LETTER IV.

Journey, across Mount St. Gothard, to Milan-Description of the Cathedral.

WE

E had now nothing more pressing than to prepare for Italy; and, on the 1st. of September, we took coach for Brunnen, a little village on the lake of the Four Cantons, where we arrived next day, at noon; after passing through a rugged and mountainous country, though generally thick set with comfortable farmhouses, as in the settled parts of the United States.

Passing by Schweitz, the capital of a small Canton of the same name, we were struck with the picturesque effect

of

of the clouds, which had gathered in circling volumes, round the body of an isolated mountain, while its rocky summit, invisibly supported in the air, glowed with the warm refulgence of a noonday sun.

At Brunnen, where the cantons of Uri, Schweitz, and Unterwalden, first allied themselves by a defensive treaty, we took boat for Fluellen; rowing between rugged mountains, shagged with firs. Among them we frequently espied cubic cottages, surrounded with little patches of cultivation, perched, at such tremendous heights, upon the very edge of overhanging precipices, that we could scarcely contemplate them without apprehensions, that some of the little boxes

would

would slide off from their shelving ledges, and come down upon our heads.

One of these cultivated specks, actually fell into the lake not long since, together with its little tenement, and all that it contained.

At the foot of a neighbouring ridge, is the valley of Gerisau, forming the smallest Republic in Europe. It can only be approached by water, and the Lilliputian Commonwealth is little more than two leagues in length; yet it contains twelve hundred souls; among whom sumptuary laws would be superfluous, since the keeping of a saddle-horse is there an unknown luxury.

Near

Near the upper end of the lake, a little chapel appears upon the left. It is erected upon the very spot, says Tradition, where Tell escaped from his Persecutors, when they were conveying him to prison. As the boat coasted the shore, to avoid a rising tempest, the hero jumped out upon the rocks, at a desperate leap, and mocked the tardy pursuit of his Conductors.

We landed to contemplate the venerated spot, and found the walls of the chapel rudely painted with the real or imaginary exploits of the Patron of Switzerland-recollecting with patriotic sensations the reception of William Penn, at Shackamaxon, in the wig-wam of king Tammany.

We

We disembarked at Fluellen, the port of communication between Switzerland and Italy, for the exchange of cattle and cheese, against rice, silk stuffs, &c. and walked a mile or two, to Altdorf, the capital of Uri, a place that was burnt by the French, when they retreated before the Russians, in 1799. It is now rapidly rebuilding, in a good modern stile, which gives it the lively air of an American town: new houses rising on all sides, beneath thick groves, preserved as a security from falling Avalanches.

The venerable tree was long preserved, in the market-place of Altdorf, to which the Son of the Hero of Switzerland was bound with thongs, when the Father shot the apple from the head of