Valley, a pyramidal peak of bare granite guards the way to the heroic region, and now the green and flowery mottled slopes, with the thick luxuriant foliage and fruits of the walnut, chestnut, pear, and other trees, begin to spread out more largely. Here is a sweet picturesque spot, wildly beautiful. The smell of the new made hay, as it lies upon the green sward, is full of fragrance. Here and there it is gathered into small grotesque stacks, to be carried on the shoulders. I have seen women, with their heads and shoulders buried beneath enormous bundles of this short grass, laboring along the path at the brink of precipices, where a single step would plunge bundle and carrier into the gulf below. Now and then comes to the ear the pleasant music of the mower whetting his scythe.

The Valley opens out immediately at Amsteg, where the ascent towards Andermatt, in the direction you have passed, commences. From this to Altorf the way winds luxuriant through a well wooded and cultivated region. You visit the village of Burglen, where William Tell was born. It is a beautiful rural hamlet, of most magnificent verdure, higher up among the mountains than Altorf, and commanding a rich leafy view of the Valley below. The church is in front, and in sight is the village of Attighausen, where Walter Furst was born. A little chapel stands on the spot formerly occupied by Tell's house. Why could they not have let the house remain as it was, and put the chapel in the churchyard? It is covered with very rude paintings, descriptive of various scenes in Tell's life, accompanied with sentences from Scripture. On the front of the chapel is the text, "We are called unto liberty-but by love serve one another." How admirable and appropriate! Called unto liberty, to serve in love! A blessed world this will be, when all tyranny and oppression end in that. A blessed inheritance it is, when the Patriot leaves that to his countrymen.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Traditions of Freedom. Religious liberty the garrison of civil.

LESS than half an hour's walk now brings you to Altorf, name so sacred in Swiss story, where you pass through the very square in which the heroic father shot the apple from his child's head. There the figures stand, above the fountain; the rudest caricature of statuary could not deprive them of interest. And there is the old tower, said to stand where the linden tree grew, to which the noble boy was bound by the tyrant Gessler, as the mark for the father's archery. The Child was father of the Man, for had he not stood steadfast and smiling, the father's heart had faltered. You must have your own boyish enthusiasm fresh about you, with which you used to read the story at school, if you would visit these spots now with proper feelings, or with enjoyment like that which the story itself once gave you.

And what an admirable tale! In all the romantic or heroic eras of nations there never were finer materials of poetry. What a pity there could not have been some Homer to take them up, to give them the charmed shape and being of truth wrought by the imagination into epic song! Schiller has done much in his masterly drama, but the subject is that almost of an historical epic. Schiller was eminently successful in the delineation of the child, as well as the patriot. Happy is the country, that has such memories to cherish as those of Wallace, Leonidas, and Tell, and is still worthy of them! Unhappy and degraded is the land, from which, though the letter of such memories may remain, the soul of them in the people hath departed! It is sad to say of a country, It has been free. It is sad to say of a country, as of an individual, that

"The wiser mind

Mourns less for what age takes away,

Than what it leaves behind."

The critics are trying to mystify the historical grandeur of Switzerland, casting the blur of doubt and scepticism over its heroic traditions, questioning whether Tell and the Apple ever existed. A country of critical unbelievers that could produce a Strauss, to turn Christ and the Apostles into a myth-mist, will dispose easily of all less sacred story. There is no feat, which such infidelity cannot perform; it would put a lie into the lips of nature herself. Ruthless work it makes when it turns the ploughshare of ruin through loved and hallowed associations. But true patriotism and poetry, as well as Divine Truth, are too much for it; it can no more strike the memories of Tell from the mind of Switzerland, than it could abolish the earth's strata, or annihilate her veins of gold and diamond. Ever will these heroic traditions

remain, ever in the faith of the Swiss hearts, ever in the glens of the mountains, ever in the books and ballads of the cottages, as indestructible as the Alps, as far kenned and brightly shining as the light of those flowers that poets tell of :

"Of flowers, that with one scarlet gleam
Cover a hundred leagues, and seem

To set the hills on fire."

