But if his sword he wields, at home you’d better stay”—
is an English translation of a Lucerne rhyme. Guide-books refer to him as the district-barometer. Our experience—and we watched him narrowly for a month,—proved him to be as unstable as was he for whom he was named. There is a gloomy tarn upon the southern declivity in which Pontius Pilate drowned himself, a remorseful exile, driven from palace, judgment-seat and country, but unable to evade the torment of memory and the accusing vision of “that Just Man.” So runs the popular legend, and that the “cap,” “collar” and “sword” of the mountain rise from this dark and accursed lake. Moreover, it is believed by the peasants that storms follow the approach of a foreigner to the haunted spot. With all his humors and untruthfulness, Pilatus deserves a better name. He is a striking and magnificent accessory to a view that is glorious in every aspect.
Every rood of ground around Lake Lucerne, otherwise known as the Lake of the Four Cantons, is memorable in the history of the gallant little Republic. Near it, Arnold Winkelried gathered into his breast the red sheaf of spears upon the battle-field of Sempach, July 9th, 1386.
The Confederate Brethren of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, met at Rütli upon the very border of the lake, on the night of November 7th, 1307, and swore to give no rest to mind or body until Switzerland should be free.
William Tell was born at Bürglen, a few miles above Fluelen. It is fashionable to call him a myth, and his biography symbolical. If our opinion on this head had been demanded prior to our going to Lucerne, the spirit, if not the letter of our reply would have been akin to Betsey Prig’s “memorable and tremendous words,”—“I don’t believe there’s no sich a person!” By the time we had re-read Schiller’s “William Tell,” and visited, with it in hand, Altorf, Küssnacht and Tell’s Platte, we credited the tales of his being and daring almost as devoutly as do the native Switzers.
Küssnacht is but a couple of miles back from the lake in the midst of a smiling country lying between water and mountains. A crumbling wall on a hill-side to the left of the road was pointed out to us as the remains of Gessler’s Castle, pulled down and burned by the Confederates the year after the Oath of Rütli. The Hollow Way in which Tell shot him is a romantic lane between steep, grassy banks and overhanging trees. It was by this that Gessler approached the tree behind which Tell lay, concealed, cross-bow in hand. The exact place of the tyrant’s death is marked by a little chapel. A fresco in the porch depicts the scene described by Schiller. The purple Alpine heather blossoms up to the church-door, and maiden-hair ferns fringe the foundation walls. The short, warm season in Switzerland is blessed by frequent and copious showers; the face of the earth is freshly green and the herbage almost as luxuriant as are the spring-crops of Italy. We drove a mile beyond the chapel to Immensee, a hamlet upon Lake Zug. Lunch was spread for us at a round table in the lakeside garden of a café. The Rigi rose abruptly from the southern and narrower end of the blue sheet. Drifts of gauzy haze were sailing slowly across the broad brow.
“Almost six thousand feet high!” remarked Prima, following the outlines with thoughtful eyes, “And Zug is thirteen hundred feet deep. Lake Thun fifteen hundred. One’s imagination needs Swiss training in order to grasp such figures.”
The opposite heights were a much lower group, graceful in undulation and form, and heavily wooded. To our right as we sat, was a barren line, like a mountain-road, running sharply down the side of one of the range.
“The Goldau Landslip!” We had heard of it almost as long and frequently as of the Wyllie disaster in the White Mountains. In 1806, a strip of the mountain, one thousand feet long and one hundred thick, slid, on a September afternoon, at first slowly, then, with frightful velocity, until it crashed, three thousand feet below, upon four peaceful villages at the foot of the slope and into the Lake of Lowerz. To this day, a solemn mass is said in the sister-village of Artli, upon the anniversary of the calamity, for the souls of the four hundred-and-odd men, women and children who perished in that one hour. Lowerz, forced thus suddenly from its bed, reared, a tottering wall of waters, eighty feet high, and fell backward upon islands and shores, bearing churches, dwellings and trees before it. It is a mere pond now, a little over a mile wide, and but fifty feet deep, the débris of the slide having settled in it. A peaceful eye of light, it reflected the quiet heavens as we looked back upon it from the hill above Immensee, but the awful track on which neither tree nor bush takes root, leads down into it.
Tell’s Platte—or “Leap”—is marked by a tiny chapel upon the extremest water’s edge near Rütli. Its foundations are built into the rock upon which the patriot sprang from Gessler’s boat. The present shrine belongs probably to the sixteenth century, but the original chapel was consecrated,—declare the annalists of the country, and the English translator of Schiller,—when men who had seen and known Tell were alive and present at the ceremony. An altar stands within the recess—it is only that. The front is arched and pillared, and the steps are washed by the wake of each passing steamer. A great Thanksgiving Mass for Swiss liberty is performed here once in the year, attended by a vast concourse of people in gaily-decorated boats. There is not room on the shelving shore for a congregation.