Page:Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 - Volume 1.djvu/78

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diligence was neither clean nor comfortable; we ought to have gone to the end of the lake by the steam-boat. The carriage-road runs at a very little distance from the water’s edge. Half way on the lake is the longest bridge in the world. A bridge across a lake is less liable to be carried away, I suppose, by storms and the swelling of the waters, than over a river, but it ceases to be the picturesque spanning arch that adds such beauty to a landscape; it becomes a mere long low pier. At the end of the lake we took into the diligence a number of passengers, who had come so far by the steam-boat. Our road lay through a valley surrounded by immense mountains, which became higher, closer, and more precipitous as we advanced through the plain at their foot. At one time it seemed as if we must be quite shut in, and then, just as we reached the very extremity of the valley, another lake opened on us—the lake of Wallenstadt, so surrounded by precipitous mountains, that it had been impossible to construct a road round it; but blessings on steam—a traveller’s blessing, who loves to roam far and free, we embarked in a steam-boat, and in an hour arrived at the other end of the lake. The lake of Wallenstadt, surrounded by its high precipitous mountains, is gloomy; indeed, all the region we now travelled was marked