It is singular, perhaps, that neither this superlative Bay of Uri, nor all its varied traditions of the Tellsplatte or the Rütli, should have succeeded in evoking a single verse from the poet whose inspiration had been kindled to such splendid effort in Scotland, less than twenty years previously, by the vision of a sweet-voiced girl by the spray of a Highland waterfall, by the careless evening greeting of a woman by a lake. The magic period of plenary inspiration was passed, indeed, for Wordsworth at the time of this continental tour in 1820; and yet it was after his return to England that he composed the great sonnet on King's College Chapel. The Rütli lies across the lake scarcely half an hour's row from Brunnen, yet it does not appear from Dorothy's journal that her brother even visited it. Here, on a green shelf of meadow by the side of the greener lake, and over-topped towards the west by the dark woods and cliffs of the Sonnenberg, are the few square yards of sacred soil where the three founders of Swiss freedom met together and conspired, if fables do not lie, for the rooting out of the Austrian tyrant in 1307. Their actual names are given, and the very day of meeting--November 7, in "the dead vast and middle of the night"--yet the imp of modern criticism, which has spared neither Tell nor Arnold von Winkelried, is clamorous again to rob us of this famous drama of conjuration on the Rütli. On the opposite shore of the lake, but considerably further to the south--to the south, in fact, of the little village of Sisikon, which itself may be reckoned as roughly the centre of the Bay of Uri--on the immediate margin of the water, and below the great, vertical, twisted precipices of the dark and towering Axenberg, is the little ledge of the Tellsplatte, where Tell is said to have sprung ashore from the boat, and from the custody of his warders, during the onslaught of a sudden squall, when on his way as a prisoner from Altdorf to Küssnacht. The chapel was rebuilt towards the close of last century, and is visible as we pass from the steamer. Behind it runs the great St. Gothard railway, on its way from Bâle to Milan; and higher up the cliff is the famous highroad of the Axenstrasse, which was driven along the face of these sheer and impracticable precipices, in alternate cutting, embankment and tunnel, by the zeal of the Federal Government in 1863-64, in order to better the communication between Canton Ticino and the rest of Switzerland. Ticino, or Tessin, the fifth largest of the states in acreage but the seventh in population, lies to the south of Uri, across the wild pass of the St. Gothard, on the sunny Italian side of the Alps, and was only admitted to the Confederation in 1803, though earlier by a dozen years than units of such importance as Neuchâtel, Geneva, and the Valais. One is rather apt to forget that the Switzerland of the days before the French Revolution--the Switzerland