Sentimental reciter/Tell's Speech

by James Sheridan Knowles

For other versions of this work, see Tell's Speech.

TELL’S SPEECH.

Ye crags and peaks, I’m with you once again!
I hold to you the hands you first beheld,
To show they still are free.⁠Methinks I hear
A spirit in your echoes answer me,
And bid your tenant welcome to his home
Again!—O sacred forms, how proud you look!
How high you lift your heads into the sky!
How huge you are! how mighty and how free!
Ye are the things that tower, that shine-whose smile
Makes glad-whose frown is terrible-whose forms,
Robed or unrobed, do all the impress wear
Of awe divine. Ye guards of liberty,
I'm with you once again!-I call to you
With all my voice!-I hold my hands to you
To show they still are free. I rush to you
As though I could embrace you!

⁠Sealing yonder peak,
I saw an eagle wheeling near its brow
O'er the abyss: his broad expanded wings
Lay calm and motionless upon the air,
As if he floated there without their aid,
By the sole act of his unlorded will,
That buoy'd him proudly up. Instinctively
I bent my bow; yet kept he rounding still
His airy circle, as in the delight
Of measuring the ample range beneath,
And round about absorbed, he heeded not
The death that threaten'd him.-I could not shoot!-
'Twas liberty!-I turned my bow aside,
And let him soar away!

⁠Heavens, with what pride I used
To walk these hills, and look up to my God,
And bless him that it was so! It was free!
From end to end, from cliff to lake 'twas free-
Free as our torrents are that leap our rocks,
And plough our valleys, without asking leave:
Or as our peaks that wear their caps of snow,
In very presence of the regal sun,
How happy was it then! I loved
Its very storms. Yes, Emma, I have sat
In my boat at night, when, midway o'er the lake,
The stars went out, and down the mountain gorge
The wind came roaring. I have sat and eyed
The thunder breaking from his cloud, and smiled
To see him shake his lightnings o'er my head,
And think I had no master save his own.
You know the jutting cliff round which a track
Up hither winds, whose base is but the brow
To such another one, with scanty room
For two a-breast to pass ? O'ertaken there
By the mountain blast, I've laid me flat along,
And while gust followed gust more furiously,

As if to sweep me o’er the horrid brink,
And I have thought of other lands, whose storms
Are summer flaws to those of mine, and just
Have wished me there—the thought that mine was free,
Has check’d that wish, and I have raised my head,
And cried in thraldom to that furious wind,
Blow on! This is the land of liberty! ⁠Knowles.