Even so beautiful, so far seen, so inspiring, like beacons on the mountain tops, are these historical traditions. What wickedness it would be to sweep them from the soul of the country! On a clear moonlight night, it is said you can even now sometimes see the stalwart form of Tell in his native valley bending his great cross-bow and trying the strength of his arrows. It would require no great power of Imagination to see beneath the moon on the meadow of Grutli the immortal group of three, Tell, Furst, and Melethal, with solemn faces and hands uplift to heaven, taking that great oath of Liberty, which was the testament of freedom to their country.

All things considered, it is well and noble that the public authorities in Uri should have ordered to be burned a book by the son of the celebrated Haller, criticising the story of Tell so as to injure the popular version. Let the rulers and the people but keep the right spirit of the tradition which they guard with such jealousy, and let them unite the freedom of the State and

of the personal franchise on their mountains with the spirit of piety, with freedom to worship God according to conscience, and they will show themselves worthy of the inheritance which old patriots transmitted to them. How true, how precious, how noble, is that sonnet of Wordsworth on the obligations of Civil to Religious Liberty, in which he apostrophizes his native land for the dear memory of her sons, who for her civil rights have bled, and then passes to the great truth that all uselessly would these great souls have fallen in the conflict, if it had not been afterwards sustained and carried onward by religious principle; if the freedom fought for on earth had not been lighted from other worlds and linked with heaven. So must claims from other worlds inspirit the Star of Liberty in Switzerland, or not long will it remain above the horizon.

"How like a Roman Sydney bowed his head,
And Russel's milder blood the scaffold wet!
But these had fallen for profitless regret,
Had not thy holy church her champions bred,
And claims from other worlds inspirited

The Star of Liberty to rise. Nor yet,

(Grave this within thy heart!) if spiritual things

Be lost through apathy, or scorn, or fear,

Shalt thou thy humbler franchises support,

However hardly won, or justly dear.

What came from Heaven, to Heaven by nature clings,
And if dissevered thence, its course is short."

Study it, ye politicians but Christians, and not In England, in Geneva,

Graver, deeper, more important truth than this was never condensed into the like human composition. and statesmen, and not only statesmen only in the Old World, but the New! in America, wherever there is liberty in possession or liberty in danger, study this. If spiritual things be lost, through apathy, or scorn, or fear, or formalism, your humbler civil privileges you never can support, at what costly price soever they may have been won, or however dear they may be to you. Let souls be persecuted for religion, or your religion merged into a State Sacrament, or a church commandment fastened by the State, and your State will be a despotism and yourselves slaves. Your

true freedom must come from God, and cling to God, and leave the soul alone and undisturbed with God, for God's Spirit alone can support it.

"What came from Heaven to Heaven by nature clings,

And if dissevered thence, its course is short!"

I will not omit to add the very beautiful third stanza of those suggested to Wordsworth by Tell's tower at Altorf, on which the deeds of the hero are painted. It was not indeed an Italian pencil that wrought the paintings, but neither was it an Italian heart that wrought the actions. Tell's boy was the heir of his father's courage, and the very personification of cheerful filial faith and love.

"How blest the souls, who, when their trials come,

Yield not to terror or despondency,

But face, like that sweet Boy, their mortal doom,
Whose head the ruddy apple tops, while he
Expectant stands beneath the Linden tree,
Not quaking, like the timid forest game;
He smiles, the hesitating shaft to free,
Assured that heaven its justice will proclaim,
And to his Father give its own unerring aim."

Before coming to Altorf, you cross a rapid stream, in which it is said that William Tell lost his life in his old age by endeavoring to save a child from drowning, when the waters were high. This was in 1350. He was born about the year 1280. The village of Burglen, his birth-place, is a most lovely spot in a vale of luxuriant vegetation, surrounded by great mountains, and fit to educate a spirit like Tell's. Here a man must live in the Past, the great Past, and hope for the future. Would that Tell's great spirit could return from the dead, “to animate an age forlorn," to waken his native vales again with the echoes of genuine liberty! Would that such a spirit might rise, to break the fetters from the souls of his countrymen, worse, by far, than those on the body.

"There is a bondage worse by far to bear

Than his, who breathes, by roof and floor and wall