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LETTER II.

Journey through Switzerland-Descrip

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tion of Zurich.

UITTING Basil in the cool of the

morning, we rode, or walked, all day, up hill, and down, across a corner of Germany, ostensibly consecrated to Catholic uses, by wooden crosses, and stone chapels, innumerable. Among them we perceived, for the first time, with a degree of veneration that had more in it of poetry than Protestantism,

-a Friar of orders grey

counting his beads, and mumbling over his prayer-book; if not with zeal according to knowledge, at least with all the abstractedness

stractedness and tranquillity of a Pilgrim and a Sojourner upon earth.

We stopped for the night at a little town-Rheinfelden - Lauffenberg- or Wildenstein, in which a narrow street of ten houses on a side, is blocked up at each end by a gate-way, and hemmed in by a wall, or a precipice, at the foot of which rolls a torrent, beneath a covered bridge-images of confinement so insupportable to an American that we could not sit down to supper till we had convinced ourselves we were at large, by rambling into the adjacent fields, and surveying the distant horizon.

Next morning, quitting the territory of Basil, we passed through the town of Baden, as the Peasantry of the neighbourhood

bourhood were collecting in the great church, to prostrate themselves before a tinsel Madonna, or a crocus Saint, and we arrived, before noon, at Zurich, having passed in a few hours from Protestantism, to Popery, and from Popery to Protestantism again: for religion has been subjected in Switzerland to geographical boundaries, and the hereditary Burgher is Catholic or Protestant according to the decree of the Sovereign Council of his Canton, when at the period of the Reformation the religion of the State was decided, like a political question, by the majority of votes.

This part of Switzerland is hilly, but not mountainous-cultivated, but not fertile-inhabited, but not populous; and exhibits nothing more remarkable to a

Foreign

Foreign eye than the Beggars idling upon the road, and the women, in short petticoats and black caps, at work in the fields.

As you approach Zurich, a manufacturing town of ten thousand people, beautifully situated at the north end of the lake that bears its name (a charming expanse of water ten leagues in length and one in breadth) the neighbouring hills rise into a stupendous amphitheatre, sloping gradually to the lucid arena, which is every where bordered with vineyards and pasture grounds, dotted with alternate villas, villages and towns, and pointed with the glistening spires of the capital, at one end, and the snowy peaks of Schweitz and Glarus, at the other.

The

The transparent Limmat flows from the lake through the middle of the town, and a broad wooden bridge serves alike for a market place, and a public walk, where walking is not quite so fashionable an amusement as it is in France and England. The principal Inn (where we had the good fortune to find the pleasantest apartments unoccupied) encroaches upon one side of the bridge, fronts the outlet of the lake, and presents between the tall spires of the churches on the right and left, the distant chain of Alpine summits-white with the frost of ages.

Here we have pitched our tents, as from this commanding station we can reconnoitre Switzerland, and direct scouting parties at will, to scale the walls of the mountain, explore the defiles of the

glacier

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