enchant the vision and animate the spirit,--warming commonplace persons into something approaching to poetic fervor, and persons of genius to pour forth their inspirations in verse or lofty prose. You may have read the most vivid and accurate description, yet the reality will burst upon you like a revelation; a few cherished hallucinations may be uncovered to the raw air of truth, but you will look again and again, day after day, and a perennial glory will surround the kaleidoscopic panorama, “ever charming, ever new,” photographing it in the mind forever. Scarcely a day, or an hour of the day, when there is not being produced, scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon an inexhaustible source of constant and perfect beauty. It is indeed a beautiful land, meriting the words of the Psalmist, “a fair place, the joy of the whole earth.” It is a place where all save the spirit of man seems divine; so fascinating, that, like Virgil, who on his death-bed longed to view once more the nymphs of Bacchus as they danced on the banks of the river of Peloponnesus, one who has visited Switzerland sighs again for its glorious sun, its delicious air with the shivering freshness of the glacier, its magnificent scenery, its gorgeous mountains, its valleys of idyllic beauty, its beautiful roads shaded by hedges, its streams bordered with hazel copses, its forests carpeted with moss, its corners of shade and solitude with freshness and luxurious ease, its happy and tranquil retreats, and its asylums for modest pleasure or for calm repose: “Who first beholds those everlasting clouds, Those mighty hills, so shadowy, so sublime, As rather to belong to heaven than earth, But instantly receives into his soul A sense, a feeling, that he loses not; A something that informs him ’tis an hour Whence he may date henceforward and forever?” CHAPTER XVIII. WILLIAM TELL. “Almighty powers! That was a shot indeed; It will be talked of to the end of time.” Trite and worn out as the subject may appear, it is impossible by any amount of familiarity to divest the historical legend of William Tell of its undying charm; and he who has visited the scene, so far from his interest in it being exhausted, has only been made more enthusiastic in its favor. It is a perfectly simple and natural story, when read in the light of the times, the circumstances that led up to it, and the impulses which sustained it throughout.