THE WANDERER OF SWITZERLAND: INTRODUCTION. THE Wanderer of Switzerland and other Poems appeared in the spring of 1806. The volume had been leisurely printed in the Iris Newspaper Office, when the occasional want of better employment for the types afforded opportunity. It was begun without any definite aim, continued without a hope worth a fear of disappointment, and completed at the hazard of proving as ephemeral as the ordinary issues from the same press. Most of the contents were composed during this slow process. The leading poem itself was so produced, and substituted for one of a very different character, the sheets of which were cancelled to make room for it. Had this timely sacrifice of a favourite piece of juvenile extravagance not been made, it is hardly to be imagined that the speculation would have been other than a failure, though several of the smaller effusions, under the signature of Alcæus, having found admission into the Poetical Register of preceding years, had attracted honourable notice from critics, whose praise would have been sufficient, upon minds less depressed than the author's, to act as "Fame," "The spur that the clear spirit doth raise, The immediate origin of the first poem in the series was purely incidental. And here, having good precedents, even in this fastidious age, to avoid the idle circumlocution of telling a plain tale of one's self in the third person, I shall venture hereafter to use simple egotism in such preliminary remarks as a few of the following compositions may seem to warrant. In the year 1798 the independence of Switzerland had been virtually destroyed by France, though, till 1803, the cantons were nominally allowed to exercise home-jurisdiction. Bonaparte then interfered, and urged them to form "a constitution for the security of both countries;"—the wolf urging the lamb to frame a league for the equal security of the fold and the den! On the 13th of January, in the year last mentioned, the following paragraph was given in my Weekly Recapitulation of Facts and Rumours :-"In his letter to the Swiss deputies, Bonaparte demands an entire sacrifice of all their factious and selfish passions, and in the same breath he sets them a noble example of disinterested moderation, by peremptorily declaring, that he will not permit the establishment of any kind of government in the cantons, which may be hostile to his own, for Switzerland must in future be the open frontier of France." The law of the strongest of course prevailed, and the mountains were compelled to pass under the yoke; but of the brave mountaineers, multitudes, scorning submission, began immediately to emigrate to the neighbouring coun B tries, but more especially to America, whither, it was said at the time, thousands had transported themselves and their families into voluntary exile, with the view of establishing a Swiss colony in some unoccupied part of the far west. On the 17th of February, this circumstance was thus recorded, under the head above mentioned, in the Iris:"The heart of Switzerland is broken; and Liberty has been driven from the only sanctuary which she had found on the Continent. But the unconquered, the unconquerable offspring of Tell, disdaining to die slaves in the land where they were born free, are emigrating to America. There, in some region remote and romantic, where Solitude has never seen the face of man, nor Silence been startled by his voice, since the hour of creation, may the illustrious exiles find another Switzerland, another country rendered dear to them by the presence of Liberty. But even there, amidst mountains more awful, and forests more sombre than his own, when the echoes of the wilderness shall be awakened by the enchantment of that song which no Swiss in a foreign clime ever hears without fondly recalling the land of his nativity, and weeping with affection, how will the heart of the exile be wrung with home-sickness! and oh what a sickness of heart must that be, which arises not from hope deferred,' but from hope extinguished,—yet remembered!"" A friend, on reading these lines, said, "You should write a poem on the subject; it is a fine one." I answered, “It might be made the burden of a ballad;"- the idea instantly springing up, that a metrical dialogue, after the manner, and about the length, of the well-known fragmentary cento of "It was a friar of orders grey," &c., would be a fit medium to comprise and communicate the sentiments of the paragraph. The thought followed me, till I was compelled to turn round and follow it. The first part of the Wanderer of Switzerland was then struck out at a heat, and shown to my adviser; he approved of it, and encouraged me to proceed. The phantom, however, flitted before me from one unexpected change in the plan to another, till, as I proceeded, taking the course that opened, rather than that which had been premeditated, I was carried so far beyond the original conception, that the sole point which was aimed at in the commencement was the last that could be attained, at the close of the poem: for though I never lost sight of that object in the widest discursion by the way, it continued to recede as I pressed onward to approach it, like one of the Alpine peaks in the scene of the Song, resting, when first discovered, on the apparently near ring of the horizon, yet not to be reached till all the valleys, lakes, and eminences between, hidden among their own intersections, had been painfully, and step by step, traversed. The remaining contents of the volume were chiefly melancholy ruminations