170 THE BOULEVARD ST. ANTOINE. Geneva, September 15th, 1844. GENEVA is a handsome town, just the very place for an invalid to amuse himself quietly for three or four days. Abundance of pleasant objects to divert the eye and occupy the mind, without any of those attractions of a higher order which imperiously demand such bodily and mental exertions as one feels too feeble to bestow. There are gigantic old streets and magnificent new ones; the former resting their claims to admiration on the barbaric caprice, the other inviting you to admire the stately regularity of their architecture. There are also little Islands, little Groves, and little Walks, together with a particularly bad Statue of a particularly bad man.* The Boulevard Saint Antoine merits a somewhat more honourable mention, and more eminent rank in the beauties of Geneva. This broad and noble terrace, with its avenue of ancient Chestnuts, the deep valley of garden and grove which it commands, and the green meadows and purple hills which form its prospect, has few equals and though last, not least to be eulogized, are the vast and towering villas which constitute its back ground, luxuriating in all the graceful fantasies of Italian architecture, and running wild with balustraded stairs, balconies, loggias filled * Rousseau. with bright coloured flowers, and round turricles, that seem hung like bird-cages in the air. It seems almost needless to mention the celebrated Lake and its lordly father the Rhone; but to speak of Geneva and not write about the Rhone, is impossible. For my own part, I indulged in a Dithyrambic. The Rhone! the Rhone! the mighty Rhone! The broad, the swift, the azure Rhone! There's not a Rivergod that rides So regally the obedient tides: In the red clift of the mountain) To the Pearl Palaces of ocean. Lo! here he sweeps Round Castle Keeps, Broad as their own Baronial mould, While every wave, From Tower and Cave, Chaunts some romantic lay or legend old : And hoary Minsters, Burghs, and mouldring Woods, Image their lordly forms in his careering Floods. SEA OF THE SOUTH! flow on. Flow on, thou sunny Stream!- That bauble of the minstrel's dream, Blue Leman owes thee her transparent lake: 172 LAKE LEMAN. And rush melodiously along, With an enfranchised Warrior's song, By cliff and tree, Right joyously: But whence yon Monster Torrent's headlong chase? Ah me! the abhorr'd embrace his sullied waves declare. WELL, this famous Lake Leman, as far as Lausanne at least, is but a dowdy affair after all, in spite of what the depraved and depraving Novelist of Vevay and his zealous Propagandist the minstrel Baron of Newstead have done to bedizen it! Rousseau is at least sincere in his vicious enthusiasm; but as for Byron, he finds himself in the vicinity of such names as Ferney, Clarens, Vevay, &c. remembers Jean Jacques, and forthwith feels it incumbent upon him to rave. The hyperbolical Fiend immediately begins to torment him; and this melancholy incoherence my Lord manifests especially in those stanzas of which "Clarens, sweet Clarens ! stands at the head. Endowed with an average share of natural and incidental beauties, with but feeble pretensions to the sublime, it has been the singular infelicity of this great Reservoir of the Rhone to have acquired a species of celebrity denied to many a more majestic Water: yet surely that is a notoriety little to be envied which derives its lustre from such names as Voltaire, Gibbon, and Rousseau, and founds its hopes of Immortality on so capricious a harp as that of George Noel Byron. Lausanne, September 18th, 1844. Some talk of Dales, And hills in Wales, saith the old ballad. Talk indeed! if they have not seen Lausanne, they don't know what they are talking about. Lovely Lausanne! Romantic Lausanne! what on earth has she been doing? can she have paused upon an earthquake? Emblem of caprice! how has she been coquetting with the valley and the hill? I declare, I do not exaggerate when I affirm my belief that there is not a palm's breadth of level ground from one end of the pavement to the other. One while you find yourself hobbling and panting on the pinnacle of a street, commanding not only the lofty mansions and pictorial towers half buried in the waving foliage of this congregation of hills, but the blue lake, with its bordure of mountains and party-coloured enamel of villages and towers. Anon you are plunged over head and ears either into a deep labyrinth of aged groves, or into some paved ravine, enfiladed by romantic piles, whose antique fronts and towery roofs threaten to make common cause against you, and sepulchre their victim-(whether vestal or not) in their stony embrace. And then to lionize! for lionize you inevitably must. No man who has an eye in his head can forbear attempting at least some scrutiny of this masonic menagerie of mazy streets, old mansions, and still older steeples; and with or without an eye, no man dares disavow the attempt. 66 Che fare?" then, as we say at Rome. I saw yesterday a pair of horses jib in beautiful stile down a hill about as steep as the Montagnes Russes; so much for trusting their legs, I thought of Monkbarn's caustic Sarcasm to Lovel: "True, true, I forgot your Bucephalus. You are a foolish lad by the by, and should stick to eighteen pence aside if you will trust any one's legs in preference to your own." And as for trusting one's own! till I enter the tomb of my fathers shall I ever forget exploring what the guide books call those pleasing varieties of hill and dale, which terminate in that nice old wooden staircase of about one thousand steps, which leads to the Cathedral! It is of course a bagatelle unworthy the dignity of such an ascent, |