NUMBER FORTY-EIGHT.

FROM BERNE TO SACHSELN.

The Aar and its valley--Thun, its environs and lake-Unterseen-The Lauterbrunnen and Staubbach-A glimpse of the Swiss peasantry-Curious misprint in Goldsmith's Traveller-The Lake of Brienz-The Giesbach-The musical schoolmaster and his family-The pass of the Brünig-Entrance into UnterwaldenLungern and its lake-Partially drained-Sachseln-St. Nicholas von der FlücLegends concerning him.

A DRIVE of four or five hours took us from Berne to Thun; since the construction of the railroad, it is the affair of a short hour. Persons travelling in the opposite direction, from Thun to Berne, frequently take the market boats which descend the Aar. This river is, next to the Rhone and the Rhine, of which it is the most considerable tributary, one of the most important channels, by which the waters of the Swiss ice-mountains find their way to the sea. Its principal sources are in the glaciers of the Schreckhorn and the Grimsel, at no great distance from those of the Rhine. It foams through frightful ravines, and plunges over lofty waterfalls, in the first part of its course, but it is navigable for the greater part of the way from the lake of Thun, and winding by Berne, Soleure, and Aarau, unites its waters with the Rhine, about half-way between Basle and Schaffhausen. Between Berne and Thun, the valley of the Aar is charming. You see but little of the river, but substantial farm-houses line the road, and rich pastures spread rural plenty far away before and around you. The sky was cloudless, and the sparkling sum

mits of the Alps, beyond the sources of the Aar, bounded the prospect. There is, perhaps, no country where the state of the weather is so important to the tourist. It makes all the difference between the dreary uniformity of cold, leaden clouds, which are the same in all countries, and the unmatched glories of the Jungfrau and Mont Blanc.

Thun is a picturesque old town, of three or four thousand inhabitants, and though not among the more celebrated resorts, struck me as one of the most attractive spots for a quiet residence in Switzerland. It is about a mile from the lake, and the Aar, as it dashes out of it, is not inferior in sparkling beauty to the Rhone, as it rushes from the lake of Geneva. An ancient church, a ruined castle, smiling meadows in the environs, modern villas, the river, the lake, and beyond, the glaciers, the wooded heights, and in the background the Sovereign MAIDEN ;-no element of loveliness or grandeur is wanting at Thun. But these mountain regions have their perils and disasters, unknown to the lower world. We contributed our mite to the relief of the inhabitants of a valley, which had lately been buried by an avalanche; and our hasty excursion will soon bring us to the melancholy ruins of Goldau.

A little steamer now plies from Thun to Interlachen; we crossed the lake by a more picturesque conveyance, a broad, flat-bottomed boat, rowed by women, with a very inconsiderable draft of water, which enabled us to creep nearer to some beautiful spots along the shores of the lake, which with a greater draft of water would have been inaccessible. We were about three hours on this delightful, secluded little sheet of water. There were but few villas at that time on the shores of the lake-just enough to give assurance that you were not "out of humanity's reach," without changing the rustic simplicity of the scene by the alloy of suburban magnificence. The shores of the lake for some distance from

Thun have changed their character, I believe, in this respect of late years, by the erection of numerous villas.