on personal sorrows and troubles, in which I had few to sympathise, and none to console; for, though these were, externally, the obvious consequences of youthful follies and misfortunes (see the General Preface), the main causes of my unexplained malady lay far deeper, and were identified with the conditions on which life itself was held by the sufferer. These morbid symptoms of a "mind diseased" were too tempting not to expose the compositions that betrayed them and their author to the heartless sarcasms of those critical inquisitors, who, in the exuberance of selfcomplacency, delight to torment the miserable, when it can be done wisely—that is, with impunity. The unpretending volume, however, thus cast upon the world, met with such early and fostering favour among strangers of another class, that the first edition of five hundred copies only being soon exhausted, my liberal booksellers, Messrs. Longman and Co., adopted the foundling work, and published a second of double that number; which going off as quickly as the former, they issued a third impression of two thousand copies within a few months of its first appearance. Then came a check which threatened nothing less than annihilation to my labours and my hopes. The Edinburgh Review of January, 1807, denounced the unfortunate volume in a style of such authoritative reprobation as no mortal verse could be expected to survive. Reviewers may be infallible in their critical judgments, and in their own courts they are so, of course, but when the most sagacious of them turn prophets, they show that they have as little claim to that character as poets themselves have, in these degenerate days, when it can no longer be said, as of old, that "the sacred name Of poet and of prophet is the same.' The writer of the article alluded to was pleased to say, in his plural capacity, "We are perfectly persuaded, that, in less than three years, nobody will know the name of the Wanderer of Switzerland, or of any other of the poems in this collection;" -a prognostic as true, probably, as any thing else in the entire paper, and worthy, it must be confessed, of honourable mention, on the appearance, in the present series, of a thirteenth edition of the same poems, three and thirty years after they had been left for execution, in less than a tenth of the time which has elapsed since the sentence of oblivion was recorded. Of this, the critic himself may have had some second-sighted anticipation, when, within eighteen months from the utterance of this oracle, a fourth impression (1500 copies) of the condemned volume was passing through the press whence the Edinburgh Review itself was issued; while, for several years afterwards, successive editions of that and other works from the same excommunicated quarter, were printed by Messrs. James Ballantyne and Co. And all these "feeble outrages" were committed, notwithstanding the tender mercy of the reviewer towards the culprit, so amiably exemplified in his forbearance to do justice, till the third offence became "too alarming to be passed over," according to the following very frank acknowledgment in the preamble to the critique : : "We took compassion upon Mr. Montgomery, on his first appearance, conceiving him to be some slender youth of seventeen, intoxicated with weak tea, and the praises of sentimental ensigns, and other provincial literati, and tempted, in that situation, to commit a feeble outrage on the public, of which the recollection would be a sufficient punishment. A third edition, however, is too alarming to be passed over in silence; and though we are perfectly persuaded, that, in less than three years, nobody will know the name of the Wanderer of Switzerland, or of any of the other poems in this collection, still we think ourselves called upon to interfere, to prevent, in as far as in us lies, the mischief that may arise from the intermediate prevalence of so distressing an epidemic. It is hard to say what numbers of ingenuous youth may be led to expose themselves in public, by the success of this performance, or what addition may be made in a few months to that great sinking fund of bad taste, which is daily wearing down the debt which we have so long owed to the classical writers of antiquity."-Edinburgh Review, No. XVIII. January, 1807. When a giant of twenty-horse power undertakes "To break a butterfly upon a wheel," it is ten to one but he misses his aim, and stuns his own arm by the violence of the first stroke; while the silly insect flits away, to the delight of, "it is hard to say, what numbers of ingenuous youth," who have been "led to expose themselves in public," on so august an occasion, irreverently shouting, "Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur." PUBLIUS SYRUS. The historical facts alluded to in the following narrative may be found in the Supplement to Coxe's Travels in Switzerland, Planta's History of the Helvetic Confederacy, and Zschokke's Invasion of Switzerland by the French in 1798, translated by Dr. Aikin. THE WANDERER OF SWITZERLAND. PART I. A Wanderer of Switzerland and his Family, consisting of his Wife, his Daughter, and her young Children, emigrating from their Country, in consequence of its Subjugation by the French, in 1798, arrive at the Cottage of a Shepherd, beyond the Frontiers, where they are hospitably entertained. Shep. "WANDERER, whither dost thou roam? Wanderer. "In the sunset of my day, Stranger, I have lost my home : Here mine arms a wife enfold, These her infants-O their Sire, Shep. "SWITZERLAND then gave thee birth ?" |