Chapter VII: Part 7

Switzerland was divided at this period into small sovereignties and baronial fiefs; and there were, besides, also the Imperial cities of Bern and Basel and Zürich. The nobles were warlike and restless. Rudolph checked their depredations and composed their dissensions. Upon that seething age of violence and rapine he laid, as it were, the forming hand, as if in the darkness the coming time was dimly visible to him;--a man to be remembered, in the vexed and disheartening history of Austria, as one of her few heroes. The people of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden, notwithstanding the dislike they had shown to his ancestor, voluntarily appointed him their protector; and he gave them, in 1274, the firm assurance that he would treat them as worthy sons of the Empire in inalienable independence; and to that assurance he remained true till his death, which happened in 1291, in the seventy-fourth year of his age.

It is related in the Rhymed Chronicle of Ottocar, how he had been kept alive for a whole year by the skill of his physicians, but that they told him at last, as he sat playing at draughts, that death was upon him, and that he could live but five days. "Well, then," he said, "on to Spires!" that he might lay him in the Imperial vault in the great Cathedral there,--where many Emperors slept their long sleep, till, in the Orléans Succession War in the time of Louis XIV., as afterwards in 1794, under the revolutionary commander Custine, French soldiers rudely disturbed it, with every circumstance of outrage which Frenchmen only could devise. Rudolph went forth thither, but fell by the way, and died at Germersheim, a dirty little village which he had founded. And in the Cathedral at Spires, where he rested from his activities, you may see this day a monumental statue of him, executed by that great artist, the late Ludwig Schwanthaler of Munich, for his art-loving patron, Ludwig I., King of Bavaria.

Rudolph was succeeded by his son Albrecht, then forty-three years old, likewise a vigorous man, whose restless spirit of aggrandizement gave the Swiss much uneasiness. His purpose seems to have been to acquire the sovereignty of the ecclesiastical and baronial fiefs, and, having thus encompassed the free cities and the Three Cantons, to compel submission to his authority. In the seventh week after Rudolph's death, they met together to renew the ancient bond with the people of Uri and Unterwalden; and they swore, in or out of their valleys, to stand by one another, if harm should be done to any of them. "In this we are as one man," ran their oath, among other things, "in that we will receive no judge who is not a countryman and an inhabitant, or who has bought his office."

After several years of troubles and frights among them, the Emperor sent to the Forest Cantons to say, that it would be well for them and their posterity, if they submitted to the protection of the Royal House, as all neighboring cities and counties had done; he wished them to be his dear children; he was the descendant of their Bailiff of Lenzburg, son of their Emperor Rudolph; if he offered them the protection of his glorious line, it was not that he lusted after their flocks or would make merchandise of their poverty, but because he knew from his father and from history what brave men they were, whom he would lead to victory and knighthood and plunder.

Then spake the nobles and the freemen of the Forest Cantons: "They know very well, and will ever remember, how his father of blessed memory was a good leader and Bailiff to them; but they love the condition of their ancestors, and will abide by it. If the King would but confirm it!"

And thereupon they sent Werner, Baron of Attinghausen, Landammann of Uri, like his fathers before him and his posterity after him, to the Imperial Court. But the King was quarrelling with his Electors, and was in bad humor, and sent to Uri to forbid them from assessing land-rates on a convent there. Whereupon the men of Schwyz, being without protection, made a league for ten years with Werner, Count of Honburg; and that their submission to the Austrian power might not be construed into a duty, they sent to the King for an Imperial Bailiff. Albrecht appointed Hermann Gessler of Brunek, and Beringer of Landenberg, whose cousin Hermann was in much favor with him. Beringer's manners were rough even at the Court; and to get rid of him, they sent him to tame the Waldstätte. He appointed Bailiffs whose poverty and avarice were the cause of much oppression, emboldened as they were by the ill-feeling of the King towards the men of Schwyz, whose freedom the King had refused to confirm, and waited only for opportunity to annihilate their ancient rights, after the example he had already set in Vienna and Styria.

The Imperial Bailiffs resolved to take up their abode in the Forest Cantons,--Landenberg in Unterwalden, near Sarnen, in a castle of the King's, while Gessler built a prison-castle by Altorf in Uri; for within the memory of men no lord had dwelt in Schwyz. They used their power wantonly;--unjust and weary imprisonments for slightest faults; haughty manners, and all the stings of insolent authority;--and no redress to be had at the King's hands. The peace and happy security of the men of Schwyz were gone, and they looked in one another's faces for the thing that was to be done. The honored families of their race were despised and called peasant-nobles;--there was Werner Stauffacher, a well-to-do and well-meaning man; and the Lord of Attinghausen above all, of an ancient house, in years, with much experience, and true to his country; there was Rudolph Redings of Biberek, whose descendants live to this day in Schwyz, supporting still the honor of their name; and the Winkelrieds, mindful of the spirit of their ancestor who slew the dragon. In such persons the people _believed_; they knew them and their fathers before them; and when they were made light of, there was hatred between the people and the Bailiffs. As Gessler passed Stauffacher's house in Steinen, one day, where the little chapel now stands, and saw how the house was well built, with many windows, and painted over with mottoes, after the manner of rich farmers' houses, he cried to his face, "Can one endure that these peasants should live in such houses?"

