LAKE LEMAN, AND ITS ASSOCIATIONS.

THERE are some places in the world, which imaginative persons, who contract a sympathy with Genius, feel it almost a duty to visit. Not to perform such pilgrimages, seems a neglect of one of the objects of life. The world has many a Mecca and many a Medina for those who find a prophet in Genius, and an holiness in its sepulchre. Of these none are more sacred than “Leman with its crystal face.”

The very name of that lovely lake is a poem in itself. It conjures up the living and actual shapes of those who have been greater than their kind. As the thought of Troy brings before us at once the bright Scamander — the heaven-defended towers — the hum of the wide Grecian camp — with the lone tent of Achilles, sullen at his loss — and the last interview of Hector and her to whom he was “father, mother, brethren” — so with the very name of Leman rise up — the rocks of Meillerie — the white walls of Chillon — we see the boat of Byron, with the storm breaking over Jura — the “covered acacia walk” — in which, at the dead of night, the Historian of Rome gazed upon the waters after he had finished the last page of his deathless work: Voltaire, Rousseau, Calvin — beings who were revolutions in themselves — are summoned before us. Yes, Leman is an epic; poetical in itself, it associates its name with the characters of poetry; — and all that is most beautiful in nature is linked with all that is most eloquent of genius.

The morning after my arrival at the inn, which is placed (a little distance from Geneva,) on the margin of the lake, I crossed to the house which Byron inhabited, and which is almost exactly opposite. The day was calm but gloomy, the waters almost without a ripple. Arrived at the opposite shore, you ascend, by a somewhat rude and steep ascent, to a small village, winding round which, you come upon the gates of the house. On the right-hand side of the road, as you thus enter, is a vineyard, in which, at that time, the grapes hung ripe and clustering. Within the gates are some three or four trees, ranged in an avenue. Descending a few steps, you see in a small court before the door, a rude fountain; it was then dried up — the waters had ceased to play. On either side is a small garden branching from the court, and by the door are rough stone seats. You enter a small hall, and, thence, an apartment containing three rooms. The principal one is charming, — long, and of an oval shape, with carved wainscoating — the windows on three sides of the room command the most beautiful views of Geneva, the Lake, and its opposite shores. They open upon a terrace paved with stone; on that terrace how often he must have “watched with wistful eyes the setting sun!” It was here that he was in the ripest maturity of his genius — in the most interesting epoch of his life. He had passed the bridge that severed him from his country, but the bridge was not yet broken down. He had not yet been enervated by the soft south. His luxuries were still of the intellect — his sensualism was yet of nature — his mind had not faded from its youthfulness and vigour — his was yet the season of hope rather than of performance, and the world dreamt more of what he would be than what he had been.

His works (the Paris edition) were on the table. Himself was everywhere! Near to this room is a smaller cabinet, very simply and rudely furnished. On one side, in a recess, is a bed, — on the other, a door communicates with a dressing-room. Here, I was told, he was chiefly accustomed to write. And what works? “Manfred,” and the most beautiful stanzas of the third Canto of “Childe Harold,” rush at once upon our memory. You now ascend the stairs, and pass a passage, at the end of which is a window, commanding a superb view of the Lake. The passage is hung with some curious but wretched portraits. Francis I., Diana of Poitiers, and Julius Scaliger among the rest. You now enter his bed-room. Nothing can be more homely than the furniture; the bed is in a recess, and in one corner an old walnut-tree bureau, where you may still see written over some of the compartments, “Letters of Lady B — .” His imaginary life vanishes before this simple label, and all the weariness, and all the disappointment of his real domestic life come sadly upon you. You recall the nine executions in one year — the annoyance and the bickering, and the estrangement, and the gossip scandal of the world, and the “Broken Household Gods.”

 

(“I was disposed to be pleased. I am a lover of Nature and an admirer of beauty. I can bear fatigue, and welcome privation, and have seen some of the noblest views in the world. But in all this, the recollection of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation which must accompany me through life-has preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory, around, above, and beneath me.” — Byrons Journal of his Swiss Tour.)

