little town of Schwyz itself, which is visible rather too obviously as the land slopes up in the distance, though with less than eight thousand inhabitants, might very justly complain of Berne that the latter has usurped its proper dignity in attracting to itself the Swiss seat of federal government. Brunnen, which is called the port of Schwyz, and from which it is distant about three miles, is singularly crushed and over-weighted by the great hotels on the Seelisberg and the Axenfels, and has suffered perhaps more severely by the exploitation of its neighbourhood than any other single station on the lake. The attraction here, of course, is the majestic Bay of Uri, which comes into view with startling suddenness, in a few revolutions of the paddles, as the steamer approaches the quay at Brunnen; and whose splendour, luckily, neither monster hotel, nor monster crowd, nor the presence of the great St. Gothard railway (here first insistently apparent on the margin of the lake), "nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy." One would have preferred, no doubt, to have approached this inner shrine of the hills--which is also the inner shrine of the great traditions of Swiss liberty--with somewhat less obtrusive parade of the engineering triumphs of the nineteenth century. One remembers for the moment how William and Dorothy Wordsworth came hither, and on foot, in 1820. "We descended," writes Dorothy in one of her journals, "by a long flight of steps, into the Vale, and, after about half a mile's walking, we arrived at _Brunnen_. Espied Wm. and M. [her brother, William, and his wife] upon a crag above the village, and they directed us to the Eagle Inn, where I instantly seated myself before a window, with a long reach of the Lake of Uri before me, the magnificent commencement to our regular approach to the St. Gothard Pass of the Alps. [Hitherto their approach from Calais had been devious, by way of the Rhine and the Oberland.] My first feeling was of extreme delight in the excessive _beauty_ of the scene--I had expected something of a more awful impression from the Lake of Uri; but nothing so _beautiful_." There was then no St. Gothard railway; no over-weening hotels; not even, perhaps, a steamboat on the lake!