Gesler. Thou art to shoot an apple from his head! I do desire-command it so. Level my crossbow at the darling head Of mine own child? No - rather let me die! Gesler. Or thou must shoot, or with thee dies the boy! You have no children, sir you do not know The tender throbbings of a father's heart! Bertha. O, do not jest, my lord, with these poor sous. See how they tremble, and how pale they look, So little used are they to hear thee jest! Gesler. Who tells thee that I jest? Here is the apple: Room there, I say! Just eighty paces, And let him take his distance as the custom is, Not an inch more or less! It was his boast That at a hundred he could hit his man. Now, archer, to your task, and look you miss not! Bertha. Heavens! this grows serious; - down, boy, on your knees, And beg the governor to spare your life. Albert. I will not down upon my knees to him! To trifle with a father's anguish thus. Although this wretched man had forfeited Both life and limb for such a slight offence, He'll know thee well in future; and this hour He and his children's children will remember. Gesler. Open a way, there — quick! Why this delay? And see, I graciously repose thy fate Thou boastest of thy steady eye. "T is well! Now is the fitting time to show thy skill. Albert. Say, where am I to stand? I do not fear; My father strikes the bird upon the wing, And will not miss now when 't would harm his boy! Bertha. Does the child's innocence not touch thy heart? To which you must account for all your deeds. No, I will not be bound! I will be still, my Still as a lamb. Then I shall writhe and struggle with my Bind me? bonds. Bertha. But let your eyes, at least, be bandaged, boy! Albert. And why my eyes? No! Do you think I fear An arrow from my father's hand? Not I! I'll wait it firmly, nor so much as wink! Quick, father, show them that thou art an archer! He doubts thy skill - he thinks to ruin us. Shoot, then, and hit, though but to spite the tyrant! Bertha. But will you really venture on it, Tell? your hand 's unsteady - your knees tremble. Gesler. I do not want thy life, Tell, but the shot. Tell. It must be! (Collects himself, and shoots.) Many voices. The boy's alive! The apple has been struck! Albert. Here is the apple, father! You would not harm your boy. Well I knew Gesler. Well done! the apple 's cleft right through the cōre. It was a master shot, I must allow. A word, Tell. Tell. Sir, your pleasure? Gesler. Thou didst place A second arrow in thy belt-nay, nay! Well, my lord, Tell. And, be assured, I should not then have missed. Schiller. CXXVIII. IMPORTANCE OF SELF-DISCIPLINE. 1. COSTLY appara'tus and splendid cabinets have no magical power to make scholars. In all circumstances, as a man is, under God, the master of his own fortune, so is he the maker of his own mind. 2. The Creator has so constituted the human intellect that it can only grow by its own action; and by its own action and free will it will certainly and necessarily grow. Every man must, therefore, educate himself. His book and teacher are but helps; the work is his.. 3. A man is not educated until he has the ability to summon, in an emergency, all his mental powers in vigorous exercise to effect a proposed object. It is not the man who has seen most, or read most, who can do this; such a one is in danger of being bōrne down, like a beast of burden, by an overwhelming mass of other men's thoughts. 4. Nor is it the man who can boast of native vigor and capacity. The greatest of all the warriors, in the siege of Troy, had not the preeminence because nature had given strength and he carried the largest bow, but because SELF-DISCIPLINE had taught him how to bend it. DANIEL WEBSTER. CXXIX. WAR. 1. NOBODY sees a battle. The common soldier fires away amidst a smoke-mist, or hurries on to the charge in a crowd which hides everything from him. The officer is too anxious about the performance of what he is specially charged with to mind what others are doing. The commander cannot be present everywhere, and see every wood, water-course or ravine, in which his orders are carried into execution: he learns from his reports how the work goes on. It is well for a battle is one of those jobs which men do without daring to look upon. El EI The 2. Over miles of country, at every field-fence, in every gorge of a valley or entry into a wood, there is murder committing wholesale, continuous, reciprocal murder. The human form God's image is mutilated, deformed, lacerated, in every possible way, and with every variety of torture. wounded are jolted off in carts to the rear, their bared nerves crushed into maddening pain at every stōne or rut; or the flight and pursuit trample over them, leaving them to writhe and roar without assistance—and fever and thirst, the most enduring of painful sensations, possess them entirely. 3. Thirst, too, has seized upon the yet able-bodied soldier, who, with bloodshot eyes, and tongue lõlling out, plies his tradeblaspheming, killing, with savage delight, callous when the brains of his best-loved comrade are spattered over him. The battle-field is, if possible, a more painful object of contemplation than the combatants. They are in their vocation, earning their bread; what will not men do for a shilling a day? But their work is carried on amid the fields, gardens, and homesteads of men unused to war. They who are able have fled before the coming storm. The poor, the aged, the sick, are left in the hurry, to be killed by stray shots, or beaten down as the charge and counter-charge go over them. 4. The ripening grain is trampled down; the garden is trodden into a black mud; the fruit-trees, bending beneath their luscious load, are shattered by the cannon-shot. Churches and private dwellings are used as fortresses, and ruined in the con flict. Barns and stack-yards catch fire, and the conflagration spreads on all sides. At night the steed is stabled beside the altar; and the weary homicides of the day complete the wrecking of houses to make their lairs for slumber. The fires of the bivouac complete what the fires kindled by the battle have left unconsumed. 5. The surviving soldiers march on to act the same scenes over again elsewhere; and the remnant of the scattered inhabitants return to find the mangled bodies of those they had loved, amid the blackened ruins of homes; to mourn with more agonizing grief over the missing, of whose fate they are uncertain; to feel themselves bankrupts of the world's stores, and look from their children to the desolate fields and garners, and think of famine, and pestilence engendered by the rotting bodies of the half-buried myriads of slain. 6. The soldier marches on and on, inflicting and suffering as before. War is a continuance of battles an epidemic striding from place to place, more horrible than the typhus, pestilence or cholera, which not unfrequently follow in its train. The siege is an aggravation of the battle. The peaceful inhabitants of the beleaguered town are cooped up, and cannot fly the place of conflict. The mutual injuries inflicted by the assailant and assailed are aggravated - their wrath is more frenzied; then come the storm and the capture, and the riot and lustful excesses of the victor soldiery, striving to quench the drunkenness of blood in the drunkenness of wine. 7. The eccentric movements of war the marching and countermarching often repeat the blow on districts slowly recovering from the first. Between destruction and the wasteful consumption of the soldiery, poverty pervades the land. Hopeless of the future, hardened by the scenes of which he is a daily witness, perhaps goaded by revenge, the peasant becomes a plunderer and assassin. The horrible cruelties perpetrated by Spanish peasants on the French soldiers who fell into their power were the necessary consequences of war. 8. The families of the upper classes are dispersed; the discipline of the family circle is removed; a habit of living in the day |