 

Men may moralize as they will, but misfortunes cause error, — and atone for it I wished to see no other rooms but those occupied by him. I did not stay to look at the rest I passed into the small garden that fronts the house — here was another fountain which the Nymph had not deserted. Over it drooped the boughs of a willow; beyond, undivided by any barrier, spread a vineyard, whose verdant leaves and laughing fruit, contrasted somewhat painfully with the associations of the spot. The Great Mother is easily consoled for the loss of the brightest of her children. The sky was more in harmony with the Genius Loci than the earth. Its quiet and gloomy clouds were reflected upon the unwrinkled stillness of the Lake; and afar, its horizon rested, in a thousand mists, upon the crests of the melancholy mountains.

The next day I was impatient to divert the feelings which the view of Byron’s villa from the garden of my lodgment occasioned, and I repaired on a less interesting pilgrimage, though to a yet more popular, and perhaps imperishable shrine. What Byron was for a season, Voltaire was for half a century: a power in himself — the cynosure of civilization — the dictator of the Intellectual Republic. He was one of the few in whom thought has produced the same results as action. Next to the great Reformers of Religion, who has exercised a similar influence over the minds of men and the destinies of nations? Not indeed according to the vulgar sentiment that attributes to him and to his colleagues the causes of Revolution: the causes existed if no philosopher had ever lived; but he ripened and concentrated the effects. Whether for good or ill, time must yet show — this only can we say, that the evil that has resulted was not of Philosophy, but of Passion. They who prove a disease exists, are not to be blamed if, after their decease, wrong remedies are applied. The misfortune of human affairs is, that Sages point out the rottenness of an old system — but it is quacks that build up the new. We employ the most scientific surveyors to estimate dilapidations, and the most ignorant masons to repair them. This is not the fault of the surveyor. “Les partisans de la liberté sont ceux qui détestent le plus profondément les forfaits qui se sont commis en son nom.” (Influence des Passions.)

The drive from Geneva to Ferney is picturesque and well cultivated enough to make us doubt the accuracy of the descriptions which proclaim the country round Ferney to have been a desert prior to the settlement of Voltaire. You approach the house by an avenue. To the left is the well known church which “Voltaire erected to God.” (“Deo erexit Voltaire.”) It is the mode among tourists to wonder at this piety — and to call it inconsistent with the tenets of its founder. But tourists are seldom profound inquirers. Any one, the least acquainted with Voltaire’s writings, would know how little he was of an Atheist He was too clever for such a belief. He is one of the strongest arguers Philosophy possesses in favour of the existence of the Supreme Being; and much as he ridicules fanatics, they are well off from his satire, when compared with the Atheists. His zeal, indeed, for the Divine existence sometimes carries him beyond his judgment, as in that Romance, where Dr. Friend (Doctor of Divinity, and Member of Parliament!) converts his son Jenni, (what names these Frenchmen do give us!) and Jenni’s friend Birton, in a dispute before a circle of savages. — Dr. Friend overthrows the sturdy atheist with too obvious an ease. In fact, Voltaire was impatient of an argument against which he invariably declared the evidence of all our senses was opposed. He was intolerance itself to a reasoner against the evidence of Reason. I must be pardoned for doing Voltaire this justice — I do not wish to leave Atheism so brilliant an authority.

Opposite to the church, and detached from the house, was once the theatre, now pulled down — a thick copse is planted on the site. I should like, I own, to have seen, even while I defend Voltaire’s belief, whether “Mahomet” or “Le Bon Dieu” were the better lodged!

The house is now before you — long, regular, and tolerably handsome, when compared with the usual character of French or of Swiss architecture. It has been described so often, that I would not go over the same ground if it did not possess an interest which no repetition can wear away. Besides, it helps to illustrate the character of the owner. A man’s house is often a witness of himself.

