A traveller should be prepared to read the book of nature with the historical harmony. An ignorant or forgetful man sees nothing but the scene before him, when the historical student sees it peopled with great forms, sees it in grand moral lights and shades, surrounded by the many-coloured atmosphere of the past, as well as the light of the day's sun that is shining upon it. When a man visits Altorf, he needs to be for the time thrown back into the past; but this is impossible, unless the past is in him as the fruit of his studies taken into his being. The guide-books will repeat to him the name of Tell and the facts in his history, the inscription will inform him that such and such great events took place amidst the scenes he is visiting; but this does not give him the past, does not make that inward scenery up with which his mind has need to have been familiar, in order that the place may call heroic times and interests into being. How much greater is the enjoyment of a mind that has the whole of such a drama as Schiller's William Tell fresh in memory while wandering over the Canton Uri, than his that has but a few dry dates and names, or worse than all is dependent on the monuments, the guides, and the Handbooks!

A man visits Zurich; he goes into the Cathedral; what a loss to him, if for the first time he learns that Zwingle there preached, or knows nothing about the history of Zwingle, and the scenes of the reformation! He visits Einseidlen; seeks the shrine of the Virgin, sees the monks at worship; what a loss to him if his studies in history have failed to people the scene to his own mind from the great life that for a time was there passing! A man crosses the Wengern Alp. If he has never read the tragedy of Manfred, there is a grand scenery created from the poet's mind, in respect of which he crosses before the Jungfrau with his eyes shut. A man passes into Athens and stands on the Acropolis. What a loss to him if his studies have never made him familiar with the age of Pericles! Nay, there is a recollection of objects around him that have absolutely no meaning, no story, no lesson, no language to his mind, if many a page of Grecian history be not in his remembrance. A man wanders into Egypt, up and down the Nile, into old majestic

Thebes, with its dim colossal ruins. What an inappreciable, irretrievable loss to him if he never read Herodotus, or is des titute of a knowledge of the combined prophetic and actual history of that antique marvellous country, with its gigantic, monstrous types of thought and being!

"Labour to distil and unite into thyself," says ancient Fuller, "the scattered perfections of several nations. Many weed foreign countries, bringing home Dutch drunkenness, Spanish pride, French wantonness, and Italian Atheism; as for the good herbs, Dutch industry, Spanish loyalty, French courtesy, and Italian frugality, these they leave behind them; others bring home just nothing; and because they singled not themselves from their countrymen, though some years beyond sea, were never out of England." This is the great folly of travelling without a foreign language, that it compels a stranger to keep company only with his own countrymen, so that he returns home with all his prejudices.

We are still in the magnificent pass of the St. Gothard, and it continues to present a character at once picturesque and beautiful, wild and savage. The gorges are tremendous, the bridges thrown across the torrent frequent and bold. Here and there, dark forests of fir cling to the mountains, and sometimes you see the savage jagged paths of recent avalanches. Now and then, there is a little chapel on the mountain's brow; the evening chime of bells comes ringing up the valley; you meet corded brown friars walking and women working on the roads. The sun is pouring through rifts in the clouds, and the dark blue sky opens.

I cannot help noting the variety and contrast of colours of fered to the eye in such a scene; the azure of the sky, the violet mountains, of a hue as deep as the heart's ease, the grisly gray rocks, the black firs, the deep blue gorges, the pale verdure of the trees, the deeper delicious green of the grassy slopes and meadow patches, the white virgin snow, the dim mists, the silvery clouds, the opal of the morn, the golden lights of evening. What an intermingling of lovely hues and shades! At some distance below Wasen the mountains are singularly grand! Far down the 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, labouring 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 LIV.

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 mistify 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 Melcthal, 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