It came at last to insulting their wives and daughters; and the first man that attempted this, one Wolfenschiess, was struck dead by an angry husband; and when the brave wife of Stauffacher reflected how her turn might come next, she persuaded her husband to anticipate the danger. Werner Stauffacher at once crossed the lake to Uri, to consult with his friend Walther, Prince of Attinghausen, with whom he found concealed a young man of courage and understanding. "He is an Unterwaldner from the Melchthal," said Walther; "his name is Erni an der Halden, and he is a relation of mine; for a trifling matter Landenberg has fined him a couple of oxen; his father Henry complained bitterly of the loss, whereupon a servant of the Bailiff said, 'If the peasants want to eat bread, they can draw their own plough'; at which Erni took fire, and broke one of the fellow's fingers with his stick, and then took refuge here; meanwhile the Bailiff has caused his father's eyes to be put out." And then the two friends took counsel together; and Walther bore witness how the venerable Lord of Attinghausen had said that these Bailiffs were no longer to be endured. What desolating wrath resistance would bring upon the Waldstätte they knew and measured, and swore that death was better than an unrighteous yoke. And they parted, each to sound his friends,--appointing as a place of conference the Rütli. It is a little patch of meadow, which the precipices seem to recede expressly to form, on the Bay of Uri, sloping down to the water's edge,--so called from the trees being rooted out (_ausgereutet_) there,--not far from the boundary between Unterwalden and Uri, where the Mytenstein rises solitary like an obelisk out of the water. There, in the stillness of night, they often met together for council touching the work which was to be done; thither by lonely paths came Fürst and Melchthal, Stauffacher in his boat, and from Unterwalden his sister's son, Edelknecht of Rudenz. The more dangerous the deed, the more solemn the bond which bound them.

On the night of Wednesday before Martinmas, on the 10th of November, 1307, Fürst, Melchthal, and Stauffacher brought each from his own Canton ten upright men to the Rütli, to deliberate honestly together. And when they came there and remembered their inherited freedom, and the eternal brotherly bond between them, consecrated by the danger of the times, they feared neither Albrecht nor the power of Austria; and they took each other by the hand, and said, that "in these matters no one was to act after his own fancy; no one was to desert another; that in friendship they would live and die; each was so to strive to preserve the ancient rights of the people that the Swiss through all time might taste of this friendship; neither should the property or the rights of the Count of Hapsburg be molested, nor the Bailiffs or their servants lose one drop of blood; but the freedom which their fathers gave them they would bequeath to their children": and then, when remembering that upon what they did now the fate of their posterity depended, each looked upon his friend, consoled. And Walther Fürst, Werner Stauffacher, and Arnold an der Halden of Melchthal lifted their hands to heaven, and, in the name of God, who created emperor and peasant with the inalienable rights of man, swore to maintain their freedom; and when the thirty heard this, each one raised his hand and swore the same by God and the Saints;--and then each went his way to his hut, and was silent, and wintered his cattle.

In the mean while it happened that the Bailiff Hermann Gessler was shot dead by Wilhelm Tell, who was of Bürglen, at the entrance of the Schächenthal, a half-hour from Altorf, in Uri,--son-in-law of Walther Fürst, and a man of some substance, for he had the steward-ship in fee in Bürglen of the Frauenmüster Abbey in Zürich,--one of the conspirators. Out of wanton tyranny, or suspicious of the breaking out of disturbances, Gessler determined to discover who bore the joke most impatiently; and, after the symbolical way of the times and the people, set up a hat, (it was on the 18th of November,) to represent the dignity of the Duke Albrecht of Austria, and commanded all to do it homage. The story of Tell's refusal, and of the apple placed on the head of his son to be shot at, the world knows far and wide. Convinced by his success that God was with him, Tell confessed, that, if the matter had gone wrong, he would have had his revenge upon the Bailiff. Gessler did not dare to detain him in Uri, on account of Tell's many friends and relations, but took him up the lake, contrary to the traditions of the people, which forbade foreign imprisonment. They had not got far beyond the Rütli, when the föhn-wind, breaking loose from the gulfs of the Gothard, threw the waves into a rage, and the rocks echoed with its angry cries. In this moment of deadly danger, Gessler commanded them to unbind Tell, who, he knew, was an excellent boatman; and as they passed by the foot of the Axen Mountain, to the right as you come out of the Bay of Uri, Tell grasped his bow and leaped upon a flat rock there, climbed up the mountain while the boat tossed to and fro against the rocks, and fled through the land of the men of Schwyz. But the Bailiff escaped the storm also, and landed by Küssnacht, where he fell with Tell's arrow through him.

It should be remembered that this was Tell's deed alone: the hour which the people had agreed upon for their deliverance had not come; they had no part in the death of Gessler. Carlyle has remarked this as appearing also in Schiller's drama, in the construction of which, he says, "there is no connection, or a very slight one, between the enterprise of Tell and that of the men of Rütli." It was not a deed conformable to law or the highest ethics, yet it was one which mankind is ever ready to forgive and applaud; and the echo of it through the ages will die away only when hatred of tyranny and wrathful impatience under hopeless oppression die away also from the hearts of men. Tell was an outlaw, and he took an outlaw's vengeance: it was life against life. And yet it is a curious fact, that the historian of Switzerland (that wonderful genius, Johannes Müller, who is reported to have read more books than any man in Europe, in proof of which they point you to his fifty folio volumes of excerpts in the Town Library at Schaffhausen) suggests as a reason why there were only one hundred and fourteen persons, who had known Tell, to gather together in 1388, not much more than thirty years after his death, at the erection of a chapel dedicated to his memory on the rock where he leaped ashore, that Tell did not often leave Bürglen, where he dwelt, and that, according to the ethics of that period, the deed was not one likely to attract inquisitive wonderers to him.