The salle de reception is a small room, the furniture unaltered — the same needlework chairs in cabriole frames of oak — the same red flowered velvet on the walls. The utter apathy of the great Author to the Beautiful is manifest in the wretched daubs on the walls, which would have put an English poet into a nervous fever to have seen every time he looked round — and a huge stove, magnificently trumpery, of barbarous shape, and profusely gilt, which was “his own invention!” It supports his bust. In this room is the celebrated picture of which tradition says that he gave the design. Herein Voltaire is depicted as presenting the “Henricade” to Apollo, while his enemies are sinking into the infernal regions, and Envy is expiring at his feet! A singular proof of the modesty of merit, — and of its toleration! So there is a hell then for disbelievers — in Voltaire! But we must not take such a design in a literal spirit Voltaire was a conceited man, but he was also a consummate man of the world. We may depend upon it that he laughed himself at the whole thing as much as any one else. We may depend upon it that when the old gentleman, tapping his snuff-box, showed it to his visitors, with that visage of unutterable mockery, he said as pleasant a witticism on the subject as the wittiest of us could invent. How merry he must have been when he pointed out the face of each particular foe! How gaily he must have jested on their damnatory condition! In fact it was one of those boyish ebullitions of caricature which are too extravagant for malice, and which, to the last, were peculiar to the great animal vivacity of Voltaire. It was a hearty joke into which he plunged himself for the sake of dragging his enemies. Voltaire knew the force of ridicule too well, to mean to make himself, as the stupid starers suppose, gravely ridiculous.

The bed-room joins the salon; it contains portraits of Frederic the Great, Mad. Du Chatelet, and himself. The two last have appeared in the edition of his works by Beaumarchais. You see here the vase in which his heart was placed, with the sentiment of “Mon esprit est partout — Mon cœur est ici.”

“As I think,” said my companion, more wittily than justly, (as I — shall presently show,) “that his esprit was better than his cœur, I doubt whether the preference given to Ferney was worth the having.” Le Kain’s portrait hangs over his bed. Voltaire was the man to appreciate an actor: he himself was the Shakspeare of artifice. One circumstance proves his indifference to natural objects. The first thing a lover of nature would have thought of in such a spot, would have been to open the windows of his favourite rooms upon the most beautiful parts of that enchanting scenery. But Voltaire’s windows are all carefully turned the other way! You do not behold from them either the glorious Lake, or the haughty Alps, which (for they are visible immediately on entering the garden) might so easily have been effected. But the Lake and the Alps were not things Voltaire ever thought it necessary either to describe or study. Living in the country he was essentially the poet of cities. And even his profound investigation of men was of artificial men. Men’s tastes, their errors, and their foibles, — not their hearts and their passions. If men had neither profound emotions, nor subtle and intense imaginations, Voltaire would have been the greatest painter of mankind that ever existed.

You leave the house then — you descend a few steps: opposite to you is a narrow road, with an avenue of poplars. You enter into a green, over-arching alley, which would be completely closed in by the thick-set hedge on either side, if here and there little mimic windows had not been cut through the boughs; through these windows you may take an occasional peep at the majestic scenery beyond. That was the way Voltaire liked to look at Nature, through little windows in an artificial hedge! And without the hedge, the landscape would have been so glorious! This was Voltaire’s favourite morning walk. At the end is a bench, upon which the great man, (and with all his deficiencies, when will France produce his equal?) was wont to sit, and think. I see him now, in his crimson and gold-laced coat — his stockings drawn half-way up the thigh — his chin resting on his long cane — that eye, light (he is misrepresented sometimes as having dark eyes) and piercing, fixed, not on the ground, nor upward, but on the space before him; — thus does the old gardener, who remembers, pretend to describe him: I see him meditating his last journey to Paris, — that most glorious consummation of a life of literary triumph which has ever been afforded to a literary man — that death which came from the poison of his own laurels.

Never did Fame illumine so intensely the passage to the grave; but the same torch that flashed upon the triumph, lighted the pyre. It was like the last scene of some gorgeous melodrame — and the very effect which most dazzled the audience was the signal to drop the curtain.

The old gardener, who is above a hundred, declares that he has the most perfect recollection of the person of Voltaire; I taxed it severely. I was surprised to hear that even in age, and despite the habit of stooping, he was considerably above the middle height But the gardener dwelt with greater pleasure on his dress than his person; he was very proud of the full wig and the laced waistcoat, still prouder of the gilt coach and the four long-tailed horses. Voltaire loved parade — there was nothing simple about his tastes. It was not indeed the age of simplicity.

