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Title: Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X)

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SEEING EUROPE WITH FAMOUS AUTHORS, VOLUME V

GERMANY, AUSTRIA-HUNGARY, AND SWITZERLAND, PART ONE

Selected and Edited, with Introductions, etc., by

FRANCIS W. HALSEY

Editor of "Great Epochs in American History"
Associate Editor of "The World's Famous Orations"
and of "The Best of the World's Classics," etc.


IN TEN VOLUMES

ILLUSTRATED

1914





[Illustration: BERLIN: PANORAMA FROM THE TOWER OF THE TOWN HALL]






INTRODUCTION TO VOLUMES V AND VI

Germany, Austria-Hungary and Switzerland



The tourist's direct route to Germany is by ships that go to the two
great German ports--Bremen and Hamburg, whence fast steamer trains
proceed to Berlin and other interior cities. One may also land at
Antwerp or Rotterdam, and proceed thence by fast train into Germany.
Either of these routes continued takes one to Austria. Ships by the
Mediterranean route landing at Genoa or Trieste, provide another way for
reaching either country. In order to reach Switzerland, the tourist has
many well-worn routes available.

As with England and France, so with Germany--our earliest information
comes from a Roman writer, Julius Caesar; but in the case of Germany,
this information has been greatly amplified by a later and noble
treatise from the pen of Tacitus. Tacitus paints a splendid picture of
the domestic virtues and personal valor of these tribes, holding them
up as examples that might well be useful to his countrymen. Caesar found
many Teutonic tribes, not only in the Rhine Valley, but well established
in lands further west and already Gallic.

By the third century, German tribes had formed themselves into
federations--the Franks, Alemanni, Frisians and Saxons. The Rhine
Valley, after long subjection to the Romans, had acquired houses,
temples, fortresses and roads such as the Romans always built. Caesar
had found many evidences of an advanced state of society. Antiquarians
of our day, exploring German graves, discover signs of it in splendid
weapons of war and domestic utensils buried with the dead. Monolithic
sarcophagi have been found which give eloquent testimony of the
absorption by them of Roman culture. Western Germany, in fact, had
become, in the third century, a well-ordered and civilized land.
Christianity was well established there. In general the country compared
favorably with Roman England, but it was less advanced than Roman Gaul.
Centers of that Romanized German civilization, that were destined ever
afterward to remain important centers of German life, are Augsburg,
Strasburg, Worms, Speyer, Bonn and Cologne.

It was after the formation of the tribal federations that the great
migratory movement from Germany set in. This gave to Gaul a powerful
race in the Franks, from whom came Clovis and the other Merovingians; to
Gaul also it gave Burgundians, and to England perhaps the strongest
element in her future stock of men--the Saxons. Further east soon set in
another world-famous migration, which threatened at times to dominate
all Teutonic people--the Goths, Huns and Vandals of the Black and
Caspian Sea regions. Thence they prest on to Italy and Spain, where the
Goths founded and long maintained new and thriving states on the ruins
of the old.

Surviving these migrations, and serving to restore something like order
to Central Europe, there now rose into power in France, under Clovis and
Charlemagne, and spread their sway far across the Rhine, the great
Merovingian and Carlovingian dynasties. Charlemagne's empire came to
embrace in central Europe a region extending east of the Rhine as far as
Hungary, and from north to south from the German ocean to the Alps. When
Charlemagne, in 800, received from the Pope that imperial crown, which
was to pass in continuous line to his successors for a thousand years,
Germany and France were component parts of the same state, a condition
never again to exist, except in part, and briefly, under Napoleon.

The tangled and attenuated thread of German history from Charlemagne's
time until now can not be unfolded here, but it makes one of the great
chronicles in human history, with its Conrads and Henrys, its
Maximilian, its Barbarossa, its Charles V., its Thirty Years' War, its
great Frederick of Prussia, its struggle with Napoleon, its rise through
Prussia under Bismarck, its war of 1870 with France, its new Empire,
different alike in structure and in reality from the one called Holy and
called Roman, and the wonderful commercial and industrial progress of
our century.

Out of Charlemagne's empire came the empire of Austria. Before his time,
the history of the Austro-Hungarian lands is one of early tribal life,
followed by conquest under the later Roman emperors, and then the
migratory movements of its own people and of other people across its
territory, between the days of Attila and the Merovingians. Its very
name (Oesterreich) indicates its origin as a frontier territory, an
outpost in the east for the great empire Charlemagne had built up. Not
until the sixteenth century did Austria become a power of first rank in
Europe. Hapsburgs had long ruled it, as they still do, and as they have
done for more than six centuries, but the greatest of all their
additions to power and dominion came through Mary of Burgundy, who,
seeking refuge from Louis XI. of France, after her father's death,
married Maximilian of Austria. Out of that marriage came, in two
generations, possession by Austria of the Netherlands, through Mary's
grandson, Charles V., Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain. For years
afterward, the Hapsburgs remained the most illustrious house in Europe.
The empire's later fortunes are a story of grim struggle with
Protestants, Frederick the Great, the Ottoman Turks, Napoleon, the
revolutionists of 1848, and Prussia.

The story of Switzerland in its beginnings is not unlike that of other
European lands north of Italy. The Romans civilized the country--built
houses, fortresses and roads. Roman roads crossed the Alps, one of them
going, as it still goes, over the Great St. Bernard. Then came the
invaders--Burgundians, Alemanni, Ostrogoths and Huns. North Switzerland
became the permanent home of Alemanni, or Germans, whose descendants
still survive there, around Zuerich. Burgundians settled in the western
part which still remains French in speech, and a part of it French
politically, including Chamouni and half of Mont Blanc. Ostrogoths
founded homes in the southern parts, and descendants of theirs still
remain there, speaking Italian, or a sort of surviving Latin called
Romansch.

After these immigrations most parts of the country were subdued by the
Merovingian Franks, by whom Christianity was introduced and monasteries
founded. With the break-up of Charlemagne's empire, a part of
Switzerland was added to a German duchy, and another part to Burgundy.
Its later history is a long and moving record of grim struggles by a
brave and valiant people. In our day the Swiss have become industrially
one of the world's successful races, and their country the one in which
wealth is probably more equally distributed than anywhere else in
Europe, if not in America.

F.W.H.




CONTENTS OF VOLUME V

Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Switzerland--Part One


I. THE RHINE VALLEY

INTRODUCTION TO VOLS. V AND VI--By the Editor

IN HISTORY AND ROMANCE--By Victor Hugo

FROM BONN TO MAYENCE--By Bayard Taylor

COLOGNE--By Victor Hugo

ROUND ABOUT COBLENZ--By Lady Blanche Murphy

BINGEN AND MAYENCE--By Victor Hugo

FRANKFORT-ON-MAIN--By Bayard Taylor

HEIDELBERG--By Bayard Taylor

STRASBURG--By Harriet Beecher Stowe

FREIBURG AND THE BLACK FOREST--By Bayard Taylor


II. NUREMBERG

AS A MEDIEVAL CITY--By Cecil Headlam

ITS CHURCHES AND THE CITADEL--By Thomas Frognall Dibdin

NUREMBERG TO-DAY--By Cecil Headlarn

WALLS AND OTHER FORTIFICATIONS--By Cecil Headlam

ALBERT DUERER--By Cecil Headlam


III. OTHER BAVARIAN CITIES

MUNICH--By Bayard Taylor

AUGSBURG--By Thomas Frognall Dibdin

RATISBON--By Thomas Frognall Dibdin


IV. BERLIN AND ELSEWHERE

A LOOK AT THE GERMAN CAPITAL--By Theophile Gautier

CHARLOTTENBURG--By Harriet Beecher Stowe

LEIPZIG AND DRESDEN--By Bayard Taylor

WEIMAR IN GOETHE'S DAY--By Madame De Stael

ULM--By Thomas Frognall Dibdin

AIX-LA-CHAPELLE AND CHARLEMAGNE'S TOMB--By Victor Hugo

THE HANSEATIC LEAGUE--By James Howell

HAMBURG--By Theophile Gautier

SCHLESWIG--By Theophile Gautier

LUEBECK--By Theophile Gautier

HELIGOLAND--By William George Black


V. VIENNA

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE CAPITAL--By Bayard Taylor

ST. STEPHEN'S CATHEDRAL--By Thomas Frognall Dibdin

THE BELVEDERE PALACE--By Thomas Frognall Dibdin

SCHOENBRUNN AND THE PRATER--By Thomas Frognall Dibdin


VI. HUNGARY

A GLANCE AT THE COUNTRY--By H. Tornai de Koever

BUDAPEST--By H. Tornai de Koever

(_Hungary continued in Vol. VI_)




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME V


A PANORAMA OF BERLIN FROM THE TOWN HALL

COLOGNE CATHEDRAL

COLOGNE CATHEDRAL BEFORE THE SPIRES WERE COMPLETED

BINGEN-ON-THE RHINE

NUREMBERG CASTLE

STOLZENFELS CASTLE ON THE RHINE

WIESBADEN

STRASBURG CATHEDRAL

STRASBURG

FRAUENKIRCHE, MUNICH

DOOR OF STRASBURG CATHEDRAL

STRASBURG CLOCK

GOETHE'S HOUSE, WEIMAR

SCHILLER'S HOUSE, WEIMAR

BERLIN: UNTER DEN LINDEN

BERLIN: THE BRANDENBURG GATE

BERLIN: THE ROYAL CASTLE AND EMPEROR WILLIAM BRIDGE

BERLIN: THE WHITE HALL IN THE ROYAL CASTLE

BERLIN: THE NATIONAL GALLERY AND FREDERICK'S BRIDGE

BERLIN: THE GENDARMENMARKT

THE COLUMN OF VICTORY, BERLIN

THE MAUSOLEUM AT CHARLOTTENBURG

THE NEW PALACE AT POTSDAM

THE CASTLE OF SANS SOUCI, POTSDAM

THE CATHEDRAL OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE--TOMB OF CHARLEMAGNE

SCHOENBRUNN, VIENNA

SALZBURG, AUSTRIA

[Illustration: COLOGNE CATHEDRAL]

[Illustration: COLOGNE CATHEDRAL (Before the spires were completed, as
shown in a photograph taken in 1877)]

[Illustration: BINGEN ON THE RHINE]

[Illustration: NUREMBERG CASTLE]

[Illustration: STOLZENFELS CASTLE ON THE RHINE]

[Illustration: WIESBADEN]

[Illustration: STRASSBURG CATHEDRAL]

[Illustration: STRASSBURG AND THE CATHEDRAL]

[Illustration: THE FRAUENKIRCHE, MUNICH]

[Illustration: THE DOOR OF STRASSBURG CATHEDRAL]

[Illustration: THE STRASSBURG CLOCK]

[Illustration: GOETHE'S HOUSE IN WEIMAR]

[Illustration: SCHILLER'S HOUSE IN WEIMAR]




I

THE RHINE VALLEY




IN HISTORY AND ROMANCE[A]

BY VICTOR HUGO


Of all rivers, I prefer the Rhine. It is now a year, when passing the
bridge of boats at Kehl, since I first saw it. I remember that I felt a
certain respect, a sort of adoration, for this old, this classic stream.
I never think of rivers--those great works of Nature, which are also
great in History--without emotion.

I remember the Rhone at Valserine; I saw it in 1825, in a pleasant
excursion to Switzerland, which is one of the sweet, happy recollections
of my early life. I remember with what noise, with what ferocious
bellowing, the Rhone precipitated itself into the gulf while the frail
bridge upon which I was standing was shaking beneath my feet. Ah well!
since that time, the Rhone brings to my mind the idea of a tiger--the
Rhine, that of a lion.

The evening on which I saw the Rhine for the first time, I was imprest
with the same idea. For several minutes I stood contemplating this proud
and noble river--violent, but not furious; wild, but still majestic. It
was swollen, and was magnificent in appearance, and was washing with its
yellow mane, or, as Boileau says, its "slimy beard," the bridge of
boats. Its two banks were lost in the twilight, and tho its roaring was
loud, still there was tranquillity.

