e 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 Buerglen 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 Schaechen 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,