HOW TO SPEND A SUMMER HOLIDAY.

If the walls of London—the bill-stickers’ chosen haunt—could suddenly find a voice to tell their own history, we might have a few curious illustrations of the manners and customs—the fashions, fancies, and popular idols—of the English during the last half century,—from the days when a three feet blue bill was thought large enough to tell where Bonaparte’s victories might be read about, to the advent acres of flaring paper and print which announce a Bal Masque or a new Haymarket Comedy. One of the most startling contrasts of such a confession would refer to the announcements about means of locomotion. It is not very long ago that “The Highflyer,” 265“The Tally-ho,” the Brighton “Age,” and the Shrewsbury “Wonder” boasted, in all the glory of red letters, their wonder-feat speed of ten miles an hour,—“York in one day;” “Manchester in twenty-four hours;” and so on. The same wall now tells the passer-by a different tale, for we have Excursion Trains to all sorts of pleasant places at all sorts of low fares. “Twelve Hours to Paris” is the burden of one placard, whilst another shows how “Cologne on the Rhine” may be reached in twenty-four.

Nor is this marvellous change in speed—this real economy of life—the only variation from old modes; for the cost in money of a journey has diminished with its cost of time. The cash which a few years ago was required to go to York, will now take the tourist to Cologne. The Minster of the one city is now, therefore, rivalled as a point for sight-seers by the Dom-Kirche of the other. When the South Eastern Railway Company offers to take the traveller, who will pay them about three pounds at London Bridge one night, and place him by the next evening on the banks of the Rhine,—the excellent tendency is, that the summer holiday folks will extend their notions of an excursion beyond the Channel.

Steam, that makes the trip from London to Cologne so rapid and so cheap, does not stop there, but is ready now to bear the traveller by railway to Brunswick, Hanover, Berlin, Dresden, Vienna,—nay, with one short gap, he may go all the way to Trieste, on the Adriatic, by the iron road. Steam is ready also on the Rhine to carry him at small charge up that stream towards Switzerland. Indeed, afloat by steamer and ashore by railway, the tourist who leaves London Bridge on a Monday night may well reach Basle by Thursday or Friday, seeing many things on his way, including the best scenery of the Rhine. The beautiful portion of the banks of that river forms but a small part of its entire length; indeed, on reaching Cologne, the traveller is disappointed to find so little that is remarkable in what he beholds on the banks of the famous stream. It is not till he ascends many miles higher that he feels repaid for his journey. The scenery lies between Coblenz and Bingen, and in extent bears some such proportion to the whole length of the river as would the banks of the Thames from Chelsea to Richmond to the entire course of our great river, from its rise in Gloucestershire to its junction with the sea. In addition to the part just named, there are some few other points where the Rhine is worth seeing,—such as the fall at Schaffhausen,—but Switzerland may claim this as one of its attractions. It is a fine river from Basle, even down through the Dutch rushes and flats to the sea; but, with all its reputation, there is only a morsel of the Rhine worth going to look at, and that lies, as we have just said, between its junction with the picturesque Moselle at Coblenz and the small town of Bingen. Between those points it 266passes through hills and near mountains, whose sides and summits boast the castles and ruins so often painted and often sung; and these spots are now within the reach of the three pounds first-class railway ticket, now-a-days announced by placard on the walls and hoardings of London.

Once on a Rhine steamer, and Switzerland is within easy reach.

On our table, as we write, lies the second edition of a volume^[2] written by the physician to the Queen’s Household, Dr. Forbes, showing how a month may be employed in Switzerland. He adopted the South Eastern Railway plan, and, starting by a mail train at half-past eight in the evening of the 3rd of August, found himself and companions on the next evening looking from the window of an hotel on the Rhine. Steam and a week placed him in Switzerland. Here railways must be no longer reckoned on, and the tourist, if he be in search of health, may try what pedestrian exercise will do for him. This the Doctor strongly recommends; and, following his own prescription, we find him—though a sexagenarian—making capital way; now as a pedestrian, anon on horseback, and then again on foot, only adopting a carriage when there was good reason for such assistance. He describes the country, as all do who have been through it, as a land of large and good inns, well stored with luxurious edibles and drinkables. Against a too free use of them, he doctor-like gives a medical hint or two, and goes somewhat out of his way, perhaps, to show how much better the waters of the mountains may be than the wine. Indeed the butter, the honey, the milk, the cheese, and the melted snows of Switzerland win his warmest praises. The bread is less fortunate; but its inferiority, and many other small discomforts, are overlooked and almost forgotten in his enjoying admiration of what he found good on his way amidst the mountain valleys and breezy passes of his route. The bracing air, the brilliant sky, the animating scenes, the society of emulous and cheerful companions, and, above all, the increased corporeal exercise soon produce a change in the mind and the body, in the spirits and the stomach of the tourist.

