The fall of the Rhine near Schaffhausen hardly met the expectations of these travellers, who had heard their German friends speak in such strong terms of its greatness. It is a most beautiful waterfall, and when viewed from the platform at the base of the cliff beneath the castle, startles the spectator with its thundering plunges and foaming whirlpools. To a native of the same land with Niagara, the Yosemite, and the Yellowstone, its size is insignificant. But its beauty as a picturesque scene, when the high banks, the long rapids, the surging pools beneath, and the jagged rocks that rise through and above the spray and rainbows, are included in the panorama, can be described only in the strongest language.
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.