Switzerland/La Suisse/Die Schweiz [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION irst impressions of a country last long. My first glimpse of Switzerland was from the train as it emerged from the long tunnel just at dawn on my first journey to Italy. The line took a sudden curve, and for somé moments of rapture I found myself gazing at a vast panorama of snow peaks lighted by the cyclamenroseate glow of a cloudless winter dawn. I thought it the most beautiful and stupendous sight I had seen, and after many years I still think so. Brief as the vision was my memory has retained it clearly if not exactly. Then a war intervened, and years passed before I saw Switzerland again. By somé error of direction on my part I found myself not in the picturesque old quarter I was looking for, but in a set of sedate streets which reminded me of a neater, cleaner London suburb, a vision of the most ordinary daily life the more disconcerting since I had braced myself for another sight of those dazzling altitudes seen over ancient roofs. There was truth in both impressions, and it is well for the foreign visitor to realise at the outset of his explorations that the Swiss have to live like the rest of the world, and that they cannot live by contemplating the incomparable beauties of their mountains and lakes. On the other hand it is only with the passage of time and from repeated visits at different seasons of the year that the stranger comes to learn what variety and gradations of interest and pleasure lie between these extremes of the commonplace and the rapturous. Switzerland's situation in the centre of Western Europe of course means that it is wholly cut off from the sea, and yet that it exists as an island of peaceful, orderly living surrounded by powerful neighbours - Germany, Italy, Francé and the once-extensive Austrian Empire. Ali Switzerland's communications and exchanges must take place through or above their territories. No doubt Switzerland owes its privileged position as a permanently inviolable neutral partly to nineteenth century Liberal political idealism, and partly to the necessity of its neighbours to communicate with y