Amidst a gravel space, is a long slip of turf, untouched since it was laid down by Voltaire himself, and not far from hence is the tree he planted, fair, tall, and flourishing; at the time I saw it, the sun was playing cheerily through its delicate leaves. From none of his works is the freshness so little faded. My visit to Byron’s house of the day before, my visit now to Ferney, naturally brought the habitants of each, in contrast and comparison. In the persecution each had undergone, in the absorbing personal power which each had obtained, there was something similar. But Byron attached himself to the heart, and Voltaire to the intellect. Perhaps if Byron had lived to old age and followed out the impulses of Don Juan, he would have gradually drawn the comparison closer. And, indeed, he had more in common with Voltaire than with Rousseau, to whom he has been likened. He was above the effeminacy and the falseness of Rousseau; and he had the strong sense, and the stem mockery, and the earnest bitterness of Voltaire. Both Byron and Voltaire wanted a true mastery over the passions; for Byron does not paint nor arouse passion; he paints and he arouses sentiment.

 

(Byron has been called by superficial critics, the Poet of Passion, but it is not true. To paint passion, as I have elsewhere said, you must paint the struggle of passion; and this Byron (out of his plays at least) never does. There is no delineation of passion in the love of Medora, nor even of Gulnare; but the sentiment in each is made as powerful as passion itself. Every where, in Childe Harold, in Don Juan, in the Eastern Tales, Byron paints sentiments, not passions. When Macbeth soliloquizes on his “way of life,” he utters a sentiment; — when he pauses before he murders his King — he bares to us his passions. Othello, torn by that jealousy which is half love and half hatred, is a portraiture of passion: Childe Harold moralizing over Rome, is one of sentiment. The Poets of Passion paint various and contending emotions, each warring with the other. The Poets of Sentiment paint the prevalence of one particular cast of thought, or affection of the mind. But the crowd are too apt to confuse the two, and to call an author a passionate writer if his hero always says he is passionately in love. Few persons would allow that Clarissa and Clementina are finer delineations of passion than Julia and Haidée.)

 

But in Byron sentiment itself had almost the strength and all the intensity of passion. He kindled thoughts into feelings. Voltaire had no sentiment in his writings, though not, perhaps, devoid of it in himself, Indeed he could not have been generous with so much delicacy, if he had not possessed a finer and a softer spirit than his works display. Still less could he have had that singular love for the unfortunate, that courageous compassion for the opprest, which so prominently illustrate his later life. No one could with less justice be called “heartless” than Voltaire. He was remarkably tenacious of all early friendships, and loved as strongly as he disdained deeply. Any tale of distress imposed upon him easily; he was the creature of impulse, and half a child to the last He had a stronger feeling for Humanity than any of his cotemporaries: he wept when he saw Turgot, and it was in sobs that he stammered out, “Laissez-moi baiser cette main qui a signé le salut du peuple.” Had Voltaire never written a line, he would have come down to posterity as a practical philanthropist. A village of fifty peasant inhabitants, was changed by him into the home of one thousand two hundred manufacturers. His character at Ferney is still that of the father of the poor. As a man, he was vain, self-confident, wayward, irascible; kind-hearted, generous, and easily moved. He had nothing of the Mephistophiles. His fault was, that he was too human — that is, too weak and too unsteady. We must remember, that in opposing religious opinion, he was opposing the opinion of monks and Jesuits; — and Fanaticism discontented him with Christianity. Observe the difference with which he speaks of the Protestant faith — with what gravity and respect. Had he been born in England, I doubt if Voltaire had ever attacked Christianity — had he been born two centuries before, I doubt whether his spirit of research, and his daring courage, would not have made him the reformer of the church and not its antagonist. It may be the difference of time and place that makes all the difference between a Luther and a Voltaire.

