Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake To waft me from destruction; once I loved That I with stern delights should e'er have been thus moved. It is the hush of night, and all between There breathes a living fragrance from the shore Or chirps the grasshopper one good night carol more. At intervals some bird from out the brakes Yet quiet and dreamy as these shores appear, stern practical men have lived upon them, and the name of Calvin goes down with that of Geneva and Switzerland in the history of the world. Calvin and Rousseau! what a strange connection; yet they are linked together in the history of Geneva. The church still stands where the itinerant preacher and foreigner first thundered forth his denunciations against the dissolute town. Elevated to the control of the republic, he was just the man to sway its turbulent democracy. Stern, fearless, and decided, he marked out his course of policy, and made every thing bend to it. Take even some of the most arbitrary of his enactments, and they show the clear-sightedness of the man. Among them we find that only five dishes were allowed for a dinner to ten persons. Plush breeches were forbidden to be worn; violation of the Sabbath was punished by a public admonition from the pulpit, and adultery with death; while the gamester was exposed in the pillory, with a pack of cards suspended round his neck. These things JUNCTION OF THE RHINE AND ARVE. 31 awaken a smile or sneer in these more liberal days, but whoever shall write the last history of republics will prove that such apparently bigoted enactments, sprung out of the clearest practical wisdom. A republic without the severity of Puri an manner, I believe impossible for any length of time; that is while men are so depraved they will use their liberty for the gratification of their passions. The (so called) "straight-laced Puritan" is, after all, the only man who knows any thing of the true genius of a republic among men such as we find them. Calvin and Rousseau ! which, after all, was the true republican? the sentimental dreamer or the stern Presbyterian? These two names stand in Geneva like great indexes, pointing out the characters of the 30,000 persons who annually pass through it, by showing which way their sympathies flow. One portion looks on Calvin to sneer, the other on Rousseau to sigh. The deep blue tint of the waters of the Rhone as it leaves the lake has often been commented upon. As it rushes under the bridges of the town, it looks as if a vast quantity of indigo had been emptied into it, tinging it as I have seen water in no other part of the world. About a mile and a half from town, this stream of "heavenly dye" receives the turbid waters of the Arve into its bosom. The Arve is a furious stream, and comes pouring down from Mont Blanc, loaded with the debris of the mountains, till it looks like a river of mud. When the clear blue Rhone first meets this rash innovator of its purity, it refuses to hold any companionship with it, and retires in apparent disgust to the opposite bank, and for a long way the waters flow on with the separating line between the muddy white and pellucid blue, as clearly drawn as the shore itself. But the Arve finally conquers, and fuses all its corrupt waters into the Rhone, which never after recovers its clearness till it falls into the sea. I followed the bank along for some distance, watching with the intensest interest this struggle between corruption and purity. There was an angry, rash, and headlong movement to the turbid Arve, while the stainless waters of the Rhone seemed endeavouring, by yielding, to escape the contagious touch of its companion. What a striking emblem of the steady encroachment of bad principles and desires when once admitted into the heart, or of the corrupting influence of bad companionship on a pure mind. The Arve, for the time being, seemed endowed with consciousness, and a feeling of anger involuntarily arose within me at its unblushing effrontery in thus crowding back the beautiful Rhone from its own banks, and forcing it to receive its disgusting embrace. The world is full of histories of which the Rhone and Arve are the type. FREYBOURG ORGAN. 33 VII. FREYBOURG ORGAN AND BRIDGES.-SWISS PECULIARITIES. NOTHING strikes the traveller more than the peculiar customs attached to the separate cantons of Switzerland. Although bordering on each other, and each but a few miles across, yet they retain from generation to generation their own peculiar dress and money. The traveller becomes perfectly confused with the latter. The dress of the female peasantry is not only dissimilar in the different cantons, but odd as it well can be. In one, the head-dress will be an immensely broad-brimmed straw hat, without any perceptible crown; in another a man's hat; in a third a diminutive thing perched on the top of the head; and in a fourth a black crape cap, with wings on either side projecting out like huge fans. The latter you find in Freybourg, and this reminds me of the two magnificent wire bridges in the town itself, and the immense organ. The latter has 7800 pipes, some of them 32 feet long, and 64 stops. It is an instrument of tremendous power, and though the traveller is compelled to pay eleven francs to hear it on a weekday, it is worth the money. At first, one imagines a trick is played upon him, and that a full orchestra accompanies the organ. The mellow tones melt in and float away with the heavier notes, as if a band of musicians were playing out of sight. Many refuse to believe it is not a deception till they go up and examine every part of the instrument. The effect is perfectly bewildering. There is the trombone, the clarionet, the flute, the fife, and ever and anon, the clear ringing note of the trumpet. ance is closed with an imitation of a thunder storm, in which the wonderful power of the instrument is fully tested. At first you The perform. hear the low distant growl swelling up, and then slowly dying away. The next peal breaks on the ear with a more distinct and threatening sound. Nearer and nearer rolls up the thunder-cloud, sending its quick and heavy discharges through the atmosphere, till clap follows clap with stunning rapidity, rolling and crashing through the building till its solid arches tremble as if the real thunders of heaven were bursting overhead. I did not dream that a single instrument could possess so much power. There are two suspension bridges in Freybourg; one remarkable for its great length, the other for its extreme beauty. The latter connects the top of two mountains, swinging over a frightful gulf that makes one dizzy to look down into. There are no buttresses or mason-work in sight at a little distance. Shafts are sunk in the solid rock of the mountains, down which the wires that sustain it are dropped. There it stretches, a mere black line nearly 300 feet in the heavens, from summit to summit. It looks like a spider's web flung across a chasm; its delicate tracery showing clear and distinct against the sky. While you are looking at the fairy creation suspended in mid-heaven, almost expecting the next breeze will waft it away, you see a heavy wagon driven on it. You shrink back with horror at the rashness that could trust so frail a structure at that dizzy height. But the air-hung cobweb sustains the pressure, and the vehicle passes in safety. Indeed, weight steadies it, while the wind, as it sweeps down the gulf, makes it swing under you. The large suspension bridge is supported on four cables of iron wire, each one composed of 1,056 wires. As the Menai bridge of Wales is often said to be longer than this, I give the dimensions of both as I find them in Mr. Murray: Frey bourg, length 905 feet, height 174 feet, breadth 28 feet; Menai, length 580 feet, height 130 feet, breadth 25 feet. A span of 905 feet, without any intermediate pier, seems impossible at first, and one needs the testimony of his own eyes before he can fully believe it. But to the customs of the Swiss. I do not speak of them here because I have witnessed them all thus far on my route, or in any part of it, but because they seem to fill out a chapter best just here. Of some of these customs I speak as an eye-witness-of thers simply as a historian. There is one connected with edu |