[Illustration: THE DENTS DU MIDI FROM GRYON, ABOVE BEX.] III. In America, I suppose, if you stand in the centre of the Michigan shore of Lake Superior, you can no more make out Canada across the water than a man can make out Normandy though he strain his eyes for ever from Selsey or Beachy Head. A lake, in fact, may be so big that it ceases, for all landscape effect, to be a lake at all, and becomes merely an inland sea. Perhaps the most beautiful lakes of all are those of such modest dimension--yet more than mere ponds or tarns--that you can comprehend their total shore-line from some eminence on their bank, as Buttermere, for example, is comprehended from the slopes of Red Pike, or Loch Lomond, very nearly, from the summit of Ben Voirlich. The Lake of Geneva, from this point of view, is much nearer Buttermere than Lake Superior; but still, in a sense, not whimsical, but real, must be reckoned as much too big. And not only this, but its basin also is a hotch-pot of different kinds of scenery, and of different ranges of hills. It is encradled, as a whole, neither in Alp nor Jura, but lies rather in a plain between the two. It's head, indeed, penetrates superficially into the lower Alps of Vaud; whilst the greater Alps of the Valais, and in particular the noble Dent-de-Morcles, and the yet nobler Dent-du-Midi, guard its upper waters at such a distance that, though really far removed, they appear as we approach to rise almost from its margin, and form an immediate and splendid setting for its reaches above Evian and Vevey. Its southern shore, again, is bordered fairly closely, for almost its whole length, by rugged Alps of Savoy that open behind Thonon to admit glimpses even of the far-away snows of Mont Blanc himself, revealed in crowning majesty beyond the valley of the Dranse. So far, indeed, Lac Leman may be fairly claimed for Alpine; but turn to the opposite shore, and we must tell another tale. From Geneva towards Lausanne the background is formed, though at considerable distance, by the south-east escarpment of the Jura, whose long, level-crested wall of limestone rock--exactly like the long limestone wall of the Pennine hills above the Vale of Eden, or of Mendip above the marshes of mid-Somerset--affords the strongest contrast in the world to the abruptly pointed, opposite, Savoyard summits of the Dent d'Oche or Pointe de Grange, though not without analogy, near the city of Geneva, in the hog-backed ridge of the Grand Salève, which might almost belong to Jura itself. Moreover, this ridge of Jura, which at Geneva itself is not more than some ten miles or so away from the lake, gradually, after Rolle, or Aubonne, in its straight course towards the north-east, trends farther and farther from the lake, which here begins to curve towards the south, so that part of the north shore of the lake, between Rolle and Lausanne, actually abuts on neither Alp nor Jura, but terminates, rather tamely, on the great central plain of Switzerland.