Thus William Tell, like Arnold von Winkelried, recedes into the dim borderland of legend and history. After all, it is no irreparable loss. The individual Arnold, the individual Tell, were units merely of the great company of authentic, unnamed heroes who smote the Austrian tyrant at Sempach and Morgarten, who triumphed against the Burgundian at Grandson, Morat, and Nancy. The third division, in still ascending scale of mountain grandeur, of the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons is that which extends south-westward from the intersection of the cross, and is known--certainly towards its extremity, and perhaps throughout its length--from the little village at its head as the Lake of Alpnach. Here the general effect is more definitely mountainous than that which has awaited us in sailing the two previous compartments: Rigi is now exchanged for Pilatus as the presiding genius and dominant monarch of the scene; whilst the Alps of Unterwalden, and, beyond the low pass of the Brünig, the greater Alps of the Berner Oberland--the triple Maiden, Monk, and Giant--the Peak of Storms, and the Peak of Shrieking--at last supply that mountain background which everyone must have missed when looking up the water towards Küssnacht or Lucerne. The Oberland giants, it is true, are set at too great distance to impress the eye, however much they may affect the imagination, with the same sense of impending mountain majesty as we find in the Bay of Uri; but Pilatus and the Stanserhorn are both immediate and splendid objects; whilst even the dark, pine-clad crags of the little Bürgenstock, which is literally, like Catullus' Sermio, "all-but-island"--for it needs but the raising of the lake a very few feet, and the consequent flooding of the low isthmus between Stans and Buochs, to complete its insulation--push out into the lake with an assertive individuality that is wholly out of keeping with their relatively insignificant height (actually less than four thousand feet). Roughly half-way up, at a point where the lake is narrowed to the dimensions of a river by the sudden, sharp intrusion of the tall black cliffs of the Lopperberg (a footstool of Pilatus), the strait thus strangely created is spanned across to Stanstad by an ugly iron bridge. The crass utilitarianism, in fact, that mars, though it cannot wholly disfigure, so much that is beautiful in Switzerland, and that contributes so little to the honour of the modern Switzer (however well it may fill his purse), is altogether painfully too evident along the shores of this division of the Lake of Lucerne. The hideous lines of electric wires along the margin of the lake are only less detestable than those that degrade the Pass of Llanberis; this bridge across the narrows is as ugly as may be; whilst Baedeker (with his usual businesslike lack of romanticism) duly chronicles in a single breath the presence of "water-falls and Portland cement factories" in the neighbouring glen of the Rotzloch.