Very fine lines, but inspired by the marble rivers of Versailles. The Rhine does not spring from a bed of reeds: it rises from a bed of hoar-frost; its urn, or rather its urns are of ice; its origin is congenerous with those peoples of the North of which it became the adopted stream and the martial girdle. The Rhine, born of the Saint-Gotthard in the Grisons, sheds its waters into the sea of Holland, Norway and England; the Rhone, also a child of the Saint-Gotthard, bears its tribute to the Neptune of Spain, Italy and Greece: sterile snows form the reservoirs of the fecundity of the ancient world and the modern world. Two pools, on the Saint-Gotthard table-land, give birth, one to the Ticino, the other to the Reuss. The source of the Reuss is lower than the source of the Ticino, so that, by digging a canal of a few hundred paces, one would throw the Ticino into the Reuss. If one were to repeat this work in the case of the principal tributaries of those streams, one would produce strange metamorphoses in the regions at the foot of the Alps. A mountaineer can afford himself the pleasure of suppressing a river, of fertilizing or sterilizing a country: there is something to take down the pride of power. It is a marvellous thing to see the Reuss and the Ticino bid each other an eternal farewell and take their opposite ways down the two sides of the Saint-Gotthard: their cradles touch; their destinies are separate: they go to seek different lands and different suns; but their mothers, always united, do not cease, from the height of solitude, to feed their disunited children. There was formerly, on the Saint-Gotthard, a hospice served by Capuchins; now one sees only the ruins of it; there remains of religion but a cross of worm-eaten wood with its Christ: God remains when men withdraw. On the Saint-Gotthard upland, a desert in mid-sky, one world ends and another commences: the German names are replaced by Italian names. I take leave of my companion, the Reuss, which had brought me, as I went up, from the Lake of Lucerne, to go down to the Lake of Lugano with my new guide, the Ticino. The Saint-Gotthard is hewn perpendicularly on the Italian side; the road which plunges into the Val Tremola does credit to the engineer obliged to trace it in the narrowest gorge. Seen from above, this road is like a ribbon folded and folded again; seen from below, the walls supporting the embankments give the impression of the works of a fortress, or resemble those dykes which are built one above the other to resist the invasion of the waters. Sometimes, also, the double row of mile-stones planted regularly on both sides of the road suggests a column of soldiers descending the Alps once more to invade unhappy Italy. _Saturday_, 18 _August_ 1832 (LUGANO).