My bark has stopped at the landing-stage of a house on the right bank of the lake, before entering the Bay of Uri. I climbed up to the orchard of that inn and came to sit under two walnut-trees which give shelter to a stable. Before me, a little to the right, on the opposite bank of the lake, the village of Schwyz unfolds itself among orchards and the inclined planes of those pastures called "Alps" in this part; it is surmounted by a rock broken into a semi-circle, the two points of which, the Mythen and the Haken, the Mitre and the Hook, owe their names to their shapes. This horned capital rests upon turfy slopes, as the crown of the rude Helvetian independence rests on the head of a nation of shepherds. The silence around me is interrupted only by the tinkling of the bells of two heifers left in the neighbouring stable; they seem to ring out to me the glory of the pastoral liberty which Schwyz has given, with its name, to a whole people: a little canton in the neighbourhood of Naples, called "Italia," has in the same way, but with less sacred rights, communicated its name to the land of the Romans.
Three o'clock.
We are starting; we are entering the Bay or Lake of Uri. The mountains grow taller and darker. There is the grass-grown ridge of the Grütli and the three fountains at which Fürst, Arnold von Melchthal and Stauffacher[443] swore to deliver their country; there, at the foot of the Achsenberg, is the chapel that marks the place at which Tell, jumping from Gessler's[444] bark, pushed it back with his foot to the midst of the billows.
On the Lake of Lucerne.
But did Tell and his companions ever exist? Might they not be only persons of the North, born in the songs of the Scalds, whose heroic traditions are to be found on the shores of Sweden? Are the Swiss to-day what they were at the time when they won their independence? Those bear-paths see cal-ashes roll along where Tell and his companions used to bound, bow in hand, from peak to peak: am I myself a traveller in harmony with these regions?
A storm comes luckily to assail me. We are landing in a creek, at a few paces from Tell's chapel: it is always the same God that raises the winds and the same confidence in that God that reassures men. As in former days, when crossing the Ocean, the lakes of America, the seas of Greece, of Syria, I am writing on drenched paper. The clouds, the waves, the rolling of the thunder blend better with the ancient liberty of the Alps than the voice of that effeminate and degenerate nature which my century has placed in my bosom despite myself.
*
Altdorf.
I have disembarked at Flüelen and reached Altdorf, where the absence of horses will keep me one night at the foot of the Bannberg. Here, William Tell shot the apple from his son's head: the bow-shot was of the length that separates those two fountains. Let us believe, in spite of the fact that the same story was told by Saxo Grammaticus[445], as quoted first by myself in my Essai sur les révolutions[446]; let us have faith in religion and liberty, the two great things about man: glory and power are brilliant, not great.