The Lake of GenevaMorris, Joseph E. (Joseph Ernest)
History
The Lake of Geneva
Morris, Joseph E. (Joseph Ernest)
Geneva, Lake (Switzerland and France)
In a chapel on the east of the south transept is the tomb, with a
modern statue, of Duke Henri de Rohan, the Protestant leader, who
was slain at the battle of Rheinfelden in 1638. The church has, of
course, been stripped of its ancient coloured glass, for we can hardly
suppose that Calvinistic Geneva of the sixteenth century lacked its
local "Blue Dick" or its incorrigible William Dowsing; but luckily two
splendid windows have somehow escaped, and are now in safe possession
in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire. One is a large figure of St. John the
Evangelist, and another of St. Julian or St. James-the-Less. Preserved
in the same collection are two fifteenth-century bench-ends, and a
fragment of broken stall canopy, that come also from the Cathedral.
Everyone should climb to the top gallery of the great south tower, for
there, on a fine day, we are best in a position--it is the highest
spot in the whole city save the adjoining leaden flèche--to study the
topography of Geneva and the surrounding country. Geneva, we then see,
though different from towns, such as Luxembourg, Richmond, or Le Puy,
whose actual site and immediate environs in themselves are striking and
beautiful, is none the less set in the heart of a general landscape
which for varied splendour and loveliness is hardly to be rivalled by
any other great city--and not at all in my experience--in the western
half of Europe. Immediately to the east spread the waters of the lake,
intensely and uniquely blue, and dotted perhaps with the graceful
lateen sails that are only found here, on Lac Leman, and again on the
Mediterranean. Owing to the direction at this point of the axis of the
lake (more or less to the north-east), which points directly at the
heart of the great central plain of Switzerland, between the Jura and
the Alps, the distance is closed along the water by no lofty chain of
hills, but merely dies away into flat and fruitful vale. To the left
of the lake, however, appears the noble limestone escarpment that
constitutes the eastern boundary of the Jura, stretching for nearly
half-a-hundred miles, like a vast blue wall, from its commencement on
the Rhone, below the city, in the neighbourhood of Bellegarde, far
away to the north-east, in the direction of Neuchâtel. The position of
Bellegarde itself is roughly fixed by the great fort at Ecluse, seen
clearly on its hill above the narrow glen of the Rhone; for at Ecluse
(well named, like Cluses, on the Avre, for the word means strait, or
narrows) Jura and Alp come close together, and confront one another
menacingly across the contracted gorge of the Rhone. The spot is almost
exactly paralleled in England by the deep valley between Tebay and
Lowgill, which is also threaded by a great trunk railway, though it
happily needs no fort; and where the Lake mountains and Howgill Fells,
which are out-liers of the so-called Pennine chain, similarly confront
one another across the shallow stream of the Lune. Commencing then
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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