There is hardly an event or character in history which is not to somebody a myth or a phantom; and so Tell has not escaped the skepticism of men. But those who doubt his existence have little experience of history, says Müller. Grasser was the first to remark the resemblance between the adventures of Tell and those of a certain Tocco, or Toke, or Palnatoke, of Denmark, which are related by Saxo Grammaticus, a learned historian who flourished in Denmark in the twelfth century, of which kingdom and its dependencies he compiled an elaborate history, first printed at Paris in 1486; but the Danish Tocco, who is supposed to have existed in the latter half of the tenth century, was wholly unknown to the Swiss, who, if ever, came to the Alps before that time. The Icelanders, also, have a similar story about another hero, which appears in the "Vilkinasaga" of the fourteenth century. It is more likely that the Danes and other Northern people got their tradition from the Swiss, by way of the Hanse Towns perhaps, if we are to be permitted to believe in but one original tradition, which is not less arbitrary than unphilosophic.

Moreover, for what did these one hundred and fourteen people dedicate a chapel to him thirty years and a little more after his death? And there is the Chronicle of Klingenberg, which covers the end of the fourteenth century, which tells his story; and Melchior Russ, of Lucerne, who, in compiling his book, about the year 1480, had before him a Tell-song, and the Chronicle of Eglof Etterlins, Town-Clerk of Lucerne in the first half of the fifteenth century; and since 1387, too, there has been solemn service by the people of Uri to commemorate him. So that the "Fable Danoise" of Uriel Freudenberger of Bern (1760) becomes a mere absurdity, and the indignant Canton of Uri had no less right to burn it (although to burn was not to answer it, suggests the critic,) than to honor the "Defence" by Balthasar with two medals of gold. And what has been written to establish him may be read in Zurlauben, (whose approbation is almost proof, says Müller, reverentially,) and elsewhere as undernoted.[A]

[Footnote A: In Balthasar, _Déf. de Guill. Tell_ (Lucerne, 1760); Gottl. Eman. von Haller, _Vorlesung über Wilh. Tell_, etc. (Bern, 1772); Hisely, _Guill. Tell et la Révolution de_ 1307 (Delft, 1826); Ideler, _Die Sage vom Schüsse des Tell_ (Berlin, 1836); Häusser, _Die Sage vom Tell_ (Heidelberg, 1840); Schoenhuth, _Wilh. Tell, Geschichte aus der Vorzeit_ (Reutlingen, 1836); Henning, _Wilh. Tell_ (Nürnberg, 1836); and _Histoire de Guill. Tell, Libérateur de la Suisse_ (Paris, 1843).]

Tell's posterity in the male line is reported to have died out with Johann Martin, in 1684; the female, with Verena, in 1720. Yet it is certainly a little surprising that the elder Swiss chroniclers, John of Winterthur, and Justinger of Bern, for instance, who were almost Tell's contemporaries, make no mention of him in relating the Revolution in the Waldstätte, and that it should be left to Tschudi and others, almost two hundred years afterwards, in the sixteenth century, to give his story that dramatic importance upon which Schiller has set the seal forever. It can be explained, perhaps, on the ground that it did not at the time possess that importance which we have been taught to give it; though roughly, thus, we do away with the poetry of it, to be sure. Let Voltaire, whose function it was to deny, enjoy his feeble sneer, that "the difficulty of pronouncing those respectable names"--to wit, _Melchtad_, and _Stauffager_, and _Valtherfurst_, to say nothing of _Grisler_--"injures their celebrity." Neither are we to conceal the fact, that it is doubted, if not denied, that there ever was any Gessler in Uri to perform all the wicked things ascribed to him, and to get that arrow through him in such dramatic and effective manner in the Hollow Way; for has not Kopp published, with edifying explanation, "Documents for the History of the Confederation," (Lucerne, 1835,) in which, in the list of Bailiffs (_Landvoigte_) at Küssnacht, we do not find the name of Gessler? Perhaps there was a mistake in the name, the critic suggests.

The Revolution thus begun at the Rütli, and by Tell, went forward swiftly in January, 1308; and, true to their oath, it was consummated by the men of Schwyz without harm to the property of the Bailiffs, also without the spilling of a single drop of blood. The prison at Uri was captured, and Landenberg also, as he descended to hear mass, by twenty men from Unterwalden; but, escaping, he fled across the meadows from Sarnen to Alpnach, where he was overtaken and made to swear that he would never set foot again in the Waldstätte, and then suffered to depart safely to the King. And the peasants breathed again; and Stauffacher's wife opened her house to all who had been at the Rütli; and there was joy in the land.