What a marvellous change it is for a smoke-dried man who for months, perhaps years, has been “in populous cities pent,” to escape from his thraldom, and find himself far away from his drudgeries and routines up amongst the mountains and the lakes, and surrounded by the most magnificent scenes in nature; where he sees in all its glory that which a townsman seldom gets a glimpse of—a sunrise in its greatest beauty; and where sunsets throw a light over the earth, which makes its beauties emulate those of the heavens! Day by day, during summer in Switzerland, such enjoyments are at hand. 267One traveller may choose one route, and another another; for there are many and admirable changes to be rung upon the roads to be taken. Dr. Forbes, for instance, went from Basle to Schaffhausen, thence to Zurich, and, steaming over a part of the lake, made for Zug, and thence to the Rigi. He returned to the Zurich-See, and then went to Wallenstadt, Chur, and the Via Mala. Had he to shorten his trip without great loss of the notable scenes, he might, having first reached Lucerne, have left that place for Meyringen, and then pursued his subsequent way by the line of the lakes, visiting the various glorious points in their neighbourhood that challenged his attention—Grindelwald, Schreckhorn, Lauterbrunnen, Unterseen, and so on to Thun; then by the pass of the Gemmi to Leuk, and, from there, to what is described by our author as the gem of his whole Swiss experience—the Riffelberg, and the view at Monte Rosa:—

“Sitting there, up in mid-heaven, as it were, on the smooth, warm ledge of our rock; in one of the sunniest noons of a summer day; amid air cooled by the elevation and the perfect exposure to the most delicious temperature; under a sky of the richest blue, and either cloudless, or only here and there gemmed with those aerial and sun-bright cloudlets which but enhance its depth; with the old field of vision, from the valley at our feet to the horizon, filled with majestic shapes of every variety of form, and of a purity and brilliancy of whiteness which left all common whiteness dull;—we seemed to feel as if there could be no other mental mood but that of an exquisite yet cheerful serenity—a sort of delicious abstraction, or absorption of our powers, in one grand, vague, yet most luxurious perception of Beauty and Loveliness.

“At another time—it would almost seem at the same time, so rapid was the alternation from mood to mood—the immeasurable vastness and majesty of the scene, the gigantic bulk of the individual mountains, the peaks towering so far beyond the level of our daily earth, as to seem more belonging to the sky than to it, our own elevated and isolated station hemmed in on every side by untrodden wastes and impassable walls of snow, and, above all, the utter silence, and the absence of every indication of life and living things—suggesting the thought that the foot of man had never trodden, and never would tread there: these and other analogous ideas would excite a tone of mind entirely different—solemn, awful, melancholy....

“I said at the time, and I still feel disposed to believe, that the whole earth has but few scenes that can excel it in grandeur, in beauty, and in wonderfulness of every kind. I thought then, and I here repeat my opinion in cool blood, that had I been brought hither blindfolded from London, had had my eyes opened but for a single hour on this astonishing 268panorama, and had been led back in darkness as I came, I should have considered the journey, with all its privations, well repaid by what I saw.”

Having seen this crowning glory of mountain scenery, the tourist intent only upon a short trip might adopt one of many variations for his return to Basle. If on going out he had missed any bright spot, he should see it on his way back. He must remember:

Interlachen, one of the sweetest spots in all Switzerland, which, though only about four miles in extent, affords a perfect specimen of a Swiss valley in its best form.

The Lake of Thun, inferior to that of Wallenstadt in grandeur, and to that of Lucerne in beauty, but superior to the Lake of Zurich in both; and in respect to the view from it, beyond all these; none of them having any near or distant prospect comparable to that looking back, where the snowy giants of the Oberland, with the Jungfrau, and her silver horns, are seen over the tops of the nearer mountains.

The “show glacier” of the Rosenlaui, which is so easy of access.

The view from the Hotel of the Jungfrau on the Wengern Alp.

The lake scenery near Alpnach.

All these points should be made either out or home. They are not likely to be forgotten by the tourist when once seen. On the pilgrimage to these wonders of nature, the other peculiarities of the country and its people will be observed, and amongst them the frequency of showers and the popularity of umbrellas; the great division of landed property; the greater number of beggars in the Romanist as compared with the Protestant Cantons, and the better cultivation of the latter; the numerous spots of historical interest, as Morgarten, Sempach, Naefels; where the Swiss have fought for the liberty they enjoy (to say nothing of the dramatic William Tell, and his defeat of the cruel Gesler); the fruitfulness and number of Swiss orchards (which give us our grocers’ “French plums”), the excellent flavor of Alpine strawberries and cream; the scarcity of birds; and the characteristic sounds of the Swiss horn, the Ranz des Vaches, and the night chaunts of the watchmen.

On the map attached to Dr. Forbes’s volume are the dates, jotted down, when our traveller entered Switzerland, at Basle, and when he left it on his return to smoke and duty in London. He reached the land of mountains and lakes on the 11th of August; he quitted it on the 12th of September; four days afterwards he was being bothered at the Custom-House at Blackwall. The last words of his book are these:—“In accordance with a principle kept constantly in view while writing out the particulars of the Holiday now concluded, viz. to give to those who may follow the same or a similar track, such economical and financial details as may be useful to them, I may here 269state that the total expenses of the tour—from the moment of departure to that of return—was, as near as may be, One Guinea per diem to each of the travellers.”

The thousands of young gentlemen with some leisure and small means, who are in the habit of getting rid of both in unhealthy amusements, need hardly be told that a winter’s abstinence from certain modes and places of entertainment would be more than rewarded by a single summer holiday spent after the manner of Dr. Forbes and his younger companions. No very heroic self-denial is necessary; and the compensation—in health, higher and more intense enjoyment, and the best sort of mental improvement—is incalculable.

What we have here described is an expensive proceeding compared with the cheap contract trips which are constantly diverging from the Metropolis, to every part of England, Ireland, Scotland, and to all attainable places on the Continent. These, so far as we are able to learn, have hitherto been well conducted; and although the charges for every possible want—from the platform of the London Terminus back again to the same spot, are marvellously moderate—the speculations, from their frequent repetition, appear to have been remunerative to the projectors.