Thun beside the rushing Aar

Than close-packed, busy, bright, bizarre ;"

—and every one who knows the main street of Thun, with its four- fold row of well filled but diminutive shops, knows, I hope, the covered staircase out of it, which leads up the hill to the quaint little church and churchyard. What a place of rest is that I The churchyard is as bright as the gayest garden with rose, convol- vulus, and the old-fashioned portulacca. The little crosses over

the simple tombs are wreathed with convolvulus. Over many a last bed the roses grow with lavish beauty. And then what a setting there is for this lovely little picture! A quaint tower at each corner looks over some of the loveliest and grandest scenery of earth. First, there is Thun, nestled close beneath beside the foaming Aar, and the washerwomen's mid-stream huts, with their

tenants all busy at their homely and picturesque work ; then the fierce little river widens out into the lovely lake with the jagged Stockhorn frowning over it ; and behind that again the cone of the Niese rises up sheer against the blue sky ; then, closing the long stretch of varied bay and headland, are the grand snow fields of the Blitmlis Alp, or the Wilde Frau as the more poetical and homely popular speech calls her. To the left are the green alps and the dotted fir woods which add so unspeakably to the beauty of the snow summits and the wide glaciers. As Hitusan says,—I can give only my lame translation,—

" The Wilde Frau, in ghostly white, Ends the long range of lake and height ; While nearer, Alpine pastures bring Hot August the fresh dross of spring."

And then what a beauty and simplicity in many of the in- scriptions! I found one of which I remember first bearing as a child at my father's knee after he had first returned from Switzer- land, and which he had copied from this very churchyard. It was on the death of a child :— "Du Blume Gottes wio so friih, Brach dich des Giirtner's Hand !

Er brach dich nicht, or Oland() sin Nur in eM boss'res Land."

—which my father had translated, as well, I think, as it could be translated :- " Ah ! why, thou flower of God beloved,

Plucked thee the Gardener's band? He did not pluck thee, but removed Into a bettor land !"

1 found the same inscription, but on a child buried only a year or two ago. The old one seemed to have vanished, and, I trust, the grief it expressed, too. There is no surer line of tradition than that which preserves the most perfect and simple words of grief and trust which yesterday has uttered, for those who need their language to-day. But I have gone out of my way in order to point the contrast with Montmartre, with which I was more than disappointed,—oppressed. Of course one does not expect a great

city to find for its dead the lovely and homely retreats which a little town like Thun can create. But to me, Highgate, Abney

Park, even dismal Kensal Green, rank far above this stiff, artifi- cial, dressed-up skeleton of a fashionable world as it wreathes itself in ghastly finery for the tomb.