The Rhine is unique: it combines the qualities of every river. Like the
Rhone, it is rapid; broad like the Loire; encased, like the Meuse;
serpentine, like the Seine; limpid and green, like the Somme;
historical, like the Tiber; royal like the Danube; mysterious, like the
Nile; spangled with gold, like an American river; and like a river of
Asia, abounding with fantoms and fables.

From historical records we find that the first people who took
possession of the banks of the Rhine were the half-savage Celts, who
were afterward named Gauls by the Romans. When Rome was in its glory,
Caesar crossed the Rhine, and shortly afterward the whole of the river
was under the jurisdiction of his empire. When the Twenty-second Legion
returned from the siege of Jerusalem, Titus sent it to the banks of the
Rhine, where it continued the work of Martius Agrippa. After Trajan and
Hadrian came Julian, who erected a fortress upon the confluence of the
Rhine and the Moselle; then Valentinian, who built a number of castles.
Thus, in a few centuries, Roman colonies, like an immense chain, linked
the whole of the Rhine.

At length the time arrived when Rome was to assume another aspect. The
incursions of the northern hordes were eventually too frequent and too
powerful for Rome; so, about the sixth century, the banks of the Rhine
were strewed with Roman ruins, as at present with feudal ones.

Charlemagne cleared away the rubbish, built fortresses, and opposed the
German hordes; but, notwithstanding all that he did, notwithstanding his
desire to do more, Rome died, and the physiognomy of the Rhine was
changed.

The sixteenth century approached; in the fourteenth the Rhine witnessed
the invention of artillery; and on its bank, at Strassburg, a
printing-office was first established. In 1400 the famous cannon,
fourteen feet in length, was cast at Cologne; and in 1472 Vindelin de
Spire printed his Bible. A new world was making its appearance; and,
strange to say, it was upon the banks of the Rhine that those two
mysterious tools with which God unceasingly works out the civilization
of man--the catapult and the book--war and thought--took a new form.

The Rhine, in the destinies of Europe, has a sort of providential
signification. It is the great moat which divides the north from the
south. The Rhine for thirty ages, has seen the forms and reflected the
shadows of almost all the warriors who tilled the old continent with
that share which they call sword. Caesar crossed the Rhine in going from
the south; Attila crossed it when descending from the north. It was here
that Clovis gained the battle of Tolbiac; and that Charlemagne and
Napoleon figured. Frederick Barbarossa, Rudolph of Hapsburg, and
Frederick the First, were great, victorious, and formidable when here.
For the thinker, who is conversant with history, two great eagles are
perpetually hovering ever the Rhine--that of the Roman legions, and the
eagle of the French regiments.

The Rhine--that noble flood, which the Romans named "Superb," bore at
one time upon its surface bridges of boats, over which the armies of
Italy, Spain, and France poured into Germany, and which, at a later
date, were made use of by the hordes of barbarians when rushing into the
ancient Roman world; at another, on its surface it floated peaceably the
fir-trees of Murg and of Saint Gall, the porphyry and the marble of
Bale, the salt of Karlshall, the leather of Stromberg, the quicksilver
of Lansberg, the wine of Johannisberg, the slates of Coab, the cloth and
earthenware of Wallendar, the silks and linens of Cologne. It
majestically performs its double function of flood of war and flood of
peace, having, without interruption, upon the ranges of hills which
embank the most notable portion of its course, oak-trees on one side and
vine-trees on the other--signifying strength and joy.

[Footnote A: From "The Rhine." Translated by D.M. Aird.]




FROM BONN TO MAYENCE[A]

BY BAYARD TAYLOR


I was glad when we were really in motion on the swift Rhine, and nearing
the chain of mountains that rose up before us. We passed Godesberg on
the right, while on our left was the group of the seven mountains which
extend back from the Drachenfels to the Wolkenberg, or "Castle of the
Clouds." Here we begin to enter the enchanted land. The Rhine sweeps
around the foot of the Drachenfels, while, opposite, the precipitous
rock of Rolandseck, crowned with the castle of the faithful knight,
looks down upon the beautiful island of Nonnenwerth, the white walls of
the convent still gleaming through the trees as they did when the
warrior's weary eyes looked upon them for the last time. I shall never
forget the enthusiasm with which I saw this scene in the bright, warm
sunlight, the rough crags softened in the haze which filled the
atmosphere, and the wild mountains springing up in the midst of
vineyards and crowned with crumbling towers filled with the memories of
a thousand years.

After passing Andernach we saw in the distance the highlands of the
middle Rhine--which rise above Coblentz, guarding the entrance to its
scenery--and the mountains of the Moselle. They parted as we approached;
from the foot shot up the spires of Coblentz, and the battlements of
Ehrenbreitstein, crowning the mountain opposite, grew larger and
broader. The air was slightly hazy, and the clouds seemed laboring among
the distant mountains to raise a storm. As we came opposite the mouth of
the Moselle and under the shadow of the mighty fortress, I gazed up with
awe at its massive walls. Apart from its magnitude and almost
impregnable situation on a perpendicular rock, it is filled with the
recollections of history and hallowed by the voice of poetry. The scene
went past like a panorama, the bridge of boats opened, the city glided
behind us, and we entered the highlands again.

Above Coblentz almost every mountain has a ruin and a legend. One feels
everywhere the spirit of the past, and its stirring recollections come
back upon the mind with irresistible force. I sat upon the deck the
whole afternoon as mountains, towns and castles passed by on either
side, watching them with a feeling of the most enthusiastic enjoyment.
Every place was familiar to me in memory, and they seemed like friends I
had long communed with in spirit and now met face to face. The English
tourists with whom the deck was covered seemed interested too, but in a
different manner. With Murray's Handbook open in their hands, they sat
and read about the very towns and towers they were passing, scarcely
lifting their eyes to the real scenes, except now and then to observe
that it was "very nice."

As we passed Boppart, I sought out the inn of the "Star," mentioned in
"Hyperion;" there was a maiden sitting on the steps who might have been
Paul Flemming's fair boat-woman. The clouds which had here gathered
among the hills now came over the river, and the rain cleared the deck
of its crowd of admiring tourists. As we were approaching Lorelei Berg,
I did not go below, and so enjoyed some of the finest scenery on the
Rhine alone. The mountains approach each other at this point, and the
Lorelei rock rises up for four hundred and forty feet from the water.
This is the haunt of the water nymph Lorelei, whose song charmed the ear
of the boatman while his bark was dashed to pieces on the rocks below.
It is also celebrated for its remarkable echo. As we passed between the
rocks, a guard, who has a little house on the roadside, blew a flourish
on his bugle, which was instantly answered by a blast from the rocky
battlements of Lorelei.

The sun came out of the clouds as we passed Oberwesel, with its tall
round tower, and the light shining through the ruined arches of
Schonberg castle made broad bars of light and shade in the still misty
air. A rainbow sprang up out of the Rhine and lay brightly on the
mountain-side, coloring vineyard and crag in the most singular beauty,
while its second reflection faintly arched like a glory above the high
summits in the bed of the river were the seven countesses of Schonberg
turned into seven rocks for their cruelty and hard-heartedness toward
the knights whom their beauty had made captive. In front, at a little
distance, was the castle of Pfalz, in the middle of the river, and from
the heights above Caub frowned the crumbling citadel of Gutenfels.
Imagine all this, and tell me if it is not a picture whose memory should
last a lifetime.

We came at last to Bingen, the southern gate of the highlands. Here, on
an island in the middle of the stream, is the old mouse-tower where
Bishop Hatto of Mayence was eaten up by the rats for his wicked deeds.
Passing Ruedesheim and Geisenheim--celebrated for their wines--at sunset,
we watched the varied shore in the growing darkness, till like a line of
stars across the water we saw before us the bridge of Mayence.

[Footnote A: From "Views Afoot." Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.]




COLOGNE[A]

BY VICTOR HUGO.


The sun had set when we reached Cologne. I gave my luggage to a porter,
with orders to carry it to a hotel at Duez, a little town on the
opposite side of the Rhine; and directed my steps toward the cathedral.
Rather than ask my way, I wandered up and down the narrow streets, which
night had all but obscured. At last I entered a gateway leading to a
court, and came out on an open square--dark and deserted. A magnificent
spectacle now presented itself. Before me, in the fantastic light of a
twilight sky, rose, in the midst of a group of low houses, an enormous
black mass, studded with pinnacles and belfries. A little farther was
another, not quite so broad as the first, but higher; a kind of square
fortress, flanked at its angles with four long detached towers, having
on its summit something resembling a huge feather. On approaching, I
discovered that it was the cathedral of Cologne.

What appeared like a large feather was a crane, to which sheets of lead
were appended, and which, from its workable appearance, indicated to
passers-by that this unfinished temple may one day be completed; and
that the dream of Engelbert de Berg, which was realized under Conrad de
Hochsteden, may, in an age or two, be the greatest cathedral in the
world. This incomplete Iliad sees Homers in futurity. The church was
shut. I surveyed the steeples, and was startled at their dimensions.
What I had taken for towers are the projections of the buttresses. Tho
only the first story is completed, the building is already nearly as
high as the towers of Notre Dame at Paris. Should the spire, according
to the plan, be placed upon this monstrous trunk, Strasburg would be,
comparatively speaking, small by its side.[B] It has always struck me
that nothing resembles ruin more than an unfinished edifice. Briars,
saxifrages, and pellitories--indeed, all weeds that root themselves in
the crevices and at the base of old buildings--have besieged these
venerable walls. Man only constructs what Nature in time destroys.

All was quiet; there was no one near to break the prevailing silence. I
approached the facade, as near as the gate would permit me, and heard
the countless shrubs gently rustling in the night breeze. A light which
appeared at a neighboring window, cast its rays upon a group of
exquisite statues--angels and saints, reading or preaching, with a large
open book before them. Admirable prologue for a church, which is nothing
else than the Word made marble, brass or stone! Swallows have fearlessly
taken up their abode here, and their simple yet curious masonry
contrasts strangely with the architecture of the building. This was my
first visit to the cathedral of Cologne. The dome of Cologne, when seen
by day, appeared to me to have lost a little of its sublimity; it no
longer had what I call the twilight grandeur that the evening lends to
huge objects; and I must say that the cathedral of Beauvais, which is
scarcely known, is not inferior, either in size or in detail, to the
cathedral of Cologne.

The Hotel-de-Ville, situated near the cathedral, is one of those
singular edifices which have been built at different times, and which
consist of all styles of architecture seen in ancient buildings. The
mode in which these edifices have been built forms rather an interesting
study. Nothing is regular--no fixt plan has been drawn out--all has been
built as necessity required. Thus the Hotel-de-Ville, which has,
probably, some Roman cave near its foundation, was, in 1250, only a
structure similar to those of our edifices built with pillars. For the
convenience of the night-watchman, and in order to sound the alarum, a
steeple was required, and in the fourteenth century a tower was built.
Under Maximilian a taste for elegant structures was everywhere spread,
and the bishops of Cologne, deeming it essential to dress their
city-house in new raiment, engaged an Italian architect, a pupil,
probably, of old Michael Angelo, and a French sculptor, who adjusted on
the blackened facade of the thirteenth century a triumphant and
magnificent porch. A few years expired, and they stood sadly in want of
a promenade by the side of the Registry. A back court was built, and
galleries erected, which were sumptuously enlivened by heraldry and
bas-reliefs. These I had the pleasure of seeing; but, in a few years, no
person will have the same gratification, for, without anything being
done to prevent it, they are fast falling into ruins. At last, under
Charles the Fifth, a large room for sales and for the assemblies of the
citizens was required, and a tasteful building of stone and brick was
added. I went up to the belfry; and under a gloomy sky, which harmonized
with the edifice and with my thoughts, I saw at my feet the whole of
this admirable town.

From Thurmchen to Bayenthurme, the town, which extends upward of a
league on the banks of the river, displays a whole host of windows and
facades. In the midst of roofs, turrets and gables, the summits of
twenty-four churches strike the eye, all of different styles, and each
church, from its grandeur, worthy of the name of cathedral. If we
examine the town in detail, all is stir, all is life. The bridge is
crowded with passengers and carriages; the river is covered with sails.
Here and there clumps of trees caress, as it were, the houses blackened
by time; and the old stone hotels of the fifteenth century, with their
long frieze of sculptured flowers, fruit and leaves, upon which the
dove, when tired, rests itself, relieve the monotony of the slate roofs
and brick fronts which surround them.

