Undazzled........................

A mosaic of William Tell at the Swiss National Museum

     The first descent of Freedom to our modern world, the first unfurling of her standard on the rocky pinnacle of Europe, is here celebrated in the style which it deserved.  There is no false tinsel-decoration about William Tell, no sickly refinement, no declamatory sentimentality.  All is downright, simple, and agreeable to Nature; yet all is adorned and purified and rendered beautiful, without losing its resemblance.  An air of freshness and wholesomeness breathes over it; we are among honest, inoffensive, yet fearless peasants, untainted by the vices, undazzled by the theories, of more complex and perverted conditions of society.
-Thomas Carlyle, the opening paragraph of his An Introductory Essay to Friedrich Schiller's 1804 play William Tell