How glad we were to escape from sultry Paris,—brighter, gayer, certainly, but also even hotter than dusty, old, sultry London. We slept at Dijon, but saw nothing in the old capital of Burgundy except some very diminutive Burgundian cavalry of to-day, of whom Charles the Bold would not, I think, have been proud. Yes, we did see beside a whole regiment of cats, of whom more than twelve mighty ones belonged to our own inn, and stamped it with the impress of their unfragrant presence. In- deed, it was impossible, amidst such a plethora of the fells domes- hat, not to indulge suspicions of the table d'hote veal, which, I trust, were groundless. The "heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world" were not much lightened till we reached Neuchatel, and then not immediately, for we reached it late at night ; found one of the three principal inns shut up, and both the others quite full. There was an omnibus full of us in despair, including an old Frenchman, who suddenly changed the elaborate politeness of the previous minute into coarse denunciations of the unfortunate waiter who communicated the truth, characterizing him as an imbecile and a fool,—terms which seemed hardly appropriate to a mere incapa- city to create rooms and furniture on the spur of the moment. The old gentleman's affectionate son had, however, in the meantime more wisely applied himself to wheedling the landlady, who made some change in her domestic arrangements so as to set a bed at liberty ; and when this was communicated to "papa," as the young man called him, he instantly smoothed down and was all politeness again. I persuaded the landlady to obtain us a lodging at a distance, where -I struggled during the night with an adverse fate in the shape of a spring bed with its springs broken, so that it gave way in the middle and doubled me up in a pothook as if it had been a sitz-bath, a shape in which it is not convenient to sleep. Still, it was better than the outside of the omnibus, and probably also than the inside, within which I have some reason to fear that certain amiable passengers remained all night. The old Frenchman's wrath with the Neuchatel waiter exploded a day or two afterwards in the only amusing scene I have yet observed at a table (note. It appears that both " papa,"—a heavy, passionate, old, middle-class Frenchman, who looked as if he might have been a retired shopkeeper,—and fits, cherished perma- nent wrath against the waiter who had received them with the un- welcome news of no room. They missed no opportunity of finding fault with all he brought them, and all he did. At last, one day, at the table d'hôte dinner, the worm turned against his persecutors. After being twice told that the dishes he brought were bad, — they seemed very good to us, — and receiving orders to bring some other dish needing special preparation in its place, which he obeyed, he at length, on the third repetition of these tactics, said by way of reproof that at tables d'hote the custom was either to eat or to refuse, but not to give orders. Then the old Frenchman broke loose, launched his heaviest denunciations at the insolence of the waiter, and rising in wrath, went down stairs to the landlady, to whom he stormed so loud that some of the other guests rose to shut the door, while opinions were loudly and freely expressed that the waiter was in the right. In the meantime, the son, —a perfectly colourless, sallow, ti?f, carefully dressed young man, with brilliant black eyes, hair parted in the middle, a well trained moustache, and a most amusing habit of winking to himself,—sat with his napkin tucked under his chin, rejoicing in the storm he had created, shrugging his shoulders, picking his teeth, and bestowing innumerable winks on himself by way of private approbation, as his " papa's" stormy voice rose into the salon. Ile produced upon me the curious impression of looking as if he were an intellectual puppet made expressly for his " papa's " amusement, so completely different in species did he seem from the coarse old Frenchman, and yet so utterly devoted to him in manner. I thought he must have been wound up, and was going off in a thousand little intellectual tricks and grimaces, and freaks of countenance and speech, for " papa's" exclusive enjoyment. Nothing could exceed the puppet's delight when he had got " papa " to take up his cause so wrathfully below stairs. It ended, however, in the defeat of both papa and puppet. Public Opinion was against them, and they left in great wrath the same evening, without greetings on either aide.

The first real delight of our holiday was our little excursion, partly by post carriage, partly by the Jura Chemin de Fer Indus- tfiel," to the mountain villages of Hauts Geneveys, Lode, and Brenda, where we saw the beautiful lake from which the Doubs makes its great leap of eighty feet. Hauts Geneveys is a village at the top of a mountain to which the railway, one of the most extra- ordinary works of its kind, finds its way up by the usual zigzags. It commands the most exquisite view of the wide green Alpine valley called the Val de Ruz, over which are sprinkled some thirty cosy little Swiss villages ; on the opposite side rises up the pictur- esquely wooded mountain of Chaumont—spoiled, I regret to say, by a pension at the summit, where stout young Englishwomen play at their detestable croquet, instead of enjoying as they ought the Sabbath silence of the hills ;" indeed, the click of that eternal croquet-bat and the usual disputes about the game were the first sounds we heard as we emerged from the fir woods at the top. But at Hants Geneveys there is no such company hotel. There is a quiet little village inn commanding Chatunont and the whole Val de Ruz, and beyond it we get a glimpse of the blue waters of the lake of Neuchatel ;—and then again, in the far distance, the gigantic shapes of the Bernese and the Savoy Alps rise up like ghosts of their true selves as one sees them in their more immediate neighbourhood. As the evening falls, they generally emerge from the mist, taking shape above and beneath the clouds which cling to them. Now, a sunbeam falls on a great white glacier, and tarns it to the most exquisite crimson. Now, a whole mountain comes out, apparently wrapped in rosy flame ; then, again, they turn cold and ash-coloured, as the setting sun disap- pears, to rekindle just once more in that lovely after-glow which is due, I suppose, to some reflection from the higher clouds. And while you gaze at all this lovely, mysterious, far-off world, the lights begin to twinkle in the innumerable villages inhabited by the Swiss watchmakers close at hand ; the cattle, with their tinkling bells, come in for the night ; the late hay gives out its sweetest scent ; the near green mountains darken and turn to the richest purple against the pale daffodil of the sky ; and as the stars begin to brighten and multiply, the quaint old watchman (who is begin- ning to disappear from the company-towns of Switzerland), com- mences his disturbing and useless, but expressive and rememberable cries. I seem to realize better, somehow, the grand scenery amidst which I am sleeping, when I am roused now and then during the night by the watchman's periodic report, from without, that the stars are bright and the hours rolling on. We enjoyed nothing like Haute Geneveys till we got here. It was a glorious vestibule to still more glorious scenes.

A WORKING MAN IN SEARCH OF REST.