As an Author, we are told that he has done many things well, none pre-eminently well — a most absurd and groundless proposition. He has written pre-eminently well! He is the greatest prose writer, beyond all comparison, that his country has produced. You may as well say Swift has done nothing pre-eminently well, because he is neither so profound as Bacon, nor so poetical as Milton. Voltaire is Swift en grand. Swift resembles him, but ten thousand Swifts would not make a Voltaire. France may affect to undervalue the most French of her writers — France may fancy she is serving the true national genius by plagiarising from German horrors — neglecting the profundity of German genius; but with only isolated exceptions, all that of later times she has produced truly national and promising duration, is reflected and furnished forth from the peculiar qualities of Voltaire; — the political writings of Paul Courier, the poetry of Beranger, the novels of Paul de Kock. Her Romanticists are to her, what the Della Cruscans were to us: only they have this advantage — they would be immoral if they could. They have all the viciousness of the eunuch, but happily, they have his impotence also.

But this digression leads me to one whom I must except from so general a censure. From Ferney I went to Coppet: from the least I diverted my thoughts to the most sentimental of writers. Voltaire is the moral antipodes to De Stael. The road to Coppet from Ferney is pretty but monotonous. You approach the house by a field or paddock, which reminds you of England. To the left, in a thick copse, is the tomb of Madame de Stael. As I saw it, how many of her eloquent thoughts on the weariness of life rushed to my memory! No one perhaps ever felt more palpably the stirrings of the soul within, than her whose dust lay there. Few had ever longed more intensely for the wings to flee away and be at rest. She wanted precisely that which Voltaire had — common sense. She had precisely that which Voltaire wanted — sentiment. Of the last it was well said, that he had the talent which the greater number of persons possessed in the greatest degree. Madame de Stael had the talent which few possess, but not in the greatest degree. For her thoughts are uncommon, but not profound; and her imagination is destitute of invention. No work so imaginative as the “Corinne” was ever so little inventive.

And now the house is before you. Opposite the entrance, iron gates admit a glimpse of grounds laid out in the English fashion. The library opens at once from the hall; a long and handsome room containing a statue of Necker: the forehead of the minister is low and the face has in it more of bonhommie than esprit. In fact, that very respectable man was a little too dull for his position. The windows look out on a gravel-walk or terrace; the library communicates with a bedroom hung with old tapestry.

In the salle à manger on the first floor, is a bust of A. W. Schlegel and a print of Lafayette. Out of the billiard-room, the largest room of the suite, is the room where Madame de Stael usually slept, and frequently wrote, though the good woman who did the honours; declared, “she wrote in all the rooms.” Her writing indeed was but an episode from her conversation. Least of all persons, was Madame de Stael one person as a writer, and another as a woman. Her whole character was in harmony; her thoughts always overflowed and were always restless. She assumed nothing factitious when she wrote. She wrote as she would have spoken.

 

Madame de Stael wrote “à la volée.”

“Even in her most inspired compositions,” says Madame Necker de Saussure, “she had pleasure to be interrupted by those she loved.” There are some persons whose whole life is inspiration. Madame de Stael was one of these. She was not of that tribe who labour to be inspired, who darken the room and lock -the door, and entreat you not to disturb them. It was a part of her character to care little about her works once printed. They had done their office, they had relieved her mind, and the mind had passed onward to new ideas. For my own part, I have no patience with authors who are always invoking the ghosts of their past thoughts.

 

Such authors are rare. On the other side of the billiard-room, is a small salon in which there is a fine bust of Necker, a picture of Baron de Stael, and one of herself in a turban. Every one knows that countenance full of power, if not of beauty, with its deep dark eyes.

Here is still shown her writing-book and inkstand. Throughout the whole house is an air of English comfort and quiet opulence. The furniture is plain and simple — nothing overpowers the charm of the place; and no undue magnificence diverts you from the main thought of the genius to which it is consecrated. The grounds are natural, but not remarkable. A very narrow but fresh streamlet borders them to the right. I was much pleased by the polished nature of a notice to the people not to commit depredations. The proprietor put his “grounds under the protection” of the visitors he admitted. This is in the true spirit of aristocratic breeding.