Round this great town--mercantile from its industry, military from its
position, marine from its river--is a vast plain that borders Germany,
which the Rhine crosses at different places, and is crowned on the
northeast by historic eminences--that wonderful nest of legends and
traditions, called the "Seven Mountains." Thus Holland and its commerce,
Germany and its poetry--like the two great aspects of the human mind,
the positive and the ideal--shed their light upon the horizon of
Cologne; a city of business and of meditation.

After descending from the belfry, I stopt in the yard before a handsome
porch of the Renaissance, the second story of which is formed of a
series of small triumphal arches, with inscriptions. The first is
dedicated to Caesar; the second to Augustus; the third to Agrippa, the
founder of Cologne; the fourth to Constantine, the Christian emperor;
the fifth to Justinian, the great legislator; and the sixth to
Maximilian. Upon the facade, the poetic sculpture has chased three
bas-reliefs, representing the three lion-combatants, Milo of Crotona,
Pepin-le-Bref, and Daniel. At the two extremities he has placed Milo of
Crotona, attacking the lions by strength of body; and Daniel subduing
the lions by the power of mind. Between these is Pepin-le-Bref,
conquering his ferocious antagonist with that mixture of moral and
physical strength which distinguishes the soldier. Between pure strength
and pure thought, is courage; between the athlete and the prophet--the
hero.

Pepin, sword in hand, has plunged his left arm, which is enveloped in
his mantle, into the mouth of the lion; the animal stands, with extended
claws, in that attitude which in heraldry represents the lion rampant.
Pepin attacks it bravely and vanquishes. Daniel is standing motionless,
his arms by his side, and his eyes lifted up to Heaven, the lions
lovingly rolling at his feet. As for Milo of Crotona, he defends himself
against the lion, which is in the act of devouring him. His blind
presumption has put too much faith in muscle, in corporeal strength.
These three bas-reliefs contain a world of meaning; the last produces a
powerful effect. It is Nature avenging herself on the man whose only
faith is in brute force....

In the evening, as the stars were shining, I took a walk upon the side
of the river opposite to Cologne. Before me was the whole town, with its
innumerable steeples figuring in detail upon the pale western sky. To my
left rose, like the giant of Cologne, the high spire of St. Martin's,
with its two towers; and, almost in front, the somber apsed cathedral,
with its many sharp-pointed spires, resembling a monstrous hedgehog, the
crane forming the tail, and near the base two lights, which appeared
like two eyes sparkling with fire. Nothing disturbed the stillness of
the night but the rustling of the waters at my feet, the heavy tramp of
a horse's hoofs upon the bridge, and the sound of a blacksmith's hammer.
A long stream of fire that issued from the forge caused the adjoining
windows to sparkle; then, as if hastening to its opposite element,
disappeared in the water.

[Footnote A: From "The Rhine." Translated by D.M. Aird.]

[Footnote B: One of the illustrations that accompany this volume shows
the spires in their completed state.]




ROUND ABOUT COBLENZ[A]

BY LADY BLANCHE MURPHY


Coblenz is the place which many years ago gave me my first associations
with the Rhine. From a neighboring town we often drove to Coblenz, and
the wide, calm flow of the river, the low, massive bridge of boats and
the commonplace outskirts of a busy city contributed to make up a very
different picture from that of the poetic "castled" Rhine of German song
and English ballad. The old town has, however, many beauties, tho its
military character looks out through most of them, and reminds us that
the Mosel city (for it originally stood only on that river, and then
crept up to the Rhine), tho a point of union in Nature, has been for
ages, so far as mankind was concerned, a point of defense and watching.
The great fortress, a German Gibraltar, hangs over the river and sets
its teeth in the face of the opposite shore; all the foreign element in
the town is due to the deposits made there by troubles in other
countries, revolution and war sending their exiles, emigres and
prisoners. The history of the town is only a long military record, from
the days of the archbishops of Treves, to whom it was subject....

There is the old "German house" by the bank of the Mosel, a building
little altered outwardly since the fourteenth century, now used as a
food-magazine for the troops. The church of St. Castor commemorates a
holy hermit who lived and preached to the heathen in the eighth century,
and also covers the grave and monument of the founder of the "Mouse" at
Wellmich, the warlike Kuno of Falkenstein, Archbishop of Treves. The
Exchange, once a court of justice, has changed less startlingly, and its
proportions are much the same as of old; and besides these there are
other buildings worth noticing, tho not so old, and rather distinguished
by the men who lived and died there, or were born there, such as
Metternich, than by architectural beauties. Such houses there are in
every old city. They do not invite you to go in and admire them; every
tourist you meet does not ask you how you liked them or whether you saw
them. They are homes, and sealed to you as such, but they are the shell
of the real life of the country; and they have somehow a charm and a
fascination that no public building or show-place can have. Goethe, who
turned his life-experiences into poetry, has told us something of one
such house not far from Coblenz, in the village of Ehrenbreitstein,
beneath the fortress, and which in familiar Coblenz parlance goes by the
name of "The Valley"--the house of Sophie de Laroche. The village is
also Clement Brentano's birthplace.

The oldest of German cities, Treves (or in German Trier), is not too far
to visit on our way up the Mosel Valley, whose Celtic inhabitants of old
gave the Roman legions so much trouble. But Rome ended by conquering,
by means of her civilization as well as by her arms, and Augusta
Trevirorum, tho claiming a far higher antiquity than Rome herself,
and still bearing an inscription to that effect on the old
council-house--now called the Red House and used as a hotel--became, as
Ausonius condescendingly remarked, a second Rome, adorned with baths,
gardens, temples, theaters and all that went to make up an imperial
capital. As in Venice everything precious seems to have come from
Constantinople, so in Trier most things worthy of note date from the
days of the Romans; tho, to tell the truth, few of the actual buildings
do, no matter how classic is their look. The style of the Empire
outlived its sway, and doubtless symbolized to the inhabitants their
traditions of a higher standard of civilization.

The Porta Nigra, for instance--called Simeon's Gate at present--dates
really from the days of the first Merovingian kings, but it looks like a
piece of the Colosseum, with its rows of arches in massive red
sandstone, the stones held together by iron clamps, and its low,
immensely strong double gateway, reminding one of the triumphal arches
in the Forum at Rome. The history of the transformation of this gateway
is curious. First a fortified city gate, standing in a correspondingly
fortified wall, it became a dilapidated granary and storehouse in the
Middle Ages, when one of the archbishops gave leave to Simeon, a
wandering hermit from Syracuse in Sicily, to take up his abode there;
and another turned it into a church dedicated to this saint, tho of this
change few traces remain. Finally, it has become a national museum of
antiquities. The amphitheater is a genuine Roman work, wonderfully well
preserved; and genuine enough were the Roman games it has witnessed,
for, if we are to believe tradition, a thousand Frankish prisoners of
war were here given in one day to the wild beasts by the Emperor
Constantine. Christian emperors beautified the basilica that stood where
the cathedral now is, and the latter itself has some basilica-like
points about it, tho, being the work of fifteen centuries, it bears the
stamp of successive styles upon its face....

The Mosel has but few tributary streams of importance; its own course is
as winding, as wild and as romantic as that of the Rhine itself. The
most interesting part of the very varied scenery of this river is not
the castles, the antique towns, the dense woods or the teeming vineyards
lining rocks where a chamois could hardly stand--all this it has in
common with the Rhine--but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes
in ancient craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes
strewn with dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are
like the Iceland gorges, the poor, starved villages and the
extraordinary rusticity, not to say coarseness, of the inhabitants. This
grotesque, interesting country--unique, I believe, on the continent of
Europe--lies in a small triangle between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier
and the Schiefer hills of the Lower Rhine; it goes by the names of the
High Eifel, with the High Acht, the Kellberg and the Nurburg; the upper
(Vorder) Eifel, with Gerolstein, a ruined castle, and Daun, a pretty
village; and the Snow-Eifel (Schnee Eifel), contracted by the speech of
the country into Schneifel.

The last is the most curious, the most dreary, the least visited. Walls
of sharp rocks rise up over eight hundred feet high round some of its
sunken lakes--one is called the Powder Lake--and the level above this
abyss stretches out in moors and desolate downs, peopled with herds of
lean sheep, and marked here and there by sepulchral, gibbet-looking
signposts, shaped like a rough T and set in a heap of loose stones. It
is a great contrast to turn aside from this landscape and look on the
smiling villages and pretty wooded scenery of the valley of the Mosel
proper; the long lines of handsome, healthy women washing their linen on
the banks; the old ferryboats crossing by the help of antique
chain-and-rope contrivances; the groves of old trees, with broken walls
and rude shrines, reminding one of Southern Italy and her olives and
ilexes; and the picturesque houses, in Kochem, in Daun, in Travbach, in
Bernkastel, which, however untiring one may be as a sightseer, hardly
warrant one as a writer to describe and re-describe their beauties.
Kluesserath, however, we must mention, because its straggling figure has
given rise to a local proverb--"As long as Kluesserath;" and Neumagen,
because of the legend of Constantine, who is said to have seen the cross
of victory in the heavens at this place, as well as at Sinzig on the
Rhine, and, as the more famous legend tells us, at the Pons Milvium over
the Tiber.

The last glance we take at the beauties of this neighborhood is from the
mouth of the torrent-river Eltz as it dashes into the Eifel, washing the
rock on which stands the castle of Eltz. The building and the family are
an exception in the history of these lands; both exist to this day, and
are prosperous and undaunted, notwithstanding all the efforts of
enemies, time and circumstances to the contrary. The strongly-turreted
wall runs from the castle till it loses itself in the rock, and the
building has a home-like inhabited, complete look; which, in virtue of
the quaint irregularity and magnificent natural position of the castle,
standing guard over the foaming Eltz, does not take from its romantic
appearance, as preservation or restoration too often does.

Not far from Coblenz, and past the island of Nonnenwerth, is the old
tenth-century castle of Sayn, which stood until the Thirty Years' War,
and below it, quiet, comfortable, large, but unpretending, lies the new
house of the family of Sayn-Wittgenstein, built in the year 1848. As we
push our way down the Rhine we soon come to the little peaceful town of
Neuwied, a sanctuary for persecuted Flemings and others of the Low
Countries, gathered here by the local sovereign, Count Frederick III.
The little brook that gives its name to the village runs softly into the
Rhine under a rustic bridge and amid murmuring rushes, while beyond it
the valley gets narrower, rocks begin to rise over the Rhine banks, and
we come to Andernach.

Andernach is the Rocky Gate of the Rhine, and if its scenery were not
enough, its history, dating from Roman times, would make it interesting.
However, of its relics we can only mention, in passing, the parish
church with its four towers, all of tufa, the dungeons under the
council-house, significantly called the "Jew's bath," and the old
sixteenth-century contrivances for loading Rhine boats with the
millstones in which the town still drives a fair trade. At the mouth of
the Brohl we meet the volcanic region again, and farther up the valley
through which this stream winds come upon the retired little
watering-place of Toennistein, a favorite goal of the Dutch, with its
steel waters; and Wassenach, with what we may well call its dust-baths,
stretching for miles inland, up hills full of old craters, and leaving
us only at the entrance of the beech-woods that have grown up in these
cauldron-like valleys and fringe the blue Laachersee, the lake of
legends and of fairies. One of these Schlegel has versified in the "Lay
of the Sunken Castle," with the piteous tale of the spirits imprisoned;
and Simrock tells us in rhyme of the merman who sits waiting for a
mortal bride; while Wolfgang Mueller sings of the "Castle under the
Lake," where at night ghostly torches are lighted and ghostly revels are
held, the story of which so fascinates the fisherman's boy who has heard
of these doings from his grandmother that as he watches the enchanted
waters one night his fancy plays him a cruel trick, and he plunges in to
join the revellers and learn the truth.

