GENEVA AND THE RHONE.

From PRETERITA.

John Ruskin.

MORE and more deeply every hour, in retracing Alpine paths, by my fireside, the wonder grows on me, what Heaven made the Alps for, and gave the chamois its foot, and the gentian its blue, yet gave no one the heart to love them. And in the Alps, why especially that mighty central pass was so divinely planned, yet no one to pass it but against their wills, till Napoleon came, and made a road over it.

Nor often, since, with any joy; though in truth there is no other such piece of beauty and power, full of human interests of the most strangely varied kind, in all the mountain scenery of the globe, as that traverse, with its two terminal cities, Geneva and Milan; its two lovely lakes of approach, Leman and Maggiore; its two tremendous valleys of vestibule, the Valais and Val d'Ossola; and its own, not desolate nor terrible, but wholly beautiful, upper region of rose and snow.

Of my early joy in Milan, I have already told; of Geneva, there is no telling, though I must now give what poor picture I may of the days we spent there, happy to young and old alike, again and again, in '33, '35, '42, and now, with full deliberation, in '44, knowing, and, in their repetitions twice, . and thrice, and four times, magnifying, the well-remembered joys. And still I am more thankful, through every year of added life, that I was born in London, near enough to Geneva for me to reach it easily; and yet a city so contrary to everything Genevoise as best to teach me what the wonders of the little canton were.

A little canton, four miles square, and which did not wish to be six miles square! A little town, composed of a cluster of watermills, a street of penthouses, two wooden bridges, two dozen of stone houses on a little hill, and three or four perpendicular lanes up and down the hill. The four miles of acreage round, in grass, with modest gardens, and farmdwellings; the people, pious, learned, and busy, to a man, to a Woman -to a boy, to a girl, of them; progressing to and fro mostly on their feet, and only where they had business. And this bird's-nest of a place, to be the centre of religious and social thought, and of physical beauty, to all living Europe! That is to say, thinking and designing Europe, France, Germany, and Italy. They, and their pieties, and their prides, their arts and their insanities, their wraths and slaughters, springing and flowering, building and fortifying, foaming and thundering round this inconceivable point of patience: the most lovely spot, and the most notable, without any possible dispute, of the European universe; yet the nations do not covet it, do not gravitate to it,- what is more wonderful, do not make a wilderness of it. They fight their battles at Chalons and Leipsic; they build their cotton mills on the Aire, and leave the Rhone running with a million of Aire power, all pure. They build their pleasure houses on Thames shingle, and Seine mud, to look across to Lambeth, and - whatever is on the other side of the Seine. They found their miltiary powers in the sand of Berlin, and leave this precipice-guarded plain in peace. And yet it rules them,is the focus of thought to them, and of passion, of science, and of contrat sociale; of rational conduct, and of decent- and other manners. Saussure's school and Calvin's, - Rousseau's and Byron's, - Turner's,

And, of course, I was going to say, mine; but I didn't write all that last page to end so. Yet Geneva had better

have ended with educating me and the likes of me, instead of the people who have hold of it now, with their polypous knots of houses, communal with 'London, Paris, and New York.'

Beneath which, and on the esplanades of the modern casino, New York and London now live- no more the Genevese. What their home once was, I must try to tell, as I saw it.

First, it was a notable town for keeping all its poor, - inside of it. In the very centre, where an English town has its biggest square, and its Exchange on the model of the Parthenon, built for the sake of the builder's commission on the cost; there, on their little pile-propped island, and by the steep lane-sides, lived the Genevoise poor; in their garrets, their laborious upper spinning or watch-wheel cutting rooms, -their dark niches and angles of lane: mostly busy; the infirm and old all seen to and cared for, their porringers filled and their pallet-beds made, by household care.

