Chapter 9

Where are my Switzers? Let them guard the door:
What is the matter?

Hamlet.

The American autumn, or fall, as we poetically and affectionately term
this generous and mellow season among ourselves, is thought to be
unsurpassed, in its warm and genial lustre, its bland and exhilarating
airs, and its admirable constancy, by the decline of the year in nearly
every other portion of the earth. Whether attachment to our own fair and
generous land, has led us to over-estimate its advantages or not, and
bright and cheerful as our autumnal days certainly are, a fairer morning
never dawned upon the Alleghanies, than that which illumined the Alps, on
the reappearance of the sun after the gust of the night which has been so
lately described. As the day advanced, the scene grew gradually more
lovely, until warm and glowing Italy itself could scarce present a
landscape more winning, or one possessing a fairer admixture of the grand
and the soft, than that which greeted the eye of Adelheid de Willading,
as, leaning on the arm of her father, she issued from the gate of Blonay,
upon its elevated and gravelled terrace.

It has already been said that this ancient and historical building stood
against the bosom of the mountains, at the distance of a short league
behind the town of Vévey. All the elevations of this region are so many
spurs of the same vast pile, and that on which Blonay has now been seated
from the earliest period of the middle ages belongs to that particular
line of rocky ramparts, which separates the Valais from the centre cantons
of the confederation of Switzerland, and which is commonly known as the
range of the Oberland Alps. This line of snow-crowned rocks terminates in
perpendicular precipices on the very margin of the Leman, and forms, on
the side of the lake, a part of that magnificent setting which renders the
south-eastern horn of its crescent so wonderfully beautiful. The upright
natural wall that overhangs Villeneuve and Chillon stretches along the
verge of the water, barely leaving room for a carriage-road, with here
and there a cottage at its base, for the distance of two leagues, when it
diverges from the course of the lake, and, withdrawing inland, it is
finally lost among the minor eminences of Fribourg. Every one has observed
those sloping declivities, composed of the washings of torrents, the
_débris_ of precipices, and what may be termed the constant drippings of
perpendicular eminencies and which lie like broad buttresses at their
feet, forming a sort of foundation or basement for the superincumbent
mass. Among the Alps, where nature has acted on so sublime a scale, and
where all the proportions are duly observed, these _débris_ of the high
mountains