Local tradition says that Count Henry II. and his wife Adelaide, walking
here by night, saw the whole lake lighted up from within in uncanny
fashion, and founded a monastery in order to counteract the spell. This
deserted but scarcely ruined building still exists, and contains the
grave of the founder; the twelfth-century decoration, rich and detailed,
is almost whole in the oldest part of the monastery. The far-famed
German tale of Genovefa of Brabant is here localized, and Henry's son
Siegfried assigned to the princess as a husband, while the neighboring
grotto of Hochstein is shown as her place of refuge. On our way back to
the Rocky Gate we pass through the singular little town of Niedermendig,
an hour's distance from the lake--a place built wholly of dark gray
lava, standing in a region where lava-ridges seam the earth like the
bones of antediluvian monsters, but are made more profitable by being
quarried into millstones. There is something here that brings part of
Wales to the remembrance of the few who have seen those dreary
slate-villages--dark, damp, but naked, for moss and weeds do not thrive
on this dampness as they do on the decay of other stones--which dot the
moorland of Wales. The fences are slate; the gateposts are slate; the
stiles are of slate; the very "sticks" up which the climbing roses are
trained are of slate; churches, schools, houses, stables are all of one
dark iron-blue shade; floors and roofs are alike; hearth-stones and
threshold-stones, and grave-stones all of the same material. It is
curious and depressing. This volcanic region of the Rhine, however, has
so many unexpected beauties strewn pell-mell in the midst of stony
barrenness that it also bears some likeness to Naples and Ischia, where
beauty of color, and even of vegetation, alternate surprisingly with
tracts of parched and rocky wilderness pierced with holes whence gas and
steam are always rising.

[Footnote A: From "Down the Rhine."]




BINGEN AND MAYENCE[A]

BY VICTOR HUGO


Bingen is an exceedingly pretty place, having at once the somber look of
an ancient town, and the cheering aspect of a new one. From the days of
Consul Drusus to those of the Emperor Charlemagne, from Charlemagne to
Archbishop Willigis, from Willigis to the merchant Montemagno, and from
Montemagno to the visionary Holzhausen, the town gradually increased in
the number of its houses, as the dew gathers drop by drop in the cup of
a lily. Excuse this comparison; for, tho flowery, it has truth to back
it, and faithfully illustrates the mode in which a town near the conflux
of two rivers is constructed. The irregularity of the houses--in fact
everything, tends to make Bingen a kind of antithesis, both with respect
to buildings and the scenery which surrounds them. The town, bounded on
the left by Nahe, and by the Rhine on the right, develops itself in a
triangular form near a Gothic church, which is backed by a Roman
citadel. In this citadel, which bears the date of the first century, and
has long been the haunt of bandits, there is a garden; and in the
church, which is of the fifteenth century, is the tomb of Barthelemy de
Holzhausen. In the direction of Mayence, the famed Paradise Plain opens
upon the Ringau; and in that of Coblentz, the dark mountains of Leyen
seem to frown on the surrounding scenery. Here Nature smiles like a
lovely woman extended unadorned on the greensward; there, like a
slumbering giant, she excites a feeling of awe.

The more we examine this beautiful place, the more the antithesis is
multiplied under our looks and thoughts. It assumes a thousand different
forms; and as the Nahe flows through the arches of the stone bridge,
upon the parapet of which the lion of Hesse turns its back to the eagle
of Prussia, the green arm of the Rhine seizes suddenly the fair and
indolent stream, and plunges it into the Bingerloch.

To sit down toward the evening on the summit of the Klopp--to see the
town at its base, with an immense horizon on all sides, the mountains
overshadowing all--to see the slated roofs smoking, the shadows
lengthening, and the scenery breathing to life the verses of Virgil--to
respire at once the wind which rustles the leaves, the breeze of the
flood, and the gale of the mountain--is an exquisite and inexpressible
pleasure, full of secret enjoyment, which is veiled by the grandeur of
the spectacle, by the intensity of contemplation. At the windows of
huts, young women, their eyes fixt upon their work, are gaily singing;
among the weeds that grow round the ruins birds whistle and pair; barks
are crossing the river, and the sound of oars splashing in the water,
and unfurling of sails, reaches our ears. The washerwomen of the Rhine
spread their clothes on the bushes; and those of the Nahe, their legs
and feet naked, beat their linen upon floating rafts, and laugh at some
poor artist as he sketches Ehrenfels.

The sun sets, night comes on, the slated roofs of the houses appear as
one, the mountains congregate and take the aspect of an immense dark
body; and the washerwomen, with bundles on their heads, return
cheerfully to their cabins; the noise subsides, the voices are hushed; a
faint light, resembling the reflections of the other world upon the
countenance of a dying man, is for a short time observable on the
Ehrenfels; then all is dark, except the tower of Hatto, which, tho
scarcely seen in the day, makes its appearance at night, amid a light
smoke and the reverberation of the forge....

Mayence and Frankfort, like Versailles and Paris, may, at the present
time, be called one town. In the middle ages there was a distance of
eight leagues between them, which was then considered a long journey;
now, an hour and a quarter will suffice to transport you from one to the
other. The buildings of Frankfort and Mayence, like those of Liege, have
been devastated by modern good taste, and old and venerable edifices are
rapidly disappearing, giving place to frightful groups of white houses.

I expected to be able to see, at Mayence, Martinsburg, which, up to the
seventeenth century, was the feudal residence of the ecclesiastical
electors; but the French made a hospital of it, which was afterward
razed to the ground to make room for the Porte Franc; the merchant's
hotel, built in 1317 by the famed League, and which was splendidly
decorated with the statues of seven electors, and surmounted by two
colossal figures, bearing the crown of the empire, also shared the same
fate. Mayence possesses that which marks its antiquity--a venerable
cathedral, which was commenced in 978, and finished in 1009. Part of
this superb structure was burned in 1190, and since that period has,
from century to century, undergone some change.

I explored its interior, and was struck with awe on beholding
innumerable tombs, bearing dates as far back as the eighteenth century.
Under the galleries of the cloister I observed an obscure monument, a
bas-relief of the fourteenth century, and tried, in vain, to guess the
enigma. On one side are two men in chains, wildness in their looks, and
despair in their attitudes; on the other, an emperor, accompanied by a
bishop, and surrounded by a number of people, triumphing. Is it
Barbarossa? Is it Louis of Bavaria? Does it speak of the revolt of 1160,
or of the war between Mayence and Frankfort in 1332? I could not tell,
and therefore passed by.

As I was leaving the galleries, I discovered in the shade a sculptured
head, half protruding from the wall, surmounted by a crown of
flower-work, similar to that worn by the kings of the eleventh century.
I looked at it; it had a mild countenance; yet it possest something of
severity in it--a face imprinted with that august beauty which the
workings of a great mind give to the countenance of man. The hand of
some peasant had chalked the name "Frauenlob" above it, and I instantly
remembered the Tasso of Mayence, so calumniated during his life, so
venerated after his death. When Henry Frauenlob died, which was in the
year 1318, the females who had insulted him in life carried his coffin
to the tomb, which procession is chiseled on the tombstone beneath. I
again looked at that noble head. The sculptor had left the eyes open;
and thus, in that church of sepulchers--in that cloister of the
dead--the poet alone sees; he only is represented standing, and
observing all.

The market-place, which is by the side of the cathedral, has rather an
amusing and pleasing aspect. In the middle is a pretty triangular
fountain of the German Renaissance, which, besides having scepters,
nymphs, angels, dolphins, and mermaids, serves as a pedestal to the
Virgin Mary. This fountain was erected by Albert de Brandenburg, who
reigned in 1540, in commemoration of the capture of Francis the First by
Charles the Fifth.

Mayence, white tho it be, retains its ancient aspect of a beautiful
city. The river here is not less crowded with sails, the town not less
incumbered with bales, nor more free from bustle, than formerly. People
walk, squeak, push, sell, buy, sing, and cry; in fact in all the
quarters of the town, in every house, life seems to predominate. At
night the buzz and noise cease, and nothing is heard at Mayence but the
murmurings of the Rhine, and the everlasting noise of seventeen water
mills, which are fixt to the piles of the bridge of Charlemagne.


[Footnote A: From "The Rhine." Translated by D.M. Aird.]




FRANKFORT-AM-MAIN[A]

BY BAYARD TAYLOR


Frankfort is a genuine old German city. Founded by Charlemagne,
afterward a rallying-point of the Crusaders, and for a long time the
capital of the German Empire, it has no lack of interesting historical
recollections, and, notwithstanding it is fast becoming modernized, one
is everywhere reminded of the past. The cathedral, old as the days of
Peter the Hermit, the grotesque street of the Jews, the many quaint,
antiquated dwellings and the moldering watch-towers on the hills around,
give it a more interesting character than any German city I have yet
seen. The house we dwell in, on the Markt Platz, is more than two
hundred years old; directly opposite is a great castellated building
gloomy with the weight of six centuries, and a few steps to the left
brings me to the square of the Roemerberg, where the emperors were
crowned, in a corner of which is a curiously ornamented house formerly
the residence of Luther. There are legends innumerable connected with
all these buildings, and even yet discoveries are frequently made in old
houses of secret chambers and staircases. When you add to all this the
German love of ghost-stories, and, indeed, their general belief in
spirits, the lover of romance could not desire a more agreeable
residence.

Within the walls the greater part of Frankfort is built in the old
German style, the houses six or seven stories high and every story
projecting out over the other; so that those living in the upper part
can nearly shake hands out of the windows. At the corners figures of men
are often seen holding up the story above on their shoulders and making
horrible faces at the weight. When I state that in all these narrow
streets, which constitute the greater part of the city, there are no
sidewalks, the windows of the lower stories have iron gratings extending
a foot or so into the street, which is only wide enough for one cart to
pass along, you can have some idea of the facility of walking through
them, to say nothing of the piles of wood and market-women with baskets
of vegetables which one is continuously stumbling over. Even in the
wider streets I have always to look before and behind to keep out of the
way of the cabs; the people here get so accustomed to it that they leave
barely room for them to pass, and the carriages go dashing by at a
nearness which sometimes makes me shudder.

As I walked across the Main and looked down at the swift stream on its
way from the distant Thuringian Forest to join the Rhine, I thought of
the time when Schiller stood there in the days of his early struggles,
an exile from his native land, and, looking over the bridge, said in the
loneliness of his heart, "That water flows not so deep as my
sufferings."

From the hills on the Darmstadt road I had a view of the country around;
the fields were white and bare, and the dark Taunus, with the broad
patches of snow on his sides, looked grim and shadowy through the dim
atmosphere. It was like the landscape of a dream--dark, strange and
silent.

I have seen the banker Rothschild several times driving about the city.
This one--Anselmo, the most celebrated of the brothers--holds a mortgage
on the city of Jerusalem. He rides about in style, with officers
attending his carriage. He is a little baldheaded man with marked Jewish
features, and is said not to deceive his looks. At any rate, his
reputation is none of the best, either with Jews or Christians. A
caricature was published some time ago in which he is represented as
giving a beggar-woman by the wayside a kreutzer--the smallest German
coin. She is made to exclaim, "God reward you a thousand fold!" He
immediately replies, after reckoning up in his head, "How much have I
then? Sixteen florins and forty kreutzers!"...

The Eschernheim Tower, at the entrance of one of the city gates, is
universally admired by strangers on account of its picturesque
appearance, overgrown with ivy and terminated by the little pointed
turrets which one sees so often in Germany on buildings three or four
centuries old. There are five other watch-towers of similar form, which
stand on different sides of the city at the distance of a mile or two,
and generally upon an eminence overlooking the country. They were
erected several centuries ago to discern from afar the approach of an
enemy, and protect the caravans of merchants, which at that time
traveled from city to city, from the attacks of robbers.

The Eschernheim Tower is interesting from another circumstance which,
whether true or not, is universally believed. When Frankfort was under
the sway of a prince, a Swiss hunter, for some civil offense, was
condemned to die. He begged his life from the prince, who granted it
only on condition that he should fire the figure nine with his rifle
through the vane of this tower. He agreed, and did it; and at the
present time one can distinguish a rude nine on the vane, as if cut with
bullets, while two or three marks at the side appear to be from shots
that failed.

