The Sun.
London, England, 1865-09-18 00:00:00

ALPINE TOURISTS.

(From the Times' Correspondent.)
INTERLAICEN, Sept. 13.
I have not been an idle man for this many a year,
and although I had occasion to cross the mountains
once or twice every season, I only hurried through
the great highways of Mont Cenis or the St. Got-
hard, and now find myself almost a stranger in
Switzerland. The time was—l am almost afraid to
bring it back to memory, it is so long, long ago—
when I looked upon a year as lost unless a few
weeks, at least, were spent on the Alps. There are
not any of the beaten paths of summer tourists with
which I am not thoroughly familiar, nor was I at a
loss how to strike out a new route for myself where
I lost sight of the holiday Alpenstocks, and where
the babbling of Babel no longer mingled with the
rush of mountain waters and the moan of the winds
through the pine forest. The Alps, God bless them,
are still the same, and the first champagne draught
of their pure air sends the wonted thrill through our
veins, attunes the nerves, strengthens, softens,
makes us at peace with the world, in love with life,
But the actors are changed, although the stage re-
mains the same. Where one holidaymaker ventured
beyond Brussels and Bruges in former years, now
ten summer idlers push forward to the Handeck
and the Grimsel, and where a chellet was sufficient
to harbour a few determined climbers, now half a
score Noah's arks of hotels are almost inadequate to
the wants of the manifold menagerie of pleasure-
seekers.

I crossed from Lucerne this morning over Sar-
nen, Lungern, and the Brunig, and the string of
carriages, carryalls, diligences, coaches and four,
and conveyances of every description I met on the
road might almost bear comparison with the throng
one used to fall in with on the way to Richmond in
the good old times when the world went on wheels.
If you ever fell into the delusion that all Cornhill
and Charing-cross was in Germany you will soon
rectify the error by perceiving that all Piccadilly.
and St. John's-wood are in Switzerland ; and, in-
deed, if you stay-at-home people fancy that there is
any soul left in London or England, be assured that
you are labouring under some hallucination, and
that you may well doubt the reality of your neigh-
bour's presence and your own—they are all here,
and you must be alone.

Notwithstanding the confused vastness of these
clouds—l will not merely say flocks--of birds of
passage, it is not difficult to draw lines of distinc-
tion between traveller and traveller, and classify
them into at least three different categories—the
bona fide Alpine climbers, the mere holyday folk,
and the thorough-paced migratory species. The
work of the first named class is by this time well
nigh done. Though the summer lingers on the
Alps this year with more than wooing fondness, yet
the days are drawing in, the night breezes are cool-
ing, and the uncertainty of the morrow makes your
guide mistrustful of the sunset smile of the even-
ing. It is time to fold tents and shoulder knapsacks
homewards.

But now the time has come for the mere idlers,
for the followers of others' footsteps, for the
multitude ; and of these the Alps at this moment
have almost as great a share as the Epsom
Downs at mid-May. A worthy, amiable, well-be-
haved set of people does England send to these
European trysting spots of Helvetia ! Lavish of
money, and chary of their time, with plans laid out
before them to achieve a three months' tour in
three weeks, and yet refining and trenching even
on that niggardly allowance, and breaking off mid-
way as news from home may announce a shortening
of the tether.

The third class of my fellow-idlers consists of
people 'who can afford to take things easily, who
can stretch out a holiday into a holy year—people
who tarry about Germany to let the year cool, who
linger about Switzerland till the year needs warm-
ing, who end the autumn in Italy, and take Smyrna
and Jericho, and the first cataract of the Nile, on
their way home.

Look round any of the great tables d'hote at
Lucerne, Zurich, or Geneva, run over the list des
strangers at Interlaken, listen to the talk of the
groups standing round the Giessbach, lighted by
Bengal fires, and you will see the three sets more or
less mixed together, outnumbered by, though nos
lost in, the crowd of French and German tourists.
With all his wide-awake and shooting-jacket, John
Bull knows he could not succeed in disguising him-
self, and never attempts it. There are snug, smooth-
toned, dulcet-voiced high reverends, who even here
are of the Church clerical. Their interest is in the
Great St. Bernard—the convent in the glaciers--
with many shrewd surmises about its solitaries--if
monks, why unfrocked? if priests, query in orders?
Mighty puzzles to believers in Brother Ingnatius
and Wagnerites. Lawyers muster strong between
terms, look knowing, apt of fence, yet harmless for
the moment; live and let live. I may say as much
for the M.D.'s. Your Cheapside " gent" will
smack of the shop to eternity. A pack of these the
other day when issuing out of the Lake of Lucerne
where it branches out into the Alpnach and Kus-
nacht Bays were--heaven alone may account for
association of ideas—" reminded of the circus where
Regent-street cuts across Oxford-street."

I left my conveyance at the foot of the Brunig,
and walked alone over the pass that comes down
upon the valley of the Aar at Meyringen and the
Lake of Brienz. The pass of the Brunig is hardly
as high above the sea level as Snowdon. On the
Unterwald side, however, it has forest scenery un-
matched on greater altitudes, and the first glimpses
of the Oberland, of the glittering IVetterhorn, and
of the jagged, deeply-indented bulwarks that con-
stitute its outworks, give you a foretaste of the
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sublime that ought to suffice for one day. I think
little of mountain scenery apart from woodland
beauty. The mere bare rocks of the Maritime Alps,
where Provencal and Italian niggardliness has left
hardly a stick on hill or dale, can only be made
endurable to the eye by morning and evening shades.
The pass of the Brunig is beautiful at all hours ;
even in the scorching noontide under which I toiled
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ragged things, in the mass monotonous ; but they
look dark, solemn, and mystic in their interminable
rows ; the rocks loom more abrupt and portentous