The big central division of the Lake of Lucerne, extending from the intersection of the cross to the great right angle (it is practically a right angle) at Brunnen that marks the commencement of the Urner See, or Bay of Uri, is considerably the largest, and probably in some respects the most beautiful, but otherwise perhaps the least interesting, of all five reaches of the lake. It lacks, indeed, the superlative grandeur of the Bay of Uri, which corresponds, in English Lakeland, to the head of Ullswater, or Wastwater--curiously so, since in all three cases we have, not merely a climax of severe and even savage sterility, but in all the vista up the water is closed chiefly by a single, great, pyramidal hill: at Wastwater by Great Gable, at Ullswater by Caudale Moor, and here, at the Bay of Uri, by the dark outline of the Bristenstock. The Urner See, then, is the grandest and most imposing, and in some lights gloomiest, lake in Switzerland, though the Walenstadtsee, in Glarus and Gallen, will in these respects by some be thought a rival; but the mid-reaches of Lucerne, to the south of the red cliffs and dark woods of Rigi, and contained towards the west by Pilatus, and towards the east by the twin Mythen--the last three nobly peaked--excel, I think, in open sunny beauty. Contrariwise, these reaches have but small historical interest, with the single exception of Gersau, as compared with the other four members: the Tell traditions, as we have seen, or shall see presently, are confined to the Bay of Küssnacht and to the lake of Uri; Arnold von Winkelried and Nicolas von der Flüe belong to Stans, and Stans, though actually set back a couple of miles or so from the margin of the lake, essentially belongs to the Bay of Alpnach; whilst even the little Lucernersee, though so humble in scenic splendour, leads at any rate to the quays of Lucerne itself, with its girdle of towers and ancient bridges, and with the banners in its Rathhaus that were wrested from the Austrian on the field of Sempach, and the armour there stripped from the dead body of Duke Leopold. Of most of the villages on this central reach, or reaches (for the division is sub-divided by the narrow strait between the Nasen)--whether Weggis, Vitznau, Buochs, or Beckenried--there is little to be said, save that all are quaint and characteristic, and that all are delightfully situated on the margin of the lake. Each, of course, is not without its page in history--Buochs, for example, was burnt by the French in 1798; whilst Weggis was only finally incorporated into the Canton of Lucerne, after years of struggling independence, in 1535. Gersau, however, of all this group of littoral settlements, is in some respects by far the most significant. This is a mere village, at the foot of the wooded Hochfluh--the last big point to the cast of the strangely isolated Rigi massif, and apparently the loftiest (5,574 feet), with the exception of Rigi Kulm. Hardly bigger than Küssnacht,