passes through hills and near mountains,
whose sides and summits boast the castles and
ruins so often painted and often sung; and
these spots are now within the reach of the
three pounds first-class railway ticket,
now-a-days announced by placard on the walls and
hoardings of London.

Once on a Rhine steamer, and Switzerland
is within easy reach.

On our table, as we write, lies the second
edition of a volume* written by the physician
to the Queen's Household, Dr. Forbes, showing
how a month may be employed in Switzerland.
He adopted the South Eastern Railway plan,
and, starting by a mail train at half-past eight
in the evening of the 3rd of August, found
himself and companions on the next evening
looking from the window of an hotel on the
Rhine. Steam and a week placed him in
Switzerland. Here railways must be no
longer reckoned on, and the tourist, if he be
in search of health, may try what pedestrian
exercise will do for him. This the Doctor
strongly recommends; and, following his own
prescription, we find him—though a
sexagenarian—making capital way; now as a
pedestrian, anon on horseback, and then again on
foot, only adopting a carriage when there was
good reason for such assistance. He describes
the country, as all do who have been through
it, as a land of large and good inns, well stored
with luxurious edibles and drinkables. Against
a too free use of them, he doctor-like gives
a medical hint or two, and goes somewhat
out of his way, perhaps, to show how much
better the waters of the mountains may
be than the wine. Indeed the butter, the
honey, the milk, the cheese, and the melted
snows of Switzerland win his warmest
praises. The bread is less fortunate; but its
inferiority, and many other small discomforts,
are overlooked and almost forgotten in his
enjoying admiration of what he found good on his
way amidst the mountain valleys and breezy
passes of his route. The bracing air, the
brilliant sky, the animating scenes, the society
of emulous and cheerful companions, and,
above all, the increased corporeal exercise
soon produce a change in the mind and the
body, in the spirits and the stomach of the
tourist.

* "The Physician's Holiday."

What a marvellous change it is for a smoke-
dried man who for months, perhaps years,
has been " in populous cities pent," to escape
from his thraldom, and find himself far away
from his drudgeries and routines up amongst
the mountains and the lakes, and surrounded
by the most magnificent scenes in nature;
where he sees in all its glory that which a
townsman seldom gets a glimpse of—a
sunrise in its greatest beauty; and where
sunsets throw a light over the earth, which
makes its beauties emulate those of the
heavens! Day by day, during summer in
Switzerland, such enjoyments are at hand.
One traveller may choose one route, and
another another; for there are many and
admirable changes to be rung upon the roads
to be taken. Dr. Forbes, for instance, went
from Basle to Schaffhausen, thence to Zurich,
and, steaming over a part of the lake, made
for Zug, and thence to the Rigi. He
returned to the Zurich-See, and then went to
Wallenstadt, Chur, and the Via Mala. Had
he to shorten his trip without great loss
of the notable scenes, he might, having first
reached Lucerne, have left that place for
Meyringen, and then pursued his subsequent
way by the line of the lakes, visiting the
various glorious points in their neighbourhood
that challenged his attention—Grindelwald,
Schreckhorn, Lauterbrunnen, Unterseen, and
so on to Thun; then by the pass of the Gemmi
to Leuk, and, from there, to what is described
by our author as the gem of his whole Swiss
experience—the Riffelberg, and the view at
Monte Rosa:—

"Sitting there, up in mid-heaven, as it
were, on the smooth, warm ledge of our rock;
in one of the sunniest noons of a summer day;
amid air cooled by the elevation and the
perfect exposure to the most delicious
temperature; under a sky of the richest blue, and
either cloudless, or only here and there
gemmed with those aerial and sun-bright
cloudlets which but enhance its depth; with
the old field of vision, from the valley at our
feet to the horizon, filled with majestic shapes
of every variety of form, and of a purity and
brilliancy of whiteness which left all common
whiteness dull;—we seemed to feel as if
there could be no other mental mood but
that of an exquisite yet cheerful serenity—a
sort of delicious abstraction, or absorption of
our powers, in one grand, vague, yet most
luxurious perception of Beauty and
Loveliness.

"At another time—it would almost seem at
the same time, so rapid was the alternation
from mood to mood—the immeasurable
vastness and majesty of the scene, the gigantic
bulk of the individual mountains, the peaks
towering so far beyond the level of our daily
earth, as to seem more belonging to the sky
than to it, our own elevated and isolated
station hemmed in on every side by untrodden
wastes and impassable walls of snow, and,
above all, the utter silence, and the absence
of every indication of life and living things—
suggesting the thought that the foot of man
had never trodden, and never would tread
there: these and other analogous ideas would
excite a tone of mind entirely different—
solemn, awful, melancholy....

''I said at the time, and I still feel disposed
to believe, that the whole earth has but few
scenes that can excel it in grandeur, in beauty,
and in wonderfulness of every kind. I thought
then, and I here repeat my opinion in cool
blood, that had I been brought hither
blindfolded from London, had had my eyes opened
but for a single hour on this astonishing