Looking eastward from the quays or the lake at Lucerne across the shining expanses of water to the great background of snow-clad Alps--visualizing those Alps in memory as we sit later on at home, by the side of a winter fire--most of us have probably an impression only of a very lovely, and very magnificent, but also very vague and inchoate, huddle of confused and indefinite hills. The highest peak seen at Lucerne from the Schweizerhof Quay is apparently the Tödi (11,887 feet), supreme at the point, or very nearly at the point, where Uri, Glarus, and the Grisons meet, and next to this in actual dignity is perhaps the snowy Titlis (10,627 feet), which rises above Engelberg, and also belongs, like the Tödi, to a bunch of three converging cantons--in this case Uri, Unterwalden, and Berne. Yet these two giants, with their groups of attendant satellites, are so remote from the margin of the lake itself, and so lost amidst the company of their hardly less magnificent peers, that they strike one on the whole with less impress of overwhelming individuality--associate themselves on the whole less easily with our necessarily blurred and imperfect recollections of the Vierwaldstättersee when the lake itself is no longer seen--than two other striking hills of far less elevation, and in one case of far less noble outline, that yet rear themselves more immediately from the exact levels of the lake, and that stand more or less aloof, in conspicuous isolation, not merely from one another, but from the general confraternity of hills. Wordsworth reminds us in an admirable sonnet how "Pelion and Ossa flourished side by side, Together in immortal books enrolled"-- yet surely not Pelion and Ossa (I have never seen them) dominate Thessaly more insistently, or confront one another with more marked and divergent character across the intervening valley, than Swiss Rigi and Pilatus confront one another across the blue spaces of the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, or dominate its waters from the exact margin of its shores! [Illustration: OLD HOUSES AND BRIDGE AT LUCERNE]