[Footnote A: From "Views Afoot." Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.]




HEIDELBERG[A]

BY BAYARD TAYLOR


Here in Heidelberg at last, and a most glorious town it is. This is our
first morning in our new rooms, and the sun streams warmly in the
eastern windows as I write, while the old castle rises through the blue
vapor on the side of the Kaiserstuhl. The Neckar rushes on below, and
the Odenwald, before me, rejoices with its vineyards in the morning
light....

There is so much to be seen around this beautiful place that I scarcely
know where to begin a description of it. I have been wandering among the
wild paths that lead up and down the mountain-side or away into the
forests and lonely meadows in the lap of the Odenwald. My mind is filled
with images of the romantic German scenery, whose real beauty is
beginning to displace the imaginary picture which I had painted with the
enthusiastic words of Howitt. I seem to stand now upon the Kaiserstuhl,
which rises above Heidelberg, with that magnificent landscape around me
from the Black Forest and Strassburg to Mainz, and from the Vosges in
France to the hills of Spessart in Bavaria.

What a glorious panorama! and not less rich in associations than in its
natural beauty. Below me had moved the barbarian hordes of old, the
triumphant followers of Arminius and the cohorts of Rome, and later full
many a warlike host bearing the banners of the red cross to the Holy
Land, many a knight returning with his vassals from the field to lay at
the feet of his lady-love the scarf he had worn in a hundred battles and
claim the reward of his constancy and devotion. But brighter spirits had
also toiled below. That plain had witnessed the presence of Luther, and
a host who strove with him. There had also trodden the master-spirits of
German song--the giant twain with their scarcely less harmonious
brethren. They, too, had gathered inspiration from those scenes--more
fervent worship of Nature and a deeper love for their beautiful
fatherland....

Then there is the Wolfsbrunnen, which one reaches by a beautiful walk up
the bank of the Neckar to a quiet dell in the side of the mountain.
Through this the roads lead up by rustic mills always in motion, and
orchards laden with ripening fruit, to the commencement of the forest,
where a quaint stone fountain stands, commemorating the abode of a
sorceress of the olden time who was torn in pieces by a wolf. There is a
handsome rustic inn here, where every Sunday afternoon a band plays in
the portico, while hundreds of people are scattered around in the cool
shadow of the trees or feeding the splendid trout in the basin formed by
a little stream. They generally return to the city by another walk,
leading along the mountain-side to the eastern terrace of the castle,
where they have fine views of the great Rhine plain, terminated by the
Alsatian hills stretching along the western horizon like the long
crested swells on the ocean. We can even see these from the windows of
our room on the bank of the Neckar, and I often look with interest on
one sharp peak, for on its side stands the castle of Trifels, where
Coeur de Lion was imprisoned by the Duke of Austria, and where Blondel,
his faithful minstrel, sang the ballad which discovered the retreat of
the noble captive.

From the Carl Platz, an open square at the upper end of the city, two
paths lead directly up to the castle. By the first walk we ascend a
flight of steps to the western gate; passing through which, we enter a
delightful garden, between the outer walls of the castle and the huge
moat which surrounds it. Great linden, oak and beech trees shadow the
walk, and in secluded nooks little mountain-streams spring from the side
of the wall into stone basins. There is a tower over the moat on the
south side, next the mountain, where the portcullis still hangs with its
sharp teeth as it was last drawn up; on each side stand two grim knights
guarding the entrance. In one of the wooded walks is an old tree brought
from America in the year 1618. It is of the kind called "arbor vitae,"
and uncommonly tall and slender for one of this species; yet it does not
seem to thrive well in a foreign soil. I noticed that persons had cut
many slips off the lower branches, and I would have been tempted to do
the same myself if there had been any I could reach. In the curve of the
mountain is a handsome pavilion surrounded with beds of flowers and
fountains; here all classes meet together in the afternoon to sit with
their refreshments in the shade, while frequently a fine band of music
gives them their invariable recreation. All this, with the scenery
around them, leaves nothing unfinished to their present enjoyment. The
Germans enjoy life under all circumstances, and in this way they make
themselves much happier than we who have far greater means of being so.

At the end of the terrace built for the Princess Elizabeth of England is
one of the round towers which was split in twain by the French. Half has
fallen entirely away, and the other semicircular shell, which joins the
terrace and part of the castle-buildings, clings firmly together, altho
part of its foundation is gone, so that its outer ends actually hang in
the air. Some idea of the strength of the castle may be obtained when I
state that the walls of this tower are twenty-two feet thick, and that a
staircase has been made through them to the top, where one can sit under
the lindens growing upon it or look down on the city below with the
pleasant consciousness that the great mass upon which he stands is only
prevented from crashing down with him by the solidity of its masonry. On
one side, joining the garden, the statue of the Archduke Louis in his
breastplate and flowing beard looks out from among the ivy.

There is little to be seen about the castle except the walls themselves.
The guide conducted us through passages, in which were heaped many of
the enormous cannon-balls which it had received in sieges, to some
chambers in the foundation. This was the oldest part of the castle,
built in the thirteenth century. We also visited the chapel, which is in
a tolerable state of preservation. A kind of narrow bridge crosses it,
over which we walked, looking down on the empty pulpit and deserted
shrines. We then went into the cellar to see the celebrated tun. In a
large vault are kept several enormous hogsheads, one of which is three
hundred years old, but they are nothing in comparison with the tun,
which itself fills a whole vault. It is as high as a common two-story
house; on the top is a platform upon which the people used to dance
after it was filled, to which one ascends by two flights of steps. I
forget exactly how many casks it holds, but I believe eight hundred. It
has been empty for fifty years....

Opposite my window rises the Heiligenberg, on the other side of the
Neckar. The lower part of it is rich with vineyards, and many cottages
stand embosomed in shrubbery among them. Sometimes we see groups of
maidens standing under the grape-arbors, and every morning the
peasant-women go toiling up the steep paths with baskets on their heads,
to labor among the vines. On the Neckar, below us, the fishermen glide
about in their boats, sink their square nets fastened to a long pole,
and haul them up with the glittering fish, of which the stream is full.
I often lean out of the window late at night, when the mountains above
are wrapt in dusky obscurity, and listen to the low, musical ripple of
the river. It tells to my excited fancy a knightly legend of the old
German time. Then comes the bell rung for closing the inns, breaking the
spell with its deep clang, which vibrates far away on the night-air till
it has roused all the echoes of the Odenwald. I then shut the window,
turn into the narrow box which the Germans call a bed, and in a few
minutes am wandering in America.

Halfway up the Heidelberg runs a beautiful walk dividing the vineyards
from the forest above. This is called "The Philosopher's Way," because
it was the favorite ramble of the old professors of the university. It
can be reached by a toilsome, winding path among the vines, called the
Snake-way; and when one has ascended to it, he is well rewarded by the
lovely view. In the evening, when the sun has got behind the mountain,
it is delightful to sit on the stone steps and watch the golden light
creeping up the side of the Kaiserstuhl, till at last twilight begins to
darken in the valley and a mantle of mist gathers above the Neckar.

We ascended the mountain a few days ago. There is a path which leads up
through the forest, but we took the shortest way, directly up the side,
tho it was at an angle of nearly fifty degrees. It was hard enough work
scrambling through the thick broom and heather and over stumps and
stones. In one of the stone-heaps I dislodged a large orange-colored
salamander seven or eight inches long. They are sometimes found on these
mountains, as well as a very large kind of lizard, called the
"eidechse," which the Germans say is perfectly harmless, and if one
whistles or plays a pipe will come and play around him.

The view from the top reminded me of that from Catskill Mountain House,
but is on a smaller scale. The mountains stretch off sideways, confining
the view to but half the horizon, and in the middle of the picture the
Hudson is well represented by the lengthened windings of the "abounding
Rhine." Nestled at the base below us was the little village of
Handschuhheim, one of the oldest in this part of Germany. The castle of
its former lords has nearly all fallen down, but the massive solidity of
the walls which yet stand proves its antiquity. A few years ago a part
of the outer walls which was remarked to have a hollow sound was taken
down, when there fell from a deep niche built therein, a skeleton clad
in a suit of the old German armor.

We followed a road through the woods to the peak on which stands the
ruins of St. Michael's chapel, which was built in the tenth century and
inhabited for a long time by a company of white monks. There is now but
a single tower remaining, and all around is grown over with tall bushes
and weeds. It had a wild and romantic look, and I sat on a rock and
sketched at it till it grew dark, when we got down the mountain the best
way we could....

We have just returned from a second visit to Frankfort, where the great
annual fair filled the streets with noise and bustle. On our way back we
stopt at the village of Zwingenberg, which lies at the foot of the
Melibochus, for the purpose of visiting some of the scenery of the
Odenwald. Passing the night at the inn there, we slept with one bed
under and two above, and started early in the morning to climb up the
side of the Melibochus. After a long walk through the forests, which
were beginning to change their summer foliage for a brighter garment, we
reached the summit and ascended the stone tower which stands upon it.
This view gives one a better idea of the Odenwald than that from the
Kaiserstuhl at Heidelberg.

This is a great collection of rocks, in a wild pine wood, heaped
together like pebbles on the seashore and worn and rounded as if by the
action of water; so much do they resemble waves that one standing at the
bottom and looking up can not resist the idea that they will flow down
upon him. It must have been a mighty tide whose receding waves left
these masses piled up together. The same formation continues at
intervals to the foot of the mountains. It reminded me of a glacier of
rocks instead of ice.

A little higher up lies a massive block of granite called the Giant's
Column. It is thirty-two feet long and three to four feet in diameter,
and still bears the mark of the chisel. When or by whom it was made
remains a mystery. Some have supposed it was intended to be erected for
the worship of the sun by the wild Teutonic tribes who inhabited this
forest; it is more probably the work of the Romans. A project was once
started to erect a monument on the battlefield of Leipsic, but it was
found too difficult to carry into execution.

After dining at the little village of Reichelsdorf, in the valley
below--where the merry landlord charged my friend two kreutzers less
than myself because he was not so tall--we visited the castle of
Schoenberg, and joined the Bergstrasse again. We walked the rest of the
way here. Long before we arrived the moon shone down on us over the
mountains; and when we turned around the foot of the Heiligenberg, the
mist descending in the valley of the Neckar rested like a light cloud on
the church-spires.

[Footnote A: From "Views Afoot." Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.]




STRASSBURG[A]

BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE


I left the cars with my head full of the cathedral. The first thing I
saw, on lifting my eyes, was a brown spire. We climbed the spire; we
gained the roof. What a magnificent terrace! A world in itself; a
panoramic view sweeping the horizon. Here I saw the names of Goethe and
Herder. Here they have walked many a time, I suppose. But the inside--a
forest-like firmament, glorious in holiness; windows many-hued as the
Hebrew psalms; a gloom solemn and pathetic as man's mysterious
existence; a richness gorgeous and manifold as his wonderful nature. In
this Gothic architecture we see earnest northern races, whose nature was
a composite of influences from pine forest, mountain, and storm,
expressing in vast proportions and gigantic masonry those ideas of
infinite duration and existence which Christianity opened before them.

The ethereal eloquence of the Greeks could not express the rugged
earnestness of souls wrestling with those fearful mysteries of fate, of
suffering, of eternal existence, declared equally by nature and
revelation. This architecture is Hebraistic in spirit, not Greek; it
well accords with the deep ground-swell of the Hebrew prophets. "Lord,
thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations. Before the
mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and
the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. A
thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past. And as
a watch in the night."

The objection to Gothic architecture, as compared with Greek, is, that
it is less finished and elegant. So it is. It symbolizes that state of
mind too earnest for mere polish, too deeply excited for laws
of exact proportions and architectural refinement. It is Alpine
architecture--vast, wild, and sublime in its foundations, yet bursting
into flowers at every interval. The human soul seems to me an imprisoned
essence, striving after somewhat divine. There is a struggle in it, as
of suffocated flame; finding vent now through poetry, now in painting,
now in music, sculpture, or architecture; various are the crevices and
fissures, but the flame is one.