And how in that same year Duke Albrecht met with a bloody end, such as befell no King or Emperor of the Germans before or after him, at the hands of Duke John, his nephew, whose inheritance he had kept back, and other conspirators; and what vengeance overtook the murderers; and how Duke John, escaping in the habit of a monk into Italy, was no more heard of, but became a shadow forever, like the rest of them;--and how, eight years afterwards, came the expedition of Duke Leopold of Austria against the Waldstätte, and the fight at Morgarten, where the Swiss, thirteen hundred mountaineers in all, Wilhelm Tell among them, routed twenty thousand of the well-armed chivalry of Austria,--dating from that heroic Thermopylae of theirs the foundation of the Swiss Confederacy, as, larger and perhaps not less resolute, we see it to-day, ready to defy, if need be, single-handed, the greatest military nation of the earth;--and how, thirty years afterwards, the men of Schwyz and Uri go forth, nine hundred strong,--among them Tell, and Werner Stauffacher, now bent with years,--to the aid of Bern, threatened by the nobles roundabout;--and how, in 1332, was formed the league with Lucerne, whereby the beautiful lake gets its name as the Lake of the _Four_ Forest Cantons;--and how, one sultry July day in 1386, the men of Schwyz and Uri and Unterwalden, together with other Swiss,--some of them armed with the very halberds with which their fathers defended the pass at Morgarten,--fought again their hereditary enemy, Austria, by the clear waters of the little Lake of Sempach; how, when they saw the enemy, they fell upon their knees, according to their ancient custom, and prayed to God, and then with loud war-cry dashed at full run upon the Austrian host, whose shields were like a dazzling wall, and their spears like a forest, and the Mayor of Lucerne with sixty of his followers went down in the shock, but not a single one of the Austrians recoiled; and how at that critical, dreadful moment,--for the flanks of the enemy's phalanx were advancing to encompass them,--there suddenly strode forth the Knight Arnold Strutthan von Winkelried, crying, "I will make a path for you! care for my wife and children!" and, rushing forward, grasped several spears and buried them in his breast,--a large, strong man, he bore the soldiers down with him as he fell, and his companions pushed forward over his dead body into the midst of the host, and the victory was won, and another book was added to the epic story of the men of Schwyz and Uri and Unterwalden;--and how Duke Leopold fell fighting bravely, as became his house, and six hundred and fifty nobles with him, so that there was mourning at the Court of Austria for many a year, and men said it was a judgment upon the reckless spirit of the nobles; and how Martin Malterer, standard-bearer, of Freyburg in the Breisgau, happening to come upon Leopold as he was dying, was as one petrified, and the banner fell from his hands, and he threw himself across the body of Leopold to save it from further outrage, waiting for and finding his own death there;--and how this ruinous contest between Switzerland and Austria was not finally closed till the time of Maximilian, in 1499, when first the right of private war was abolished in Germany;--and how, through the various fortunes of the succeeding centuries, the character of the Swiss has remained for the most part the same as in the earlier time:--these things one may read at large elsewhere; but we hasten to the conclusion.

The story of Tell has been the subject of several dramas. Lemierre, a popular French dramatist of his day, (though J. J. Rousseau affects to call him a _scribe_ whom the French Academy once crowned,) produced a play founded upon it, in Paris, in 1766; but the language of Swiss freemen on a French stage was little to the taste of those days, and it was a failure. Voltaire, when asked what he thought of it, replied,--"_Il n'y a rien à dire; il est écrit en langue du pays._" But twenty years afterwards it was revived with prodigious success; for the truth which was in it flashed out then, forerunner of the storm which was soon to break over France. Again, when Florian, whom we are to remember always for his "Fables," banished in 1793 by the decree which forbade nobles to remain in Paris, taking refuge at Sceaux, was arrested and thrown into prison, he consoled his captivity by composing his drama of "Guillaume Tell,"--the worst of his productions, it is recorded. Lastly, it has been consecrated for all time by the genius of Friedrich Schiller. The legend was first brought to Schiller's notice, doubtless, by Goethe, who writes to him concerning it from Switzerland in 1797. Goethe himself thought of founding an epic on it. It was not, however, till 1801, before his journey to Dresden, that Schiller's attention was permanently directed to it. Completed on the 18th of February, it was brought out at Weimar on the 17th of March, 1804, with the most extraordinary success: the fifth act, however, was suppressed, in deference to the intended court alliance with the daughter of a murdered Russian emperor; it not being considered good taste to represent the assassination of an autocrat upon such an occasion.

Schiller's drama has been translated into French by Merle d'Aubigné and others, and many times into English,--among us by the Rev. C. T. Brooks. It follows the tradition substantially. Carlyle declares, indeed, that "the incidents of the Swiss Revolution, as detailed in Tschudi or Müller, are here faithfully preserved, even to their minutest branches." We tarried once for several days at Brunnen, and read the play upon the spot in sight of the Rütli, in the little balcony of the _pension_ of the Golden Eagle, with the deep, calm, blue lake at our feet, and the Hacken and Axen mountains and the Selisberg shutting out the world for a time; and as we look at the play now, it recalls with the utmost minuteness the scenery and the coloring of it all: yet Schiller never was there. It was the last startling effulgence of his comet-like genius; for when the spring-flowers came again, he was gone from our earth.

In the last act of the great drama, as Tell sits at his cottage-door in Bürglen in Uri, surrounded by his wife and children, after the consummation of the deed, there approaches a monk begging alms;--it is the parricide Duke John, flying the sight and presence of men. In the contrast of the feelings of these two persons, then and there, one reads Schiller's justification of his hero. As if to complete by contrast the moral of the drama of "Tell," it is related also in the tradition, that in 1354, when the stream of the Schächen was swollen, Tell, then bowing under the snowy years, seeing a child fall into it, as he passed that way, plunged in, and lost his life. Uhland has indicated this in his "Death of Tell," as only Uhland could:--

"Die Kraft derselben Liebe,
Die du dem Knaben trugst,
Ward einst in dir zum Triebe,
Dass du den Zwingherrn schlugst."