It is impossible to quit this place without feeling that it bequeaths a gentle and immortal recollection. Madame de Stael was the male Rousseau! She had all his enthusiasm and none of his meanness. In the eloquence of diction she would have surpassed him, if she had not been too eloquent. But she perfumes her violets and rouges her roses. Yet her heart was womanly, while her intellect was masculine, and the heart dictated while the intellect adorned. She could not have reasoned, if you had silenced in her the affections. The charm and the error of her writings have the same cause. She took for convictions what were but feelings. She built up a philosophy in emotion. Few persons felt more deeply the melancholy of life. It was enough to sadden that yearning heart — the thought so often on her lips, “Jamais je n’ai été aimée comme j’aime.” But, on the other hand, her susceptibility consoled while it wounded her. Like all poets, she had a profound sense of the common luxury of being. She felt the truth that the pleasures are greater than the pains of life, and was pleased with the sentiment of Horne Tooke when he said to Erskine, “If you had but obtained for me ten years of life in a dungeon with my books, and a pen and ink, I should have thanked you.” None but the sensitive feel what a glorious possession existence is. The religion which was a part of her very nature, contributed to render to this existence a diviner charm. How tender and how characteristic that thought of hers, that if any happiness chanced to her after her father’s death, “it was to his mediation she owed it as if he were living! — To her he was living — in heaven! Peace to her beautiful memory! Her genius is without a rival in her own sex; and if it be ever exceeded, it must be by one more or less than woman.

The drive homeward from Coppet to Geneva is far more picturesque, than that from Ferney to Coppet. As you approach Geneva, villa upon villa rises cheerfully on the landscape; and you feel a certain thrill as you pass the house inhabited by Marie Louise after the fall of Napoleon. These excursions in the neighbourhood of Geneva, spread to a wider circle the associations of the Lake; — they are of Leman. And if the exiles of the earth resort to that serene vicinity, hers is the smile that wins them. She received the persecuted and the weary — they repaid the benefit in glory.

It was a warm, clear, and sunny day, on which I commenced the voyage of the Lake. Looking behind, I gazed on the roofs and spires’ of Geneva, and forgot the Present in the Past. What to me was its little community of watchmakers, and its little colony of English? I saw Charles of Savoy at its gates — I heard the voice of Berthelier invoking Liberty, and summoning to arms. The struggle past — the scaffold rose — and the patriot became the martyr. His blood was not spilt in vain. Religion became the resurrection of Freedom. The town is silent — it is under excommunication. Suddenly a murmur is heard — it rises — it gathers — the people are awake — they sweep the streets — the images are broken: Farel is preaching to the council! Yet a little while, and the stern soul of Calvin is at work within those walls. The loftiest of the Reformers, and the one whose influence has been the most wide and lasting, is the earliest also of the great tribe of the persecuted the City of the Lake receives within her arms. The benefits lie repaid — behold them around! Wherever property is secure, wherever thought is free, wherever the ancient learning is revived, wherever the ancient spirit has been caught, you trace the work of the Reformation, and the inflexible, inquisitive, unconquerable soul of Calvin! He foresaw not, it is true, nor designed, the effects he has produced. The same sternness of purpose, the same rigidity of conscience that led him to reform, urged him to persecute. The exile of Bolsec, and the martyrdom of Servede, rest darkly upon his name. But the blessings we owe to the first inquirers compensate their errors. Had Calvin not lived, there would have been not one, but a thousand, Servedes! The spirit of inquiry redeems itself as it progresses; once loosed, it will not stop at the limit to which its early disciples would restrain it. Born with them, it does not grow with their growth, it survives their death — it but commences where they conclude. In one century, the flames are for the person, in another for the work; in the third, work and person are alike sacred. The same town that condemned Le Contrat social to the conflagration, makes now its chief glory in the memory of Rousseau.

