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, that, no longer divided, they may face the world and the future with one heart, with one great trembling hope, to lead the new civilization to its lasting triumphs.

Schiller had sung of Wilhelm Tell; and the men of Schwyz remembered him on that occasion, too, on the Ruetli, with their confederates from Oberwalden and Niederwalden.  On the afternoon of the 11th of November, they met at Brunnen,—­on the lake, as we have said,—­the men of Schwyz embarking in one great boat, amidst peals of music, while numberless little canoes received the others.  The wind, blowing strong from the north, filled the sail, and, as they floated down the Bay of Uri, they remembered Stauffacher and his friends, who had glided over the same dark waters at dead of night, past the Mytenstein to the Ruetli, and the old time lived again; and the little chapel on the spot where Tell sprang ashore, erected by the Canton Uri, where once a year, since 1388,