TELL. O LIBERTY, Sweet angel much maligned, What crimes, what follies of unhallowed aim Have they not cast upon thee, too resigned Meek martyr, and their lawless works of shame With thine own wreath of grand achievement twined! Not thus, yon gallant mountain-patriot, Fair Switzerland, the darling of thy fame, Caught to his outraged heart the rescued child, And, just avenger, spared not, wavered not, But with dread patience dared the noble deed, On which glad Liberty approving smil'd; For when she saw the savage Austrian bleed She knew her own Swiss home, her own Swiss children freed. L The greatest profanation of the sacred name of Liberty ever committed in the world, was making it the watch-word of Revolutionary France. In fact, the sons of Belial have so strenuously asserted their right to be considered children of light, that the rest of mankind, less badly bold, and staggered by the enormity of the lie, have almost suspected the excellence of liberty altogether. When we hear the Canadian rebel, and the Chartist insurgent, dignified with the name of patriot, the honest lovers of right and order may well disclaim the questionable title. So it is with the pagan Hindoos, and the embruted slaves, when they are called upon to worship with pseudo-christians; and so with the poor Inca of Peru, when he reasonably enough renounced a promised heaven, on being told that Spaniards went there. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as true liberty; and the essence of it consists in the peaceful enjoyment of those rights which are conformable to reason; this, like true religion, is all-worthy of its noble army of martyrs. The leading facts in the history of William Tell are too well known to need repetition; the dramatist, the historian, and the romancist, have amply cele brated the great exploit, which issued in the liberation of Switzerland. Mountainous regions have in all ages and countries been the spots where patriotism, liberty, purity, religion, hospitality, and indeed all the patriarchal virtues have lingered longest. Our own Wales, and Scottish Highlands, northern Spain, Switzerland, and the Tyrol, are sufficient instances. The statistics of crime, if the reader has the opportunity of referring to them, (for here, as in a thousand other instances, the writer labours under the difficulty of trusting to unassisted memory,) will be found to present a verdict most favourable to the morals of mountaineers in contradistinction to the profligate habits of lowlanders. Of course, in such an estimate, equal numbers are taken; for it would be unfair to weigh the guilt of a square mile of a populous, because fertile, level, against the almost actual innocence of a similar portion taken from the thinly-peopled upland. The causes which operate favourably on the characters of mountaineers, are, chiefly, the necessity for exercise, and for greater agricultural exertions; the love of home, the features of which are impressed on the mind in such picturesque and gigantic forms as those of Alps and Apennines; the continual leavening of their inhabitants with the most persecuted portions of the church; the poverty of the neighbourhood; the constant meteorological dangers in which they live; their seclusion; and the power which grandeur of scenery exerts on the mind in disposing it to natural religion. Burke said, he would do homage to the crown if he saw it hanging on a bush; and Hermann Gessler set up the ducal hat of Austria on a pole, and, in the words of Howe's translation of Zschokke, "commanded that every one should honour it by bowing as he passed by." But diversity of motive and circumstance alike justifies the former, and condemns the latter; the symbol of legitimate right is diametrically opposed to the emblem of usurping wrong: the British statesman upheld order and subjection with patriotic humility; the Austrian governor served the bad cause of degradation and oppression with foreign insolence. The saying of Burke is as different from the action of Gessler, as the vile character of a Wat Tyler, or a Jack Cade is opposed to the noble heart of an Arnold or a Tell. PETRARC H. POET, and hermit-scholar of Vaucluse, Whom Rome, admiring, forth with laurels sent A crownéd lover to thy classic muse,— That thy rare wisdom could serenely choose And wealth sin-tainted of a courtier life In palaces of priests unholy spent, By love, alike unguilty and unblest, Now with its mate, beyond the breath of blame, After a life's short search find everduring rest. |