Moreover, as society grows from barbarism upward, it tends to
inflorescence, at certain periods, as do plants and trees; and some
races flower later than others. This architecture was the first
flowering of the Gothic race; they had no Homers; the flame found vent
not by imaged words and vitalized alphabet; they vitalized stone, and
their poets were minster-builders; their epics, cathedrals.

This is why one cathedral--like Strassburg, or Notre Dame--has a
thousandfold the power of any number of Madeleines. The Madeleine is
simply a building; these are poems. I never look at one of them without
feeling that gravitation of soul toward its artist which poetry always
excites. Often the artist is unknown; here we know him; Erwin von
Steinbach, poet, prophet, priest, in architecture. We visited his
house--a house old and quaint, and to me full of suggestions and
emotions. Ah, if there be, as the apostle vividly suggests, houses not
made with hands, strange splendors, of which these are but shadows, that
vast religious spirit may have been finding scope for itself where all
the forces of nature shall have been made tributary to the great
conceptions of the soul. Save this cathedral, Strassburg has nothing
except peaked-roofed houses, dotted with six or seven rows of gable
windows.

[Footnote A: From "Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands." Mrs. Stowe
published this work in 1854, after returning from the tour she made soon
after achieving great fame with "Uncle Tom's Cabin." During this visit
she was received everywhere with distinction--and especially in
England.]




FREIBURG AND THE BLACK FOREST[A]

BY BAYARD TAYLOR


The airy basket-work tower of the Freiburg minster rises before me over
the black roofs of the houses, and behind stand the gloomy pine-covered
mountains of the Black Forest. Of our walk to Heidelberg over the
oft-trodden Bergstrasse, I shall say nothing, nor how we climbed the
Kaiserstuhl again, and danced around on the top of the tower for one
hour amid cloud and mist, while there was sunshine below in the valley
of the Neckar. I left Heidelberg yesterday morning in the "stehwagen"
for Carlsruhe. The engine whistled, the train started, and, altho I kept
my eyes steadily fixt on the spire of the Hauptkirche, three minutes hid
it and all the rest of the city from sight. Carlsruhe, the capital of
Baden--which we reached in an hour and a half--is unanimously pronounced
by travelers to be a most dull and tiresome city. From a glance I had
through one of the gates, I should think its reputation was not
undeserved. Even its name in German signifies a place of repose.

I stopt at Kork, on the branch-road leading to Strassburg, to meet a
German-American about to return to my home in Pennsylvania, where he had
lived for some time. I inquired according to the direction he had sent
me to Frankfort, but he was not there; however, an old man, finding who
I was, said Herr Otto had directed him to go with me to Hesselhurst, a
village four or five miles off, where he would meet me. So we set off
immediately over the plain, and reached the village at dusk....

My friend arrived at three o'clock the next morning, and, after two or
three hours' talk about home and the friends whom he expected to see so
much sooner than I, a young farmer drove me in his wagon to Offenburg, a
small city at the foot of the Black Forest, where I took the cars for
Freiburg. The scenery between the two places is grand. The broad
mountains of the Black Forest rear their fronts on the east, and the
blue lines of the French Vosges meet the clouds on the west. The night
before, in walking over the plain, I saw distinctly the whole of the
Strassburg minster, whose spire is the highest in Europe, being four
hundred and ninety feet, or but twenty-five feet lower than the Pyramid
of Cheops.

I visited the minster of Freiburg yesterday morning. It is a grand,
gloomy old pile, dating back from the eleventh century--one of the few
Gothic churches in Germany that have ever been completed. The tower of
beautiful fretwork rises to the height of three hundred and ninety-five
feet, and the body of the church, including the choir, is of the same
length. The interior is solemn and majestic. Windows stained in colors
that burn let in a "dim religious light" which accords very well with
the dark old pillars and antique shrines. In two of the chapels there
are some fine altar-pieces by Holbein and one of his scholars, and a
very large crucifix of silver and ebony, kept with great care, which is
said to have been carried with the Crusaders to the Holy Land....

We went this afternoon to the Jaegerhaus, on a mountain near, where we
had a very fine view of the city and its great black minster, with the
plain of the Briesgau, broken only by the Kaiserstuhl, a long mountain
near the Rhine, whose golden stream glittered in the distance. On
climbing the Schlossberg, an eminence near the city, we met the grand
duchess Stephanie, a natural daughter of Napoleon, as I have heard. A
chapel on the Schoenberg, the mountain opposite, was pointed out as the
spot where Louis XV.--if I mistake not--usually stood while his army
besieged Freiburg. A German officer having sent a ball to this chapel
which struck the wall just above the king's head, the latter sent word
that if they did not cease firing he would point his cannons at the
minster. The citizens thought it best to spare the monarch and save the
cathedral.

After two days delightfully spent, we shouldered our knapsacks and left
Freiburg. The beautiful valley at the mouth of which the city lies runs
like an avenue for seven miles directly into the mountains, and presents
in its loveliness such a contrast to the horrid defile which follows
that it almost deserves the name which has been given to a little inn
at its head--the "Kingdom of Heaven." The mountains of the Black Forest
enclose it on each side like walls, covered to the summit with luxuriant
woods, and in some places with those forests of gloomy pine which give
this region its name. After traversing its whole length, just before
plunging into the mountain-depths the traveler rarely meets with a finer
picture than that which, on looking back, he seems framed between the
hills at the other end. Freiburg looks around the foot of one of the
heights, with the spire of her cathedral peeping above the top, while
the French Vosges grow dim in the far perspective.

The road now enters a wild, narrow valley which grows smaller as we
proceed. From Himmelreich, a large rude inn by the side of the green
meadows, we enter the Hoellenthal--that is, from the "Kingdom of Heaven"
to the "Valley of Hell." The latter place better deserves its
appellation than the former. The road winds between precipices of black
rock, above which the thick foliage shuts out the brightness of day and
gives a somber hue to the scene. A torrent foams down the chasm, and in
one place two mighty pillars interpose to prevent all passage. The
stream, however, has worn its way through, and the road is hewn in the
rock by its side. This cleft is the only entrance to a valley three or
four miles long which lies in the very heart of the mountains.

It is inhabited by a few woodmen and their families, and, but for the
road which passes through, would be as perfect a solitude as the Happy
Valley of Rasselas. At the farther end a winding road called "The
Ascent" leads up the steep mountain to an elevated region of country
thinly settled and covered with herds of cattle. The cherries--which in
the Rhine-plain below had long gone--were just ripe here. The people
spoke a most barbarous dialect; they were social and friendly, for
everybody greeted us, and sometimes, as we sat on a bank by the
roadside, those who passed by would say "Rest thee!" or "Thrice rest!"

Passing by the Titi Lake, a small body of water which was spread out
among the hills like a sheet of ink, so deep was its Stygian hue, we
commenced ascending a mountain. The highest peak of the Schwarzwald, the
Feldberg, rose not far off, and on arriving at the top of this mountain
we saw that a half hour's walk would bring us to its summit. This was
too great a temptation for my love of climbing heights; so, with a look
at the descending sun to calculate how much time we could spare, we set
out. There was no path, but we prest directly up the steep side through
bushes and long grass, and in a short time reached the top, breathless
from such exertion in the thin atmosphere.

The pine-woods shut out the view to the north and east, which is said to
be magnificent, as the mountain is about five thousand feet high. The
wild black peaks of the Black Forest were spread below us, and the sun
sank through golden mist toward the Alsatian hills. Afar to the south,
through cloud and storm, we could just trace the white outline of the
Swiss Alps. The wind swept through the pines around, and bent the long
yellow grass among which we sat, with a strange, mournful sound, well
suiting the gloomy and mysterious region. It soon grew cold; the golden
clouds settled down toward us, and we made haste to descend to the
village of Lenzkirch before dark.

Next morning we set out early, without waiting to see the trial of
archery which was to take place among the mountain-youths. Their booths
and targets, gay with banners, stood on a green meadow beside the town.
We walked through the Black Forest the whole forenoon. It might be owing
to the many wild stories whose scenes are laid among these hills, but
with me there was a peculiar feeling of solemnity pervading the whole
region. The great pine-woods are of the very darkest hue of green, and
down their hoary, moss-floored aisles daylight seems never to have
shone. The air was pure and clear and the sunshine bright, but it
imparted no gayety to the scenery; except the little meadows of living
emerald which lay occasionally in the lap of a dell, the landscape wore
a solemn and serious air. In a storm it must be sublime.

About noon, from the top of the last range of hills, we had a glorious
view. The line of the distant Alps could be faintly traced high in the
clouds, and all the heights between were plainly visible, from the Lake
of Constance to the misty Jura, which flanked the Vosges on the west.
From our lofty station we overlooked half Switzerland, and, had the air
been a little clearer, we could have seen Mont Blanc and the mountains
of Savoy. I could not help envying the feelings of the Swiss who, after
long absence from their native land, first see the Alps from this road.
If to the emotions with which I then looked on them were added the
passionate love of home and country which a long absence creates, such
excess of rapture would be almost too great to be borne.

[Footnote A: From "Views Afoot." Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.]




II

NUREMBERG




AS A MEDIEVAL CITY[A]

BY CECIL HEADLAM


In spite of all changes, and in spite of the disfigurements of modern
industry, Nuremberg is and will remain a medieval city, a city of
history and legend, a city of the soul. She is like Venice in this, as
in not a little of her history, that she exercises an indefinable
fascination over our hearts no less than over our intellects. The subtle
flavor of medieval towns may be likened to that of those rare old ports
which are said to taste of the grave; a flavor indefinable, exquisite.
Rothenburg has it; and it is with Rothenburg, that little gem of
medievalism, that Nuremberg is likely to be compared in the mind of the
modern wanderer in Franconia. But tho Rothenburg may surpass her greater
neighbor in the perfect harmony and in the picturesqueness of her
red-tiled houses and well-preserved fortifications, in interest at any
rate she must yield to the heroine of this story.

For, apart from the beauty which Nuremberg owes to the wonderful
grouping of her red roofs and ancient castle, her coronet of antique
towers, her Gothic churches and Renaissance buildings or brown riverside
houses dipping into the mud-colored Pegnitz, she rejoices in treasures
of art and architecture and in the possession of a splendid history such
as Rothenburg can not boast. To those who know something of her story
Nuremberg brings the subtle charm of association. While appealing to our
memories by the grandeur of her historic past, and to our imaginations
by the work and tradition of her mighty dead, she appeals also to our
senses with the rare magic of her personal beauty, if one may so call
it. In that triple appeal lies the fascination of Nuremberg....

The facts as to the origin of Nuremberg are lost in the dim shadows of
tradition. When the little town sprang up amid the forests and swamps
which still marked the course of the Pegnitz, we know as little as we
know the origin of the name Nuernberg. It is true that the chronicles of
later days are only too ready to furnish us with information; but the
information is not always reliable. The chronicles, like our own
peerage, are apt to contain too vivid efforts of imaginative fiction.
The chroniclers, unharassed by facts or documents, with minds "not by
geography prejudiced, or warped by history," can not unfortunately
always be believed. It is, for instance, quite possible that Attila,
King of the Huns, passed and plundered Nuremberg, as they tell us. But
there is no proof, no record of that visitation. Again, the inevitable
legend of a visit from Charlemagne occurs. He, you may be sure, was
lost in the woods while hunting near Nuremberg, and passed all night
alone, unhurt by the wild beasts. As a token of gratitude for God's
manifest favor he caused a chapel to be built on the spot. The chapel
stands to this day--a twelfth-century building--but no matter! for did
not Otho I., as our chroniclers tell us, attend mass in St. Sebald's
Church in 970, tho St. Sebald's Church can not have been built till a
century later?

The origin of the very name of Nuremberg is hidden in the clouds of
obscurity. In the earliest documents we find it spelt with the usual
variations of early manuscripts--Nourenberg, Nuorimperc, Niurenberg,
Nuremberc, etc. The origin of the place, we repeat, is equally obscure.
Many attempts have been made to find history in the light of the
derivations of the name. But when philology turns historian it is apt to
play strange tricks. Nur ein Berg (only a castle), or Nero's Castle, or
Norix Tower--what matter which is the right derivation, so long as we
can base a possible theory on it? The Norixberg theory will serve to
illustrate the incredible quantity of misplaced ingenuity which both of
old times and in the present has been wasted in trying to explain the
inexplicable.

