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"Your friendly words have truly delighted and deeply moved my heart; not less the engraving of the Mytenstein, which shall stand as the very worthy and noble memorial of the Singer of Wilhelm Tell in the land of the Swiss for all time forever, a token of recognition of the genius which, struggling for the highest good of mankind, has found its home in the hearts of all noble men and women.
From Treib came the Unterwaldners, all in richly decorated boats, and the inhabitants of Lucerne in two steamboats with much music, meeting in front of the Mytenstein, which lifts its colossal front eighty feet above the water there.
"Gentlemen of the Committee of the Schiller Memorial on the Mytenstein:
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 Rütli, 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, mass is said, and a sermon preached to the people, who go up in solemn procession of little boats, looked friendly over to them; and the countrymen of Schiller, present for the first time from Stuttgart and Munich, wondered at the solemn beauty of the snowpeaks reflected in the waters below.
The grizzly Vale-king comes, the glaciers moan, The lofty Mytenstein draws on his hood, And from the Stormcleft chilly blows the wind; The storm will burst before we are prepared. KUONI. 'Twill rain ere long; my sheep browse eagerly, And Watcher there is scraping up the earth. WERNI. The fish are leaping, and the water-hen Dives up and down. A storm is coming on.
On the lake's left bank, As we sail hence to Brunnen, right against The Mytenstein, deep-hidden in the wood A meadow lies, by shepherds called the Rootli, Because the wood has been uprooted there. 'Tis where our Canton boundaries verge on yours; Your boat will carry you across from Schwytz. Thither by lonely by-paths let us wend At midnight and deliberate o'er our plans.
As they are about to break up at last, the Landammann Styger of Schwyz suggests a beautiful thing to them: "As we came from Brunnen, and looked up at the Mytenstein as we passed it, the great pyramid rising up there out of the water as if meant by Nature for a monument, it seemed to us that a memorial tablet should be placed there, simple like the column itself, with words like these: 'To Him who wrote "Tell," on his One Hundredth Birthday, the Original Cantons." And the proposition was received with unanimous shout of assent.
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