Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1838/The Castle of Chillon
97
CASTLE OF CHILLON, LAKE OF GENEVA.
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THE CASTLE OF CHILLON.
Fair lake, thy lovely and thy haunted shore
Hath only echoes for the poet’s lute;
None may tread there save with unsandalled foot,
Submissive to the great who went before,
Filled with the mighty memories of yore.
And yet how mournful are the records there—
Captivity, and exile, and despair,
Did they endure who now endure no more.
The patriot, the woman, and the bard,
Whose names thy winds and waters bear along;
What did the world bestow for their reward
But suffering, sorrow, bitterness, and wrong?—
Genius!—a hard and weary lot is thine—
The heart thy fuel—and the grave thy shrine.
The Castle of Chillon can never be viewed without exciting the noblest associations—those to which liberty and genius give birth. The names of Bonnivard, the martyr of freedom, and of Byron, her martyr and her laureate, have consecrated the scene. With the Prisoner of Chillon are connected feelings, no less in unison with the writer’s early and deplored fate, than with the sublime and beautiful scenery around.
The style of architecture of the Castle is that of the middle ages: its aspect is gloomy and low; on one side is seen the delightful Clarens, and upon the other the town of Villeneuve. Amadeus IV., count of Savoy, was the founder of this state prison, about the year 1236. It resigned its military character in 1733, to receive and store agricultural produce. The early reformers of our religion were here cruelly incarcerated, in a range of cells that still remains entire; and from a beam that passes across one of the dungeons, many of them were executed. Rings, for the fetters and the fettered, may yet be seen hanging from the staples in the wall, and the feet of Bonnivard have left their traces in the pavement. Close by this castle, Rousseau has fixed the catastrophe of his Heloise, in the rescue of one of her children, her Julia, from the water; the shock of which, and the illness produced by the immersion, caused her death.