Be that as it may, the history of our town begins in the year 1050. It
is most probable that the silence regarding the place--it is not
mentioned among the places visited by Conrad II. in this
neighborhood--points to the fact that the castle did not exist in 1025,
but was built between that year and 1050. That it existed then we know,
for Henry III. dated a document from here in 1050, summoning a council
of Bavarian nobles "to his estate Nourinberc." The oldest portion,
called in the fifteenth century Altnuernberg, consisted of the
Fuenfeckiger Thurm--the Five-cornered tower--the rooms attached and the
Otmarkapelle. The latter was burned down in 1420, rebuilt in 1428, and
called the Walpurgiskapelle. These constituted the Burggraefliche
Burg--the Burggraf's Castle. The rest of the castle was built on by
Friedrich der Rotbart (Barbarossa), and called the Kaiserliche Burg. The
old Five-cornered tower and the surrounding ground was the private
property of the Burggraf, and he was appointed by the Emperor as
imperial officer of the Kaiserliche Burg. Whether the Emperors claimed
any rights of personal property over Nuremberg or merely treated it, at
first, as imperial property, it is difficult to determine. The castle at
any rate was probably built to secure whatever rights were claimed, and
to serve generally as an imperial stronghold. Gradually around the
castle grew up the straggling streets of Nuremberg. Settlers built
beneath the shadow of the Burg. The very names of the streets suggest
the vicinity of a camp or fortress. Soeldnerstrasse, Schmiedstrasse, and
so forth, betray the military origin of the present busy commercial
town. From one cause or another a mixture of races, of Germanic and
non-Germanic, of Slavonic and Frankish elements, seems to have occurred
among the inhabitants of the growing village, producing a special blend
which in dialect, in customs, and in dress was soon noticed by the
neighbors as unique, and stamping the art and development of Nuremberg
with that peculiar character which has never left it.

Various causes combined to promote the growth of the place. The
temporary removal of the Mart from Fuerth to Nuremberg under Henry III.
doubtless gave a great impetus to the development of the latter town.
Henry IV., indeed, gave back the rights of Mart, customs and coinage to
Fuerth. But it seems probable that these rights were not taken away again
from Nuremberg. The possession of a Mart was, of course, of great
importance to a town in those days, promoting industries and arts and
settled occupations. The Nurembergers were ready to suck out the fullest
advantage from their privilege. That mixture of races, to which we have
referred, resulted in remarkable business energy--energy which soon
found scope in the conduct of the business which the natural position of
Nuremberg on the south and north, the east and western trade routes,
brought to her. It was not very long before she became the center of the
vast trade between the Levant and Western Europe, and the chief emporium
for the produce of Italy--the "Handelsmetropole" in fact of South
Germany.

Nothing in the Middle Ages was more conducive to the prosperity of a
town than the reputation of having a holy man within its borders, or the
possession of the miracle-working relics of a saint. Just as St.
Elizabeth made Marburg so St. Sebaldus proved a very potent attraction
to Nuremberg. As early as 1070 and 1080 we hear of pilgrimages to
Nuremberg in honor of her patron saint.

Another factor in the growth of the place was the frequent visits which
the Emperors began to pay to it. Lying as it did on their way from
Bamberg and Forcheim to Regensburg, the Kaisers readily availed
themselves of the security offered by this impregnable fortress, and of
the sport provided in the adjacent forest. For there was good hunting to
be had in the forest which, seventy-two miles in extent, surrounded
Nuremberg. And hunting, next to war, was then in most parts of Europe
the most serious occupation of life. All the forest rights, we may
mention, of wood-cutting, hunting, charcoal burning and bee-farming
belonged originally to the Empire. But these were gradually acquired by
the Nuremberg Council, chiefly by purchase in the fifteenth century.

In the castle the visitor may notice a list of all the Emperors--some
thirty odd, all told--who have stayed there--a list that should now
include the reigning Emperor. We find that Henry IV. frequently honored
Nuremberg with his presence. This is that Henry IV., whose scene at
Canossa with the Pope--Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire waiting three
days in the snow to kiss the foot of excommunicative Gregory--has
imprest itself on all memories. His last visit to Nuremberg was a sad
one. His son rebelled against him, and the old king stopt at Nuremberg
to collect his forces. In the war between father and son Nuremberg was
loyal, and took the part of Henry IV. It was no nominal part, for in
1105 she had to stand a siege from the young Henry. For two months the
town was held by the burghers and the castle by the Prefect Conrad. At
the end of that time orders came from the old Kaiser that the town was
to surrender. He had given up the struggle, and his undutiful son
succeeded as Henry V. to the Holy Roman Empire, and Nuremberg with it.
The mention of this siege gives us an indication of the growth of the
town. The fact of the siege and the words of the chronicler, "The
townsmen (oppidani) gave up the town under treaty," seem to point to the
conclusion that Nuremberg was now no longer a mere fort (castrum), but
that walls had sprung up round the busy mart and the shrine of St.
Sebald, and that by this time Nuremberg had risen to the dignity of a
"Stadt" or city state. Presently, indeed, we find her rejoicing in the
title of "Civitas" (state). The place, it is clear, was already of
considerable military importance or it would not have been worth while
to invest it. The growing volume of trade is further illustrated by a
charter of Henry V. (1112) giving to the citizens of Worms customs'
immunity in various places subject to him, among which Frankfort, Goslar
and Nuremberg are named as royal towns ("oppida regis").

[Footnote A: From "The Story of Nuremberg." Published by E.P. Dutton &
Co.]




ITS CHURCHES AND THE CITADEL[A]

BY THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN


It may be as well briefly to notice the two churches--St. Sebald and St.
Lawrence. The former was within a stone's throw of our inn. Above the
door of the western front is a remarkably fine crucifix of wood--placed,
however, in too deep a recess--said to be by Veit Stoss. The head is of
a very fine form, and the countenance has an expression of the most
acute and intense feeling. A crown of thorns is twisted around the brow.
But this figure, as well as the whole of the outside and inside of the
church, stands in great need of being repaired. The towers are low, with
insignificant turrets; the latter evidently a later erection--probably
at the commencement of the sixteenth century. The eastern extremity, as
well indeed as the aisles, is surrounded by buttresses; and the
sharp-pointed, or lancet, windows, seem to bespeak the fourteenth, if
not the thirteenth, century. The great "wonder" of the interior is the
Shrine of the Saint (to whom the church is dedicated), of which the
greater part is silver. At the time of my viewing it, it was in a
disjointed state--parts of it having been taken to pieces, for repair;
but from Geisler's exquisite little engraving, I should pronounce it to
be second to few specimens of similar art in Europe. The figures do not
exceed two feet in height, and the extreme elevation of the shrine may
be about eight feet. Nor has Geisler's almost equally exquisite little
engraved carving of the richly carved Gothic font in this church, less
claim upon the admiration of the connoisseur.

The mother church, or Cathedral of St. Lawrence, is much larger, and
portions of it may be of the latter end of the thirteenth century. The
principal entrance presents us with an elaborate doorway--perhaps of the
fourteenth century--with the sculpture divided into several
compartments, as at Rouen, Strassburg, and other earlier edifices. There
is a poverty in the two towers, both from their size and the meagerness
of the windows; but the slim spires at the summit are, doubtless, nearly
of a coeval date with that which supports them. The bottom of the large
circular or marigold window is injured in its effect by a Gothic
balustrade of a later period. The interior of this church has certainly
nothing very commanding or striking, on the score of architectural
grandeur or beauty; but there are some painted glass windows--especially
by Volkmar--which are deserving of particular attention. Nuremberg has
one advantage over many populous towns; its public buildings are not
choked up by narrow streets; and I hardly know an edifice of
distinction, round which the spectator may not walk with perfect ease,
and obtain a view of every portion which he is desirous of examining....

Of all edifices, more especially deserving of being visited at
Nuremberg, the Citadel is doubtless the most curious and ancient, as
well as the most remarkable. It rises to a considerable height, close
upon the outer walls of the town, within about a stone's throw of the
end of Albrecht Duerer Strasse--or the street where Albert Duerer
lived--and whose house is not only yet in existence, but still the
object of attraction and veneration with every visitor of taste, from
whatever part of the world he may chance to come. The street running
down is the street called (as before observed) after Albert Duerer's own
name; and the well, seen about the middle of it, is a specimen of those
wells--built of stone--which are very common in the streets of
Nuremberg. The upper part of the house of Albert Duerer is supposed to
have been his study. The interior is so altered from its original
disposition as to present little or nothing satisfactory to the
antiquary. It would be difficult to say how many coats of whitewash have
been bestowed upon the rooms, since the time when they were tenanted by
the great character in question.

Passing through this street, therefore, you may turn to the right, and
continue onward up a pretty smart ascent; when the entrance to the
Citadel, by the side of a low wall--in front of an old tower--presents
itself to your attention. It was before breakfast that my companion and
self visited this interesting interior, over every part of which we were
conducted by a most loquacious cicerone, who spoke the French language
very fluently, and who was pleased to express his extreme gratification
upon finding that his visitors were Englishmen. The tower and the
adjoining chapel, may be each of the thirteenth century; but the
tombstone of the founder of the monastery, upon the site of which the
present Citadel was built, bears the date of 1296. This tombstone is
very perfect; lying in a loose, unconnected manner, as you enter the
chapel; the chapel itself having a crypt-like appearance. This latter is
very small.

From the suite of apartments in the older parts of the Citadel, there
is a most extensive and uninterrupted view of the surrounding country,
which is rather flat. At the distance of about nine miles, the town of
Fuerth (Furta) looks as if it were within an hour's walk; and I should
think that the height of the chambers (from which we enjoyed this view)
to the level ground of the adjacent meadows could be scarcely less than
three hundred feet. In these chambers there is a little world of
curiosity for the antiquary; and yet it was but too palpable that very
many of its more precious treasures had been transported to Munich. In
the time of Maximilian II., when Nuremberg may be supposed to have been
in the very height of its glory, this Citadel must have been worth a
pilgrimage of many score miles to have visited. The ornaments which
remain are chiefly pictures; of which several are exceedingly
precious....

In these curious old chambers, it was to be expected that I should see
some Wohlegemuths--as usual, with backgrounds in a blaze of gold, and
figures with tortuous limbs, pinched-in waists, and caricatured
countenances. In a room, pretty plentifully encumbered with rubbish, I
saw a charming Snyders; being a dead stag, suspended from a pole. There
is here a portrait of Albert Duerer, by himself; but said to be a copy.
If so, it is a very fine copy. The original is supposed to be at Munich.
There was nothing else that my visit enabled me to see particularly
deserving of being recorded; but, when I was told that it was in this
Citadel that the ancient Emperors of Germany used oftentimes to reside,
and make carousal, and when I saw, now, scarcely anything but dark
passages, unfurnished galleries, naked halls, and untenanted
chambers--I own that I could hardly refrain from uttering a sigh over
the mutability of earthly fashions, and the transitoriness of worldly
grandeur. With a rock for its base, and walls almost of adamant for its
support--situated also upon an eminence which may be said to look
frowningly down over a vast sweep of country--the Citadel of Nuremberg
should seem to have bid defiance, in former times, to every assault of
the most desperate and enterprising foe. It is now visited only by the
casual traveler--who is frequently startled at the echo of his own
footsteps.

While I am on the subject of ancient art--of which so many curious
specimens are to be seen in this Citadel--it may not be irrelevant to
conduct the reader at once to what is called the Town Hall--a very large
structure--of which portions are devoted to the exhibition of old
pictures. Many of these paintings are in a very suspicious state, from
the operations of time and accident; but the great boast of the
collection is the "Triumphs of Maximilian I.," executed by Albert
Duerer--which, however, has by no means escaped injury. I was accompanied
in my visit to this interesting collection by Mr. Boerner, and had
particular reason to be pleased by the friendliness of his attentions,
and by the intelligence of his observations. A great number of these
pictures (as I understood) belonged to a house in which he was a
partner; and among them a portrait, by Pens, struck me as being
singularly admirable and exquisite. The countenance, the dress, the
attitude, the drawing and coloring, were as perfect as they well might
be. But this collection has also suffered from the transportation of
many of its treasures to Munich. The rooms, halls, and corridors of this
Hotel de Ville give you a good notion of municipal grandeur.