Some liken life to a book to be read in. To us it is rather an unwritten poem which each age repeats to the next,--melodious sometimes, as when the blind old mythic bard of Chios sang it under the olive-trees, by the blue Aegean, to the listening Greeks, thirsty for beauty, drinking it ever with their eyes, and with their lips lisping it,--or rough and more full of meaning, as when, with the men of Schwyz and Uri and Unterwalden, the great idea of freedom, majestic as their mountains, utters itself, composed and stern, in deeds which for all time make Switzerland honored and free.

On the 10th of November, 1859, the heart of Germany beat with gladness, if touched also with a certain sorrow, as in every hamlet, on every hill-side, from the German Ocean to the Tyrolese Alps, from the Vosges to the Carpathians and the Slavic border, the people met to celebrate with simple rites the hundredth birthday of its great poet Schiller, in whom they recognize not more what he did than what he sought after, whose striving is their striving, from highest to lowest,--the ideal man, burning to gather them together, and fold them as one flock under one shepherd, that, no longer divided, they may face the world and the future with one heart, with one great trembling hope, to lead the new civilization to its lasting triumphs.

Schiller had sung of Wilhelm Tell; and the men of Schwyz remembered him on that occasion, too, on the Rütli, with their confederates from Oberwalden and Niederwalden. On the afternoon of the 11th of November, they met at Brunnen,--on the lake, as we have said,--the men of Schwyz embarking in one great boat, amidst peals of music, while numberless little canoes received the others. The wind, blowing strong from the north, filled the sail, and, as they floated down the Bay of Uri, they remembered Stauffacher and his friends, who had glided over the same dark waters at dead of night, past the Mytenstein to the Rütli, and the old time lived again; and the little chapel on the spot where Tell sprang ashore, erected by the Canton Uri, where once a year, since 1388, mass is said, and a sermon preached to the people, who go up in solemn procession of little boats, looked friendly over to them; and the countrymen of Schiller, present for the first time from Stuttgart and Munich, wondered at the solemn beauty of the snowpeaks reflected in the waters below. A chorus of many voices broke upon the mountain-stillness, as the little fleet approached the Rütli; the men of Uri, already there, "the first on the spot," and with them the men of Gersau, a valiant band, answered in a song of welcome; and they shook each other by the hand, and made a little circle, three hundred in all, upon the Rütli; and Lusser of Uri thanked the men of Schwyz for the invitation to remember their fathers here on the five hundred and fifty-second anniversary of the deeds which Schiller has so gloriously sung. We best remember the poet by repeating and upholding his words:--

"Wir wollen seyn ein einzig Volk von Brüdern,
In keiner Noth uns trennen und Gefahr.
Wir wollen frey seyn, wie die Väter waren,
Eher den Tod als in der Knechtschaft leben.
Wir wollen trauen auf den höchsten Gott,
Und uns nicht fürchten vor der Macht der
Menschen."

"One people will we be,--a band of brothers;
No danger, no distress shall sunder us.
We will be freemen as our fathers were,
And sooner welcome death than live as slaves.
We will rely on God's almighty arm,
And never quail before the power of man." [B]

[Footnote B: Rev. C. T. Brooks's translation, p. 53.]

Then they read the scene of the Rütli Oath from Schiller's play, and sing the Swiss national song, "Callest thou, my Fatherland?" And the pastor Tschümperlin admonishes them that they best cultivate the spirit of Schiller and Tell by worthy training of their children. As they are about to break up at last, the Landammann Styger of Schwyz suggests a beautiful thing to them:--"As we came from Brunnen, and looked up at the Mytenstein as we passed it,--the great pyramid rising up there out of the water as if meant by Nature for a monument,--it seemed to us that a memorial tablet should be placed there, simple like the column itself, with words like these: 'To Him who wrote "Tell," on his One Hundredth Birthday, the Original Cantons.'" And the proposition was received with unanimous shout of assent. "This was the worthy ending of the Schiller-Festival on the Rütli," says the contemporary chronicle.

On the 10th day of November, 1859, also, there was put into the hands of the Central Committee of the Society of the Swiss Union the deed of purchase of the Rütli. It is in the handwriting of Franz Lusser of Uri, Clerk of the Court, and dated the 10th of November, the birthday of Schiller. Thus Switzerland owns its sacred places, and the title-deeds long laid up in its heart are written out at last.

On the 21st of October of last year, on a brilliant afternoon, the men of Schwyz and Uri went forth again from Brunnen, with the chief magistracy of the land. From Treib came the Unterwaldners, all in richly decorated boats, and the inhabitants of Lucerne in two steamboats with much music, meeting in front of the Mytenstein, which lifts its colossal front eighty feet above the water there. The top of it was covered with a large boat-sail, with the arms of the original Cantons and Swiss mottoes on it; in a wreath of evergreen, the arms of the other Cantons; in the middle of it, in token of the twenty-two Cantons, a white cross upon red ground; above all, the flag of the Confederacy spread to the Föhn. At the foot was a little stand made of twigs for the speaker, about which the little fleet was grouped, under the charge of the Landammann Aufdermauer of Brunnen, a gallant gentleman, host of the Golden Eagle, with his kind little sister, of whom we spoke at the beginning.

