60. Charles Dickens, on his approach to Lausanne and the Lake of Geneva

Charles Dickens recorded in his book, The Uncommercial Traveler, a journey he took.   He arrived at the capital of the Canton of Vaud, Lausanne, having approached it from Strasbourg, which is on the French side of Switzerland.  Dickens described similar climates, vistas and spectacles as our ancestor Jakob II Treuthardt would have encountered on his journey coming from the opposite direction.

"...[I] went up a thousand rugged ways, and looked down at a thousand woods of fir and pine..."

"[The mule] brought me safely, in his own wise way, among the passes of the Alps, and here I enjoyed a dozen climates a day, being now in the region of wind, now in the region of fire, now in the region of unmelting ice and snow.  Here, I passed over trembling domes of ice, beneath which the cataract was roaring; and here was received under arches of icicles, of unspeakable beauty; and here the sweet air was so bracing and so light, that at halting-times I rolled in the snow when I saw my mule do it, thinking that he must know best.   At this part of the journey we would come, at mid-day, into half an hour's thaw; when the rough mountain inn would be found on an island of deep mud in a sea of snow...

"I slept at religious houses, and bleak refuges of many kinds, on this journey, and by the stove at night heard stories of travelers who had perished within call, in wreaths and drifts of snow.

"Commend me to the beautiful waters among these mountains!   Though I was not of their mind:  they, being inveterately bent on getting down into the level country, and I ardently desiring to linger where I was.   What desperate leaps they took, what dark abysses they plunged into, what rocks they wore away, what echoes they invoked!  In one part where I went, they were pressed into the service carrying wood down, to be burnt next winter, as costly fuel, in Italy.   But, their fierce savage nature was not to be easily constrained, and they fought with every limb of the wood; whirling it round and round, stripping its bark away, dashing it against pointed corners, driving it out of the course, and roaring and flying at the peasants who steered it back again from the bank with long stout poles.

"Alas, concurrent streams of time and water carried me down fast, and I came, on an exquisitely clear day, to the Lausanne shore of the Lake of Geneva, where I stood looking at the bright blue water, the flushed white mountains opposite, and the boats at my feet with their furled Mediterranean sails, showing like enormous magnifications of this goose-quill pen that is now in my hand."

--This excerpt is taken from Charles Dickens'  The Uncommercial Traveler. Chapter VII, "Traveling Abroad."    This collection of Dickens' stories was first published in 1875, after his death.
In America, this is copyright-free, as the copyright has expired.   I copied this from the Kindle book.