I turned from Geneva, and the villa of Byron, and the scarce-seen cottage of Shelley glided by. Of all landscape scenery, that of lakes pleases me the most It has the movement without the monotony of the ocean. But in point of scenic attraction, I cannot compare Leman with Como or the Lago Maggiore. If ever, as I hope my age may, it is mine to “find out the peaceful hermitage,” it shall be amidst the pines of Como, with its waves of liquid sunshine, and its endless variety of shade and colour, as near to the scenes and waterfalls of Pliny’s delicious fountain, as I can buy or build a tenement. There is not enough of glory in the Swiss climate. It does not bring that sense of existence — that passive luxury of enjoyment — that paradise of the air and sun, which belong to Italy.

The banks of Leman, as seen from the middle of the water, lose much of their effect from the exceeding breadth of the lake; and the distance of the Alps beyond, detracts from their height. Nearness is necessary to the sublime. A narrow stream, with Mont Blanc alone towering by its side, would be the grandest spectacle in the world. But the oppression, the awe, and the undefinable sense of danger which belong to the sublime in natural objects, are lost when the objects are removed from our immediate vicinity. The very influence of the landscape around Leman renders it rather magnificent than grand. There is something of sameness too in the greater part of the voyage, unless you wind near the coast. The banks themselves often vary, but the eternal mountains in the background invest the whole with one common character. But to see the Lake to the greatest advantage, avoid, oh, avoid the steam-vessel and creep close by either shore. Beyond Ouchy and Lausanne, the scenery improves in richness and effect. As the walls of the latter slowly receded from me, the sky itself scarcely equalled the stillness of the water. It lay deep and silent as death, the dark rocks crested with cloud, flinging long and far shadows over the surface. Gazing on Lausanne, I recalled the words of Gibbon; I had not read the passage for years; I could not have quoted a syllable of it the day before, and now it rushed upon my mind so accurately, that I found little but the dates to alter, when I compared my recollection with the page. “It was,” said he, “on the day or rather the night of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last line of the last page in a summerhouse in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waves, and all nature was silent.” What a picture! Who does not enter into what must have been the feelings of a man who had just completed the work that was to render him immortal? What calm fulness of triumph, of a confidence too stately for vanity, does the description breathe! I know not which has the more poetry, the conception of the work or the conclusion — the conception amidst the “ruins of the Capitol, while the bareheaded friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter,” or the conclusion at the stillness and solitude of night, amidst the Helvetian Alps. With what tranquil collectedness of thought, he seems to bask and luxuriate as it were in the sentiment of his own glory! At such a moment did Gibbon feel that his soul which produced the glory, was no less imperishable. For my own part, I should have felt that my soul was diviner than my genius; — the genius is but an effort of the soul, and the artificer is greater than the work. The triumphs we achieve, our conquests of the domain of Time, can but feebly flatter our self-esteem, unless we regard them as the proofs of what we are. For who would submit to deem himself the blind Nursery of Thoughts, to be grafted on other soils, when the clay which nurtured them has crumbled to unproductive atoms? — To consider what Shakspeare thought, while on earth, is a noble contemplation, but it is nobler yet to conjecture what, now, may be the musings, and what the aspirations, of that spirit exalted to a sublimer career of being. It were the wildest madness of human vanity to imagine that God created such spirits only for the earth: like the stars, they shine upon us, but their uses and their destinies are not limited to be the lamps of this atom of creation. So vast a waste of spirit were, indeed, a monstrous prodigality, wholly alien to the economy and system of the Universe!