When all was still, Uri opens the musical trilogy,--the words by P. Gall. Morell, monk of Einsiedeln, the music by Baumgartner of Zürich; Unterwalden takes up the burden; then Schwyz; then all three in chorus;--and the echo of the fresh voices among the rocks there was as in a cathedral. Then Landammann Styger climbs to the stand, and makes a little speech, and reads a letter from Schiller's daughter, (of which presently,) while the curious shepherd-boys stretch out their necks over the craggy tops of the Selisberg to look down upon the lively scene below.

At the end of his speech, Styger lets fall the sail amid the beating of the drums and the shouts of the multitude; and on the flat sides of the rock appear the gilded metal letters, a foot high,--"To the Singer of Tell, Fr. Schiller, the Original Cantons, 1859." And there were other little speeches,--one by Lusser, who exclaims with much truth, "The rocks of our mountains can be broken, but not _bent_"; and then followed the Swiss psalm by Zwysig. And afterwards, in the evening, a feast in the Golden Eagle in Brunnen, at which, with the ancient sobriety, they remember the dangers of the present, and affirm their neutrality, which should not hang upon the caprice of a neighbor, but be grounded in their own will, for there is no Lord in Christendom for them except Him who is above all.

Thus wrote Schiller's daughter:--

_"Gentlemen of the Committee of the Schiller Memorial on the Mytenstein:_--

"Your friendly words have truly delighted and deeply moved my heart;-- not less the engraving of the Mytenstein, which shall stand as the very worthy and noble memorial of the Singer of Wilhelm Tell in the land of the Swiss for all time forever,--a token of recognition of the genius which, struggling for the highest good of mankind, has found its home in the hearts of all noble men and women. With infinite joy I greeted the beautiful idea, so wholly worthy of the land as of the poet,--there, where magnificent Nature, grown friendly, offers its hand on the very ground where one of the noblest, most finished creations of Schiller takes root, to consecrate to him a memorial which, defying time and storms, shall illumine afar off every heart which turns to it.

"In memory also of my beloved mother, Charlotte, Schiller's earthly angel, I rejoice in this memorial. She it was who, with deepest love for Switzerland, which she calls the land of her affections, where she passed happy youthful days from 1783 to 1784, led Schiller to it, and by her fresh, lively descriptions made him partake of it; and so prepared the way for the genius which could embrace and penetrate all things for the masterly representation of the country, which, unfortunately, his feet never trod. If, unhappily, I am not able to be present at the festival on the 21st of October, I am not the less thankful for your kind invitation; and in that sacred hour I will be with you in spirit, deeply sympathizing with all that the noble _idea_ brought into life.

"A little memorial of the 10th of November, 1859, representing Schiller and Charlotte, I pray you, Gentlemen, to accept of me, and, when you recall the parents, to remember also the daughter.

"Respectfully yours,

"EMILIE v. GLEICHEN-RUSSWURM, geb. v. SCHILLER.

"_Greiffenstein ob Bonnland. 12 October, 1860._"

In the churchyard of Cleversulzbach lies buried, since the 2d of May, 1802, the mother of Schiller. Prof. Dr. E. Mörika, when he was preacher there, erected a simple stone cross over the grave, and with his own hands engraved upon it the words, "Schiller's Mother." On the famous 10th of November, 1859, woman's hand decorated the grave with flowers, and put a laurel wreath upon the cross; and in the hour when great cities with festal processions and banquets and oratory and jubilant song offered their homage to the son, a few persons gathered around the grave of the mother, and in the silence there planted a linden-tree; for in stillness thus, while she lived, had his mother done her part, lovingly and with faith, to unfold and consecrate the genius of Friedrich Schiller.

* * * * *

A NOOK OF THE NORTH.

Adventurous travellers, who penetrated into Canada during the late visit of the Sovereign-Apparent of that colony, have furnished the public, through the daily press, with minute and more or less faithful descriptions of places upon the grand routes, Quebec and Montreal have been done by them to a hair; Kingston and another wicked place made notorious for bad manners; Toronto, Hamilton, and London of the West photographed with a camera of maximum dimensions. Upon the two great railroad-lines by which Canada is now traversed,--the Grand Trunk and the Great Western,--there is hardly a station which has not been mentioned by the reporters, either for the loyal manner in which it was decorated to do honor to the youthful Prince, or for the rather inhospitable display of certain objectionable symbols by the people around.

But neither in Canada nor elsewhere is it upon the grand routes that glimpses can be had of interior life and character. Primitive simplicity is altogether incompatible with railroads. The boy who resides near a station is quite an old man, compared with any average boy taken from the sequestered clearings ten miles back: he may be a worse kind of boy, or he may be a better, but he isn't the same kind, at any rate. Of girls it is more difficult to speak with confidence in the present era,--hooped skirts having pretty nearly assimilated them everywhere; but I have noticed that they are less ingenuous along railroads than in secluded districts, and their parents more suspicious,--a fact which makes railroad-vicinities inferior places to dwell in, compared to those that are rural and remote from the demoralizing influences of up and down trains.

