The Old Saint-Gothard - Page 2

I have been walking about the arcades, which used to bestow a
grateful shade in July, but which seem rather dusky and chilly in
these shortening autumn days. I am struck with the way the
English always speak of them--with a shudder, as gloomy, as
dirty, as evil-smelling, as suffocating, as freezing, as anything
and everything but admirably picturesque. I take us Americans for
the only people who, in travelling, judge things on the first
impulse--when we do judge them at all--not from the standpoint of
simple comfort. Most of us, strolling forth into these bustling
basements, are, I imagine, too much amused, too much diverted
from the sense of an alienable right to public ease, to be
conscious of heat or cold, of thick air, or even of the universal
smell of strong charcuterie. If the visible romantic were
banished from the face of the earth I am sure the idea of it
would still survive in some typical American heart....

Lucerne, September. --Berne, I find, has been filling with
tourists at the expense of Lucerne, which I have been having
almost to myself. There are six people at the table d'hôte; the
excellent dinner denotes on the part of the chef the easy
leisure in which true artists love to work. The waiters have
nothing to do but lounge about the hall and chink in their
pockets the fees of the past season. The day has been lovely in
itself, and pervaded, to my sense, by the gentle glow of a
natural satisfaction at my finding myself again on the threshold
of Italy. I am lodged en prince, in a room with a balcony
hanging over the lake--a balcony on which I spent a long time
this morning at dawn, thanking the mountain-tops, from the depths
of a landscape-lover's heart, for their promise of superbly fair
weather. There were a great many mountain-tops to thank, for the
crags and peaks and pinnacles tumbled away through the morning
mist in an endless confusion of grandeur. I have been all day in
better humour with Lucerne than ever before--a forecast
reflection of Italian moods. If Switzerland, as I wrote the other
day, is so furiously a show-place, Lucerne is certainly one of
the biggest booths at the fair. The little quay, under the trees,
squeezed in between the decks of the steamboats and the doors of
the hotels, is a terrible medley of Saxon dialects--a jumble of
pilgrims in all the phases of devotion, equipped with book and
staff, alpenstock and Baedeker. There are so many hotels and
trinket-shops, so many omnibuses and steamers, so many Saint-
Gothard vetturini, so many ragged urchins poking
photographs, minerals and Lucernese English at you, that you feel
as if lake and mountains themselves, in all their loveliness,
were but a part of the "enterprise" of landlords