The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard TaylorConwell, Russell H.
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The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor
Conwell, Russell H.
Taylor, Bayard, 1825-1878
From Schaffhausen they hurried on by the fields of the free and happy
Swiss farmers, and along highways that reminded him of his Pennsylvania
home, into the city of Zurich. There he carefully noted the character
and customs of the people. He was cheered by their friendly greetings,
he was surprised at their intelligence, he was pleased by the happy
faces of the children, and he was proud of the apparent influence of a
republic over its people. He visited the celebrated poet, Freiligrath, at
his villa on the shores of the lake, where the young American poet and
his elder German brother had a most social talk of Bryant, Longfellow,
and Whittier. From Freiligrath’s exile home, they walked by the “Devil’s
Bridge” to the Abbey of Einsiedeln, where the crowd of pilgrims and the
sweetest of singers in the church choir made a pleasant and charming
impression upon Bayard’s mind. Thence by valleys, and mountains, so
broken and grand, and by streams so delicately blue that descended to
the placid Zug, they journeyed to Lake Lucerne. There, on the shore, in
a charming grotto, upon which the Righi and Pilatus look down, while
above and beyond them the white peaks of the loftier Alps shimmer in the
sunshine above the clouds, William Tell, the father of Swiss liberty, had
his home. There, in an embowered cottage, that peeped from the leaves
like a maiden so coy, resided for a long time the poet Goethe; and there,
according to his own account, he studied the plot for a poem, but which
was afterwards embodied by his friend Schiller in the drama of “William
Tell.” There was the rock on which Tell leaped from Gessler’s boat; there
grew the linden-tree where Tell shot the apple from the head of his son;
there the chapel of William Tell, and there the hundreds of interesting
localities connected more or less closely with the early tyranny of
Austria and the heroic resistance of the Swiss patriots. Bayard loved
the works of Schiller, as, in fact, could hardly be avoided by any one
who reads them in the original tongue and amid the scenes so strikingly
described.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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