IENTERED Switzerland at Chiasso, a little way from Lake Como in Italy, and left it at Basle near the German frontier, and all I saw was mountains—mountains—mountains—some capped with snow and some without, tall, sharp, craggy peaks, and rough, sharp declivities, with here and there a patch of grass, here and there a deep valley, here and there a lonely, wide-roofed, slab-built house with those immense projecting eaves first made familiar to me by the shabby adaptations which constitute our “L” stations in New York. The landscape hardens perceptibly a little way out of Milan. High slopes and deep lakes appear. At Chiasso, the first stop in Switzerland, I handed the guard a half-dozen letters I had written in Milan and stamped with Italian stamps. I did not know until I did this that we were out of Italy, had already changed guards and that a new crew—Swiss—was in charge of the train. “Monsieur,” he said, tapping the stamp significantly, “vous êtes en Suisse.” I do not understand French, but I did comprehend that, and I perceived also that I was talking to a Swiss. All the people on the platform were “Schweitzers” as the Germans call them, fair, chunky, stolid²-looking souls without a touch of that fire or darkness so generally present a few miles south. Why should a distance of ten miles, five miles, make such an astonishing change? It is one of the strangest experiences of travel, to cross an imaginary boundary-line and find everything different;416 people, dress, architecture, landscape, often soil and foliage³. It proves that countries are not merely soil and climatic conditions but that there is something more—a race stock which is not absolutely a product of the soil and which refuses to yield entirely⁴ to climate. Races like animals have an origin above soil and do hold their own in spite of changed or changing climatic conditions. Cross any boundary you like from one country into another and judge for yourself.
 
Now that I was started, really out of Italy, I was ready for any change, the more marked the better; and here was one. Switzerland is about as much like Italy as a rock is like a bouquet⁵ of flowers—a sharp-edged rock and a rich colorful, odorous bouquet. And yet, in spite of all its chill, bare bleakness⁷, its high ridges⁸ and small shut-in valleys, it has beauty, cold but real. As the train sped on toward Lucerne I kept my face glued to the window-pane on one side or the other, standing⁹ most of the time in the corridor, and was rewarded constantly by a magnificent panorama¹⁰. Such bleak⁶, sharp crags as stood always above us, such cold, white fields of snow! Sometimes the latter stretched down toward us in long deep cañons or ravines until they disappeared as thin white streaks¹¹ at the bottom. I saw no birds of any kind flying; no gardens nor patches of flowers anywhere, only brown or gray or white châlets with heavy overhanging eaves and an occasional stocky, pale-skinned citizen in a short jacket, knee trousers, small round hat and flamboyant¹² waistcoat. I wondered whether I was really seeing the national costume. I was. I saw more of it at Lucerne, that most hotelly of cities, and in the mountains and valleys of the territory beyond it—toward Basle. Somebody once said of God that he might love all the creatures he had made but he certainly couldn’t admire them. I will reverse that for Switzerland.417 I might always admire its wonders but I could never love them.
 
And yet after hours and hours of just this twisting and turning up slope and down valley, when I reached Lucerne I thought it was utterly¹³ beautiful. Long before we reached there the lake appeared and we followed its shores, whirling in and out of tunnels and along splendid slopes. Arrived at Lucerne, I came out into the piazza¹⁴ which spreads before the station to the very edge of the lake. I was instantly glad that I had included Lucerne in my itinerary¹⁵. It was evening and the lamps in the village (it is not a large city) were already sparkling and the water of the lake not only reflected the glow of the lamps along its shores but the pale pinks and mauves over the tops of the peaks in the west. There was snow on the upper stretches of the mountains but down here in this narrow valley filled with quaint¹⁶ houses, hotels, churches and modern apartments, all was balmy and pleasant,—not at all cold. My belongings¹⁷ were bundled into the attendant ’bus and I was rattled¹⁸ off to one of the best hotels I saw abroad—the National—of the Ritz-Carlton system; very quiet, very ornate, and with all those conveniences and comforts which the American has learned to expect, plus a European standard of service and politeness of which we can as yet know nothing in America.
 
I am afraid I have an insatiable appetite for natural beauty. I am entertained by character, thrilled by art, but of all the enlarging spiritual influences the natural panorama is to me the most important. This night, after my first day of rambling¹⁹ about Lucerne, I sat out on my hotel balcony, overlooking the lake and studied the dim moonlit outlines of the peaks crowding about it, the star-shine reflected in the water, the still distances and the moon sinking over the peaks to the west of the418 quaint city. Art has no method of including, or suggesting even, these vast sidereal²⁰ spaces. The wonder of the night and moonlight is scarcely for the painter’s brush. It belongs in verse, the drama, great literary pageants²¹ such as those of Balzac, Turgenieff and Flaubert, but not in pictures. The human eye can see so much and the human heart responds so swiftly that it is only by suggestion that anything is achieved in art. Art cannot give you the night in all its fullness save as, by suggestion, it brings back the wonder of the reality which you have already felt and seen.
 
I think perhaps of the two impressions that I retained most distinctly of Lucerne, that of the evening and of the morning, the morning was best. I came out on my balcony at dawn, the first morning after I arrived, when the lake was lying below me in glassy, olive-black stillness. Up the bank to my left were trees, granite²² slopes, a small châlet built out over the water, its spiles standing in the still lake in a soothing²³, restful way. To my right, at the foot of the lake, lay Lucerne, its quaint outlines but vaguely²⁴ apparent in the shadow. Across the lake only a little space were small boats, a dock, a church, and beyond them, in a circle, gray-black peaks. At their extreme summits along a rough, horny skyline were the suggestions of an electric dawn, a pale, steely gray brightening from dark into light.
 
It was not cold at Lucerne, though it was as yet only early March. The air was as soft and balmy as at Venice. As I sat there the mountain skyline brightened first to a faint pink, the snow on the ridges took on a lavender and bluish hue²⁵ as at evening, the green of the lower slopes became softly visible and the water began to reflect the light of the sky, the shadow of the banks, the little boats, and even some wild ducks flying over its surface,—ducks coming from what bleak,419 drear spaces I could only guess. Presently I saw a man come out from a hotel, enter a small canoe and paddle away in the direction of the upper lake. No other living thing appeared until the sky had changed from pink to blue, the water to a rich silvery gray, the green to a translucent²⁶ green and the rays of the sun came finally glistering over the peaks. Then the rough notches²⁷ and gaps of the mountains—gray where blown clear of snow, or white where filled with it—took on a sharp, brilliant roughness. You could see the col............