I do not aver that the railroad is devoid of a kind of poetry of its own,--the same kind of sentiment, nearly, that resides about anvils and smelting-furnaces in the Hartz Mountains and in the great coal-districts: an infernal kind of sentiment, for the most part, being inseparable from burning fiery furnaces and grime; as in "Fridolin," and in the "Song of the Bell," and in the "Forging of the Anchor." Once, particularly, in travelling by rail, did I experience the mysterious glamour that seems to hang round iron more than about any other metal. It was past midnight; and on waking up after a sleep of some hours, I found myself alone in the long car, which had come to a stand-still while I slept. The stillness of the night was broken at intervals by a short, loud boom, as of an iron bell ringing up some terrible domestic from the incomprehensible unseen. On looking out of the window, I saw by some dim lamp-light that we were alone in an immense iron hall; _we_, I say, for there was a ponderous, grimy being darkly visible to me, whose gigantic shadow made terrible gestures upon the walls and among the great iron girders of the roof, as he moved slowly along the train, striking the wheels with a heavy sledge-hammer as he went. Of course there was nothing unusual in such a proceeding, the object of which was, probably, to ascertain something connected with the condition of the rolling stock; but there was a kind of awful poetry in the toll of the iron bell, which ran, and reverberated, and tingled among the iron ribs in the building, making them all sing as if they were things of flesh and blood, with plenty of iron in the latter, which is reckoned to be conducive to robust health.

But the romance of rolling stock has yet to be disengaged, and the inspired conductor or bardic baggage-master destined to do that is yet in the shell. May he long remain there!

Off the track some ten or twenty miles, though, almost anywhere, some of the materials, at least, for good, regular poetry of the old-fashioned kind are to be found. A mill, for instance, with a wooden wheel,--no demoralizing iron about it, in fact, except what cannot well be dispensed with, in view of wear and tear. A white cottage, where the miller dwells serene; mossy roof, red brick chimney, and no lightning-rod or any other iron, being the principal features of the serene miller's abode. Cherries, in that tranquil person's garden, that are nearly ripe, and roses of a delicate red,--but none so ripe or so red as the lips and cheeks of the serene miller's daughter, who trips across the little wooden foot-bridge over the mill-stream, singing a birdy kind of song as she goes. She is clad in a black velvet bodice and russet skirt, and has no iron about her of any description, unless, indeed, it is in her blood,--where it ought to be. The breath of kine waiting to be relieved of their honest milk, which is a good, solid kind of fluid in such places, and meanders about the land with great freedom in company with honey. All these things will be very scarce in the world by-and-by, on which account it seems to be a judicious thing to go off the track a little, now and then, if only to "say that we have seen them."

In following the graphic narratives of the Prince of Wales's tour, the mind naturally wandered away to places _not_ visited by him, although within easy distance of his fore-ordered course. It is well that there are places left to talk about! Let us conjure up a few old reminiscences of one,--a silent, primitive little nook of the North, within an hour's ride of Quebec, but too insignificant a spot for the coveted distinction of a royal visit. Crowned heads, then, will have the goodness to transfer their attention, and skip to the next article.

The nook to which I refer is Lorette, in Lower or French Canada, where it is commonly called _Jeune Lorette_, to distinguish it from _Ancienne Lorette_,--a less interesting place, distant from it about four miles.

Jeune Lorette is situated about eight miles north-west of Quebec, upon the beautiful, romantic stream called the St. Charles, which rushes down many a picturesque gorge, and winds through many pleasant meadows, in its course of some twenty miles from Lake St. Charles away up in the hills to the St. Roch suburb of Quebec. Here it assumes the character of a deep, tortuous dock, incumbered with the _débris_ of many ship-yards, and reflecting the skeleton shapes of big-ribbed merchantmen on the stocks. Here, too, it is generally called the Little River; probably to distinguish it from the great River St. Lawrence, into which it oozes at this point.

But higher up, as I have said, the St. Charles is romantic and rushes on its fate. At Lorette, it divides the village in twain: a western section, for the most part peopled by French-Canadian _habitans_; an eastern one, inhabited by half-breed Indians, a remnant of the once powerful Hurons of old.

These Canadian Hurons are not, in their present condition, corroborative of the Cooper specifications of Indian life: rather the contrary, in fact. There is a wing of them--a wing without feathers, indeed--settled down at Amherstburgh, on the far western marge of Lake Erie, in Canada, quite six hundred miles away from their brethren of Lorette. When shooting woodcock once in that district, I entered the comfortable log farm-house of the chief of the settlement, whose name was Martin. He was a fat, rather Dutch-looking Indian, but still active and industrious,--for a man who is an Indian and fat. I asked Mr. Martin if he hunted much; to which he replied, No, he did not,--adding, that he never was far into the woods but once in his life, and that was on his own lot of a hundred acres of bush, in which he was lost, on that occasion, for two days.

Among the Hurons of Lorette there are a few young men who hunt moose and caribou in the proper season; but the men, generally speaking, as well as the women, are engaged in the manufacture of snow-shoes and moccasons,--articles for which there is a great demand in Lower Canada. Philippe Vincent, a chieftain and shoemaker of the tribe, told me that he had disposed of twelve hundred dollars' worth of these articles, on a trip to Montreal, from which he had just returned. Many articles of Indian fancy-work are also manufactured by them: beaded pouches for tobacco, bark-work knick-knacks, and curious racks made of the hoofs of the moose, and hung upon the wall to stick small articles into.