But new objects rise to demand the thought. Opposite are the heights of Meillerie; seen from the water, they present little to distinguish them from the neighbouring rocks. The village lies scattered at the base, with the single spire rising above the roofs. I made the boatmen row towards the shore, and landed somewhere about the old and rugged town or village of Evian. Walking thence to Meillerie along the banks of the lake, nothing could be richer than the scene around. The sun was slowly sinking, the waters majestically calm, and a long row of walnut trees fringed the margin; above, the shore slopes upward, covered with verdure. Proceeding onward, the ascent is yet more thickly wooded, until the steep and almost perpendicular heights of Meillerie rise before you — here grey and barren, there clothed with tangled and fantastic busies. At a little distance you may see the village with the sharp spiral steeple rising sharp against the mountain; and winding farther, you may survey on the opposite shore, the immortal Clarens: and, whitely gleaming over the water, the walls of Chillon. As I paused, the waters languidly rippled at my feet, and one long rose-cloud, the immortalized and consecrated hues of Meillerie transferred from their proper home, faded lingeringly from the steeps of Jura. I confess myself, in some respects, to be rather of Scott’s than Byron’s opinion on the merits of the Héloise. Julie and St. Preux are to me, as to Scott, “two tiresome pedants.” But they are eloquent pedants! The charm of Rousseau is not in the characters he draws, but in the sentiments he attributes to them. I lose the individuality of the characters — I forget, I dismiss them. I take the sentiments, and find characters of my own more worthy of them. Meillerie is not to me consecrated by Julie, but by ideal love. It is the Julie of one’s own heart, the visions of one’s own youth, that one invokes and conjures up in scenes which no criticism, no reasoning, can divorce from the associations of love. We think not of the idealist, but the ideal. Rousseau intoxicates us with his own egotism. We are wrapt in ourselves — in our own creations, and not his; — so at least it was with me. When shall I forget that twilight by the shores of Meillerie — or that starlit wave that bore me back to the opposite shore? The wind breathing low from Clarens — Chillon sleeping in the distance, and all the thoughts and dreams — and unuttered, unutterable memories of the youth and passion for ever gone, busy in my soul. The place was fall, not of Rousseau, but that which had inspired him — hallowed not by the Priest — but, by the God.

I have not very distinctly marked the time in which the voyage I describe was broken up; but when next I resumed my excursion it was late at noon.

I had seen at Vevay, Ludlow the regicide’s tomb. A stern contrast to the Bosquets (now, alas! potato-grounds ) of Julie. And now, from the water, the old town of Vevay seemed to me to have something in its aspect grateful to the grim shade of the King-slayer. Yet even that memory has associations worthy of the tenderness of feeling which invests the place; and one of the most beautiful instances of woman’s affection, is the faithful valour with which his wife shared the dangers and vicissitudes of the republican’s chequered life. His monument is built by her. And, though in a time when all the nice distinctions of justice on either side were swept away, the zeal of Ludlow wrote itself in blood that it had been more just to spare, the whole annals of that mighty war cannot furnish a more self-contemning, unpurchaseable, and honest heart. His ashes are not the least valuable relics of the shores of Leman.

Again; as you wind a jutting projection of the land, Clarens rises upon you, chiefly noticeable from its look of serene and entire repose. You see the house which Byron inhabited for some little time, and which has nothing remarkable in its appearance. This, perhaps, is the most striking part of the voyage. Dark shadows from the Alps, at the right, fell over the wave, but to the left, towards Clarens, all was bright and sunny, and beautifully still. Looking back, the lake was one sheet of molten gold — wide and vast it slept in its glory; the shore on the right indistinct from its very brightness — that to the left, marked and stern from its very shadow.

Chillon, which is long, white, and, till closely approached, more like a modern than an ancient building, is backed by mountains covered with verdure. You survey now the end of the lake; a long ridge of the greenest foliage, from amidst which the frequent poplar rises, tall and picturesque, the spire of the grove. And, now, nearing Villeneuve, you sail by the little isle hallowed by Byron-

 

      “A little isle,

Which in my very face did smile,

        The only one in view,

A small green isle, it seemed no more,

Scarce broader than my dungeon floor,

But in it there were three tall trees,” &c. (Prisoner of Chillon, line 341.)

 

The trees were still there, young and flourishing; by their side a solitary shed. Villeneuve itself, backed by mountains, has a venerable air, as if vindicating the antiquity it boasts.

I landed with regret, even though the pilgrimage to Chillon was before me. And still I lingered by the wave — and still gazed along its soft expanse. Perhaps, in the vanity common to so many, who possess themselves in thought of a shadowy and unreal future, I may have dreamt, as I paused and gazed, that from among the lesser names which Leman retains and blends with those more lofty and august, she may not disdainfully reject that of one who felt at least the devotion of the pilgrim, if he caught not an inspiration from the shrine.