512 PRÆTERITA-III

church” of the beginning river is his building;¹ and never was St. Jerome’s rendering of the twenty-third Psalm sung in any church more truly: “In loco pascue, ibi collocavit me, super aquam refectionis educavit.”² But the Cathedral Minster of Zurich dates from days no longer questionable or fabulous.

38. During the first years of the tenth century, Switzerland was disputed between Rodolph II., King of Burgundy, and Bourcard, Duke of Swabia. The German duke at last defeated Rodolph, near Winterthur; but with so much difficulty, that he chose rather thenceforward to have him for ally rather than enemy; and gave him, for pledge of peace, his daughter BERTHA, to be Burgundian queen.³

Bertha, the daughter of the Duke Bourcard and Regilinda, was at this time only thirteen or fourteen. The marriage was not celebrated till 921,-and let the reader remember that marriage,-though there was no Wedding March played at it, but many a wedding prayer said,-for the beginning of all happiness to Burgundy, Switzerland, and Germany. Her husband, in the first ten years after their marriage, in alliance with Henry the Fowler of Germany, drove the Saracen and Hungarian nomad armies out of the Alps: and then Bertha set herself to efface the traces of their ravages; building, everywhere through her territories, castles, monasteries, walled towns, and towers of refuge; restoring the town and church of Soleure in 930, of Moutiers in the Jura, in 932; in the same year endowing the canons of Amsoldingen at Thun, and then the church of Neuchâtel; finally, towards 935, the church and convent of Zurich, of which her mother Regilinda

¹ [One of the towers of the Gross Münster, or Wasserkirche, on the right bank of the Limmat, is still called “Charlemagne’s Tower.”]

² [Psalm xxiii. 2 (Vulgate).]

³ [For the story of Bertha mentioned in Longfellow’s Courtship of Miles Standish-

“... the beautiful Bertha, the spinner, the queen of Helvetia; Who as she rode on her palfrey, o’er valley and meadow and mountain, Ever was spinning her thread from a distaff fixed to her spindle”-

see Gaullieur’s La Suisse Historique, ch. v. pp. 87-97, here followed by Ruskin. For other references to her, see Vol. XXXIII. p. 493 and n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]