On the profits of this work many of them live in comfort,--nay, in luxury. Paul Vincent, a cousin of Philippe mentioned above, and, like him, a chief of the tribe and a renowned builder of snow-shoes, paid two hundred and seventy-five dollars for a piano for his daughter, when I was at Quebec, five or six years ago. Whenever I visited Philippe, that stately man of the Hurons would usher me into a little parlor with a sofa in it and a carpet on the floor; he would produce brandy in a cut decanter, and cake upon a good porcelain plate, and would be merry in French and expansive on the subject of trade.

Most of these hybrid Hurons are quite as white as their Canadian neighbors; but they generally have the horse-tail hair, and black, beady eye of the aborigines. The ordinary dress of the men, in winter, is a blue blanket-coat, made with a _capuchon_, or hood, which latter is generally trimmed with bright-colored ribbon and ornamented with beads. Epaulettes, fashioned out of pieces of red and blue cloth, somewhat after the pattern of a pen-wiper, impart a distinguished appearance to the shoulders of these garments, which are rendered still more picturesque by being tucked round the body with heavy woollen sashes, variegated in red, blue, and yellow. Some of these sashes are heavily beaded, and worth from five to ten dollars each; and they, as well as the Indian blanket-coats, are to be had at the furriers' shops in Quebec, where there is a considerable demand for them by members of snow-shoe clubs, and others whose occupations or amusements render that style of costume appropriate for their wear. The older women dress in the ordinary squaw costume, with short, narrow petticoats, and embroidered _metasses_, or leggings. When going out, they fold a blue blanket over all, and put on a regular, unpicturesque, stove-pipe hat, with a band of tin-foil around it,--which makes them look like one of those mulatto coachmen one sees now and then on the box of a _bonton_ barouche, with his silver-mounted hat and double-caped blue box-coat. The young girls are disposed to innovations upon the petticoats, and modifications of the _metasses_. Once I saw one standing on a great gray crag at the foot of the fall. She looked extremely picturesque at a little distance, giving a nice bit of local color to the scene with her scarlet legs; but on a nearer approach, much of the value of the color disappeared before the unromantic facts of a pale-face petticoat and patent-leather gaiter-boots. I have noticed several of the younger people here with brown hair and blue or gray eyes, significant that the aboriginal blood is being gradually diluted. In another generation or two, there will be little of it left among them. But the correspondents of the press, who described some of these Indians seen by them at Quebec, are mistaken in attributing to them an admixture of Irish blood. Until within eight years past, there were few, if any, Irish to be found in the neighborhood of Lorette. Since that time, the construction of the Quebec water-works, which are supplied from Lake St. Charles, has given employment to hundreds of the Hibernian stock in that neighborhood; and I know not whether their influence as regards race may not be now discernible in the features of many pugnacious Huronites of tender years: but the white element traceable in the lineaments of the present and passing generations of the settlement is distinctly attributable to the proximity of the French-Canadian, whose language has been transfused into them with the blood.

Few, if any, of the older people of Lorette speak English,--Huron and French being the only languages at their command. Since the building of the great reservoir, however, many of the rising generation are picking up the English tongue in its roundest Irish form. Previously, matters were the reverse. I once noticed a handsome, brown-faced boy there, who used to come about with a bow and arrows, soliciting coppers, which were placed one by one in a split stick, shot at, and pocketed by the archer, if hit,--as they almost always were. He spoke Indian and French, and I took him for an olive-branch of the tribe; but, on questioning him, he told me that his name was Bill Coogan, and that he first saw the light, I think, in Cork, Ireland.

There is one charming feature at Lorette,--a winding, dashing cascade, which boils and creams down with splendid fury through a deep gorge fenced with pied and tumbled rocks, and overhung by gnarly-boughed cedars, pines, and birches. There is, or at least there was, a crumbling old saw-mill on a ledge of rock nearly half-way up the torrent. It was in keeping with the scene, and I hope it is there still; but it was very shaky when I last saw it, and has probably made an _éboulement_ down to the foot of the fall before now. Some short distance above the head of the fall, near the bridge by which the two villages are connected, the scene is pictorially damaged by a stark, staring paper-mill, the dominant colors of which are Solferino-red and pea-green. This, a comparatively new feature in the landscape, is not visible from below, however, and it is from there that the fall is seen to best advantage.

To the eye of the experienced fisherman, it is obvious that the St. Charles, with its sparkling rapids, and the deep, swirling pools formed by its numerous "elbows," must erstwhile have been a chosen, retreat of the noble salmon. Even now, notwithstanding the obstructions caused by the immense deposits of ship-yard refuse at its mouth, a few of these fine fish are caught every season by one or two persevering anglers from Quebec,--men who thrive on disappointment,--whose fish-hooks are miniature anchors of Hope. Lake St. Charles, from which the river derives its existence and its name, is a wild, beautiful tarn, about five miles above Lorette, embosomed in hills and woods. There are good bass in that lake, by whose shores there dwells--or dwelt--an ancient fisherman called Gabriel, who supplied anglers with canoes, and paddled them about the waters.

Lorette, although undistinguished by a glance from the mild blue eyes of the Premier Prince of England, was flashed upon, years ago, by the awful light that gleamed from the dark, fierce ones of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. This is how I came to know it.