Unterseen, as its name imports, (between the lakes), lies about half way between the lake of Thun and the lake of Brienz. It is rather a forlorn place; the black, weatherstained houses, which are reported in the hand-book as "being two hundred years old," have grown young since we were there; our guide assured us they were two thousand years old! We took a char-a-banc directly at the landing-place for Lauterbrunnen and the Staubbach. Lauterbrunnen (clear spring) is a most romantic spot; a narrow vale, almost a ravine, between lofty calcareous walls leading up toward the Jungfrau. The village, of the same name as the valley, containing between a thousand and fifteen hundred houses, is a sombre spot; its houses are far apart; the prodigious rocky walls that overhang it must nearly shut out the sun in the short winter days; vegetation wears a coarse, wiry, Alpine look. The most remarkable feature of the scene consists in the numerous waterfalls, some of them insignificant, and others of some magnitude, which break over the edges of the surrounding mountains. They vary in volume of course with the weather and the temperature; some of them flowing down to the level of the valley; some breaking over the summit, in a considerable torrent; others merely fringing the rocks over which they fall. The Staubbach alone (or dusty torrent) has obtained celebrity. The volume of water in this famous cascade was not very considerable as we saw it, but it is at all times a most striking object. American tourists who go to see the Staubbach, with their heads full of the image of Niagara, are disappointed. It is one of the characteristics of Niagara that its oceanic volume defies the seasons. Melting snows and deluging rains do not swell it; the droughts of midsummer do not sensibly affect the mighty flow of its waters. But the Staubbach sometimes steals down the face of the rock in a thin silvery thread; and at other times,

when swollen by heavy rains, shoots fiercely out from the rock, boldly arching over the valley, and swept to and fro by the wind. Byron in his journal * compares it to “the tail of a white horse streaming in the wind, such as it might be conceived would be that of the pale horse, on which Death is mounted in the Apocalypse. It is neither mist nor water, but a something between both; its immense height (nine hundred feet) gives it a wave or curve, a spreading here or condensation there, wonderful and indescribable." He has transferred this grand figure of the tail of Death's pale horse to his Manfred, in which other images also are painted from Alpine scenery.

On our way back from this pilgrimage to one of inanimate Nature's most awe-inspiring shrines, we stepped into several cottages, to get a nearer view of human nature, in the life of the Alpine peasantry. I cannot say that it gained on closer inspection. We were generally received with a sort of stolid apathy; the dialect is the harshest I ever heard spoken; there was an entire absence of that delightful feature of humble life, which is so well expressed by tidiness; an appearance of want, and of no ambition to smooth it over by ingenious little make-shifts; and at times, I must say, a sinister cast of countenance. M. Von Fellenberg had prepared me for this state of things, the sorrowful contemplation of which gave the first impulse to his educational efforts. Far from regarding Education as a mere intellectual process, designed to impart a certain amount of useful knowledge; he looked upon it as the only agency by which the condition of the masses, physical, social, political, and moral, could be improved. Aware how much America has suffered in the hasty generalizations of tourists, I should be very sorry to do injustice to any part of Switzerland; but as I had no reason to suppose that what I saw between Unterseen and Lauterbrunnen formed an excep

* Moore's life of Byron, Vol. II., p. 14. Am. Ed.

tional specimen of life in the higher Alps, I have ventured to record it. There is, to all appearance, a marked discrimination, as might be beforehand expected, between the character of the peasantry in the ungenial regions of the Oberland, and the substantial yeomanry of the middle agricultural region, and the highly cultivated population of the large towns and their neighborhoods. It resembles the contrast between Lapland and Saxony, except that in one case it is produced by difference of latitude, in the other by difference of elevation.

With respect to the Swiss, Goldsmith has pretty fairly presented, in the Traveller, the two phases of their character, without clearly referring them to the different regions to which they pertain. In the beautiful edition of the Traveller, published, with superior illustrations, by the London Art Union in 1851, a curious misprint occurs, in the commencement of the description of the Swiss, not only in the text of the Poem, but in the quotations from it explaining the illus trations. In the following couplet,

Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansion tread,
And force a churlish soil for scanty bread,

instead of "bleak" this edition in both places reads "black.” We passed the night at Unterseen. A company of singers, five in number, undertook to regale us with national airs. Their appearance certainly was not prepossessing; their voices were harsh, and their manners destitute of refinement. We encouraged their performance at first, in the hopes of hearing some national ballads; the legend of Tell, or the wild traditions of Lauterbrunnen itself. Their répertoire, however, contained nothing but commonplace sentimentalities, which, being destitute of skill or grace in the performance, soon wearied.

Unterseen was alive in the morning with a cattle fair. The scene resembled similar gatherings in our own country,