The modern splendour of Geneva, to which we descend almost reluctantly from the old, grey, upper city on the heights, if certainly very modern, is also certainly very splendid; and leaves us with the impression that the front towards the quays, with its gardens, and palatial hotels, and gigantic cafés, is one of the brightest, and gayest, and most animated scenes anywhere to be met with on the Continent. Moreover, it offers at least one point, where the Rhone, like an arrow from the string, suddenly discharges itself from the blue placidity of the lake, and storms in triumphant volume through the openings of the bridges to swirl past the little tree-shaded Ile-de-Rousseau and the other islands that lie behind it, where even the quiet lover of Nature, to whom gay throngs of all sorts are abhorrent, may feed his soul as completely with splendid, natural spectacle as anywhere among the torrents and glaciers of the remotest and most secluded valleys in which this magnificent stream has origin, and from which it descends in thunder, but never in purity like this, to traverse the whole Canton of the Valais from end to end, and to repose at length in quiet in the lake. To lean across the west parapet of the Pont-du-Mont Blanc at Geneva, and to gaze down into this deep volume of absolutely transparent and deep ultramarine water that shoots forward with Alpine strength and lightning-like rapidity, and is only broken into sheets of seething, delicately sky-blue foam at the point where its majestic impetuosity is arrested by the dams of the electric works, is to come face to face with just such a combination of natural force and loveliness as is nowhere, I think, to be found in Britain, and perhaps at few spots in the Alps. The extraordinarily deep-blue colour of the Lake of Geneva, and of the Rhone where it first emerges, and before it is polluted (alas! in half-a-mile or so) by the influx of the grey and glacier-stained Avre--till the last state of the Rhone, below Geneva, is no better than its first, above Villeneuve--has been the subject of comment and learned inquiry, but has never, unless I mistake, been satisfactorily explained. Most other Alpine lakes, whether in Switzerland or Italy, are deep, or emerald, green: and emerald, or deep green, are the strong rivers that discharge from them--the Linth from Zurich, or the Reuss at Lucerne, or the noble Aar that lends grace to Thun. Tennyson tells us how Guinevere and Lancelot rode together in the may-time woods "Over sheets of hyacinth That seem'd the heavens upbreaking thro' the earth;" but to sail on a sunny day on the waters of Lake Leman is to sail on the perfect blue of heaven itself.