But, outside the ramparts, no more poor. A sputter, perhaps, southward, along the Savoy road; but in all the champaign round, no mean rows of cubic lodgings with Doric porches; no squalid fields of mud and thistles; no deserts of abandoned brickfield and insolvent kitchen garden. On the instant, outside Geneva gates, perfectly smooth, clean, trimhedged or prim-walled country roads; the main broad one intent on far-away things, its signal-posts inscribed Route de Paris;' branching from it, right and left, a labyrinth of equally well-kept ways for fine carriage wheels, between the gentlemen's houses with their farms; each having its own fifteen to twenty to fifty acres of mostly meadow, rich-waving always (in my time for being there) with grass and flowers, like a kaleidoscope. Stately plane trees, aspen, and walnut, -sometimes in avenue, casting breezy, never gloomy, shade round the dwelling-house. A dwelling-house indeed, all the year

round; no travelling from it to fairer lands possible; no shutting up for seasons in town; hay-time and fruit-time, schooltime and play, for generation after generation, within the cheerful white domicile with its green shutters and shingle roof, — pinnacled perhaps, humorously, at the corners, glittering on the edges with silvery tin. Kept up' the whole place, and all the neighbors' places, not ostentatiously, but perfectly enough gardeners to mow, enough vintagers to press, enough nurses to nurse; no foxes to hunt, no birds to shoot; but every household felicity possible to prudence and honor, felt and fulfilled from infancy to age.

Where the grounds came down to the waterside, they were mostly built out into it, till the water was four or five feet deep, lapping up, or lashing, under breeze, against the terrace wall. Not much boating; fancy wherries, unmanageable, or too adventurous, upon the wild blue; and Swiss boating a serious market and trade business, unfashionable in the high rural empyrean of Geneva. But between the Hotel des Etrangers, (one of these country-houses open to the polite stranger, some half-mile out of the gates, where Salvador took us in '33 and '35) and the town, there were one or two landing-places for the raft-like flat feluccas; and glimpses of the open lake and things beyond, — glimpses only, shut off quickly by garden walls, until one came to the inlet of lakewater moat which bent itself under the ramparts back to the city gate. This was crossed, for people afoot who did not like going round to that main gate, by the delicatest of filiform suspension bridges; strong enough it looked to carry a couple of lovers over in safety, or a nursemaid and children, but nothing heavier. One was allowed to cross it for a centime, which seemed to me always a most profitable transaction, the portress receiving placidly a sort of dirty flattened sixpence, (I forget its name) and returning me a waistcoat

pocketful of the loveliest little clean-struck centimes; and then one might stand on the bridge any time, in perfect quiet. (The Genevese didn't like paying the centime, and went round by the gate.) Two swans, drifting about underneath, over a couple of fathoms of purest green water, and the lake really opening from the moat, exactly where the Chamouni range of aiguilles rose beyond it far away. In our town walks we used always to time getting back to the little bridge at sunset, there to wait and watch.

That was the way of things on the north side; on the south, the town is still, in the main buildings of it, as then; the group of officially aristocratic houses round the cathedral and college presenting the same inaccessible sort of family dignity that they do to-day; only, since then, the Geneva Liberals Well, I will not say what they have done; the main town stands still on its height of pebble-gravel, knit almost into rock; and still the upper terraces look across the variously mischievous Liberal works to the open southern country, rising in steady slope of garden, orchard, and vineyardsprinkled with pretty farm-houses and bits of chateau, like a sea-shore with shells; rising always steeper and steeper, till the air gets rosy in the distance, then blue, and the great walnut-trees have become dots, and the farmsteads, minikin as if they were the fairy-finest of models made to be packed in a box; and then, instant-above vineyard, above farmstead, above field and wood, leaps up the Salève cliff, two thousand feet into the air.

I don't think anybody who goes to Geneva ever sees the Salève. For the most part no English creature ever does see farther than over the way; and the Salève, unless you carefully peer into it, and make out what it is, pretends to be nothing, a long, low swell, like the South Downs, I fancy most people take it for, and look no more. Yet there are