In the neighborhood of Nuremberg--that is to say, scarcely more than an
English mile from thence--are the grave and tombstone of Albert Duerer.
The monument is simple and striking. In the churchyard there is a
representation of the Crucifixion, cut in stone. It was on a fine, calm
evening, just after sunset, that I first visited the tombstone of Albert
Duerer; and I shall always remember the sensations, with which that visit
was attended, as among the most pleasing and impressive of my life. The
silence of the spot--its retirement from the city--the falling shadows
of night, and the increasing solemnity of every monument of the
dead--together with the mysterious, and even awful, effect produced by
the colossal crucifix--but yet, perhaps, more than either, the
recollection of the extraordinary talents of the artist, so quietly
sleeping beneath my feet--all conspired to produce a train of
reflections which may be readily conceived, but not so readily
described. If ever a man deserved to be considered as the glory of his
age and nation, Albert Duerer was surely that man. He was, in truth, the
Shakespeare of his art--for the period.

[Footnote A: From "A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour."
Dibdin's tour was made in 1821.]




NUREMBERG TO-DAY[A]

BY CECIL HEADLAM


Nuremberg is set upon a series of small slopes in the midst of an
undulating, sandy plain, some 900 feet above the sea. Here and there on
every side fringes and patches of the mighty forest which once covered
it are still visible; but for the most part the plain is now freckled
with picturesque villages, in which stand old turreted chateaux, with
gabled fronts and latticed windows, or it is clothed with carefully
cultivated crops or veiled from sight by the smoke which rises from the
new-grown forest of factory chimneys.

The railway sets us down outside the walls of the city. As we walk from
the station toward the Frauen Thor, and stand beneath the crown of
fortified walls three and a half miles in circumference, and gaze at the
old gray towers and picturesque confusion of domes, pinnacles and
spires, suddenly it seems as if our dream of a feudal city has been
realized. There, before us, is one of the main entrances, still between
massive gates and beneath archways flanked by stately towers. Still to
reach it we must cross a moat fifty feet deep and a hundred feet wide.
True, the swords of old days have been turned into pruning-hooks; the
crenelles and embrasures which once bristled and blazed with cannon are
now curtained with brambles and wall-flowers, and festooned with
Virginia creepers; the galleries are no longer crowded with archers and
cross-bowmen; the moat itself has blossomed into a garden, luxuriant
with limes and acacias, elders, planes, chestnuts, poplars, walnut,
willow and birch trees, or divided into carefully tilled little garden
plots. True it is that outside the moat, beneath the smug grin of
substantial modern houses, runs that mark of modernity, the electric
tram.

But let us for the moment forget these gratifying signs of modern
prosperity and, turning to the left ere we enter the Frauen Thor, walk
with our eyes on the towers which, with their steep-pitched roofs and
myriad shapes and richly colored tiles, mark the intervals in the
red-bricked, stone-cased galleries and mighty bastions, till we come to
the first beginnings of Nuremberg--the Castle. There, on the highest
eminence of the town, stands that venerable fortress, crowning the red
slope of tiles. Roofs piled on roofs, their pinnacles, turrets, points
and angles heaped one above the other in a splendid confusion, climb the
hill which culminates in the varied group of buildings on the Castle
rock. We have passed the Spittler, Mohren, Haller and Neu Gates on our
way, and we have crossed by the Hallerthorbruecke the Pegnitz where it
flows into the town. Before us rise the bold scarps and salient angles
of the bastions built by the Italian architect, Antonio Fazuni, called
the Maltese (1538-43).

Crossing the moat by a wooden bridge which curls round to the right, we
enter the town by the Thiergaertnerthor. The right-hand corner house
opposite us now is Albert Duerer's house. We turn to the left and go
along the Obere Schmiedgasse till we arrive at the top of a steep hill
(Burgstrasse). Above, on the left, is the Castle.

We may now either go through the Himmels Thor to the left, or keeping
straight up under the old trees and passing the "Mount of Olives" on the
left, approach the large deep-roofed building between two towers. This
is the Kaiserstallung, as it is called, the Imperial stables, built
originally for a granary. The towers are the Luginsland (Look in the
land) on the east, and the Fuenfeckiger Thurm, the Five-cornered tower,
at the west end (on the left hand as we thus face it). The Luginsland
was built by the townspeople in the hard winter of 1377. The mortar for
building it, tradition says, had to be mixed with salt, so that it might
be kept soft and be worked in spite of the severe cold. The chronicles
state that one could see right into the Burggraf's Castle from this
tower, and the town was therefore kept informed of any threatening
movements on his part.

To some extent that was very likely the object in view when the tower
was built, but chiefly it must have been intended, as its name
indicates, to afford a far look-out into the surrounding country. The
granary or Kaiserstallung, as it was called later, was erected in 1494,
and is referred to by Hans Behaim as lying between the Five-cornered and
the Luginsland Towers. Inside the former there is a museum of
curiosities (Hans Sachs' harp) and the famous collection of instruments
of torture and the Maiden (Eiserne Jungfrau). The open space adjoining
it commands a splendid view to the north. There, too, on the
parapet-wall, may be seen the hoof-marks of the horse of the
robber-king, Ekkelein von Gailingen. Here for a moment let us pause,
consider our position, and endeavor to make out from the conflicting
theories of the archeologists something of the original arrangement of
the castles and of the significance of the buildings and towers that yet
remain.

Stretching to the east of the rock on which the Castle stands is a wide
plain, now the scene of busy industrial enterprise, but in old days no
doubt a mere district of swamp and forest. Westward the rock rises by
three shelves to the summit. The entrance to the Castle, it is surmised,
was originally on the east side, at the foot of the lower plateau and
through a tower which no longer exists.

Opposite this hypothetical gate-way stood the Five-cornered tower. The
lower part dates, we have seen, from no earlier than the eleventh
century. It is referred to as Alt-Nuernberg (old Nuremberg) in the Middle
Ages. The title of "Five-cornered" is really somewhat a misnomer, for an
examination of the interior of the lower portion of the tower reveals
the fact that it is quadrangular. The pentagonal appearance of the
exterior is due to the fragment of a smaller tower which once leaned
against it, and probably formed the apex of a wing running out from the
old castle of the Burggrafs. The Burggraefliche Burg stood below,
according to Mummenhof, southwest and west of this point. It was burned
down in 1420, and the ruined remains of it are supposed to be traceable
in the eminence, now overgrown by turf and trees, through which a sort
of ravine, closed in on either side by built-up walls, has just brought
us from the town to the Vestner Thor.

The Burggraf's Castle would appear to have been so situated as to
protect the approach to the Imperial Castle (Kaiserburg). The exact
extent of the former we can not now determine. Meisterlin refers to it
as a little fort. We may, however, be certain that it reached from the
Five-cornered tower to the Walpurgiskapelle. For this little chapel,
east of the open space called the Freiung, is repeatedly spoken of as
being on the property of the Burggrafs. Besides their castle proper,
which was held at first as a fief of the Empire, and afterward came to
be regarded as their hereditary, independent property, the Burggrafs
were also entrusted with the keeping of a tower which commanded the
entrance to the Castle rock on the country side, perhaps near the site
of the present Vestner Thor. The guard door may have been attached to
the tower, the lower portion of which remains to this day, and is called
the Bailiff's Dwelling (Burgamtmannswohnung). The exact relationship of
the Burggraf to the town on the one hand, and to the Empire on the
other, is somewhat obscure. Originally, it would appear, he was merely
an Imperial officer, administering Imperial estates, and looking after
Imperial interests. In later days he came to possess great power, but
this was due not to his position as castellan or castle governor as
such, but to the vast private property his position had enabled him to
amass and to keep.

As the scope and ambitions of the Burggrafs increased, and as the
smallness of their castle at Nuremberg, and the constant friction with
the townspeople, who were able to annoy them in many ways, became more
irksome, they gave up living at Nuremberg, and finally were content to
sell their rights and possessions there to the town. Beside the guard
door of the Burggrafs, which together with their castle passed by
purchase into the hands of the town (1427), there were various other
similar guard towers, such as the one which formerly occupied the
present site of the Luginsland, or the Hasenburg at the so-called
Himmels Thor, or a third which once stood near the Deep Well on the
second plateau of the Castle rock. But we do not know how many of these
there were, or where they stood, much less at what date they were built.
All we do know is that they, as well as the Burggrafs' possessions, were
purchased in succession by the town, into whose hands by degrees came
the whole property of the Castle rock. Above the ruins of the "little
fort" of the Burggrafs rises the first plateau of the Castle rock. It is
surrounded by a wall, strengthened on the south side by a square tower
against which leans the Walpurgiskapelle.

The path to the Kaiserburg leads under the wall of the plateau, and is
entirely commanded by it and by the quadrangular tower, the lower part
of which alone remains and is known by the name of Burgamtmannswohnung.
The path goes straight to this tower, and at the foot of it is the
entrance to the first plateau. Then along the edge of this plateau the
way winds southward, entirely commanded again by the wall of the second
plateau, at the foot of which there probably used to be a trench. Over
this a bridge led to the gate of the second plateau. The trench has been
long since filled in, but the huge round tower which guarded the gate
still remains and is the Vestner Thurm. The Vestner Thurm of Sinwel
Thurm (sinwel = round), or, as it is called in a charter of the year
1313, the "Middle Tower," is the only round tower of the Burg. It was
built in the days of early Gothic, with a sloping base, and of roughly
flattened stones with a smooth edge. It was partly restored and altered
in 1561, when it was made a few feet higher and its round roof was
added. It is worth paying the small gratuity required for ascending to
the top. The view obtained of the city below is magnificent. The Vestner
Thurm, like the whole Imperial castle, passed at length into the care of
the town, which kept its Tower watch here as early as the fourteenth
century.

The well which supplied the second plateau with water, the "Deep Well,"
as it is called, stands in the center, surrounded by a wall. It is 335
feet deep, hewn out of the solid rock, and is said to have been wrought
by the hands of prisoners, and to have been the labor of thirty years.
So much we can easily believe as we lean over and count the six seconds
that elapse between the time when an object is dropt from the top to the
time when it strikes the water beneath. Passages lead from the water's
edge to the Rathaus, by which prisoners came formerly to draw water, and
to St. John's Churchyard and other points outside the town. The system
of underground passages here and in the Castle was an important part of
the defenses, affording as it did a means of communication with the
outer world and as a last extremity, in the case of a siege, a means of
escape.

Meanwhile, leaving the Deep Well and passing some insignificant modern
dwellings, and leaving beneath us on the left the Himmelsthor, let us
approach the summit of the rock and the buildings of the Kaiserburg
itself. As we advance to the gateway with the intention of ringing the
bell for the castellan, we notice on the left the Double Chapel,
attaching to the Heathen Tower, the lower part of which is encrusted
with what were once supposed to be Pagan images. The Tower protrudes
beyond the face of the third plateau, and its prominence may indicate
the width of a trench, now filled in, which was once dug outside the
enclosing wall of the summit of the rock. The whole of the south side of
this plateau is taken up by the "Palast" (the vast hall, two stories
high, which, tho it has been repeatedly rebuilt, may in its original
structure be traced back as far as the twelfth century), and the
"Kemnate" or dwelling-rooms which seem to have been without any means of
defense. This plateau, like the second, is supplied with a well. But the
first object that strikes the eye on entering the court-yard is the
ruined limetree, the branches of which once spread their broad and
verdant shelter over the whole extent of the quadrangle.

On leaving the Castle we find ourselves in the Burgstrasse, called in
the old days Unter der Veste, which was probably the High Street of the
old town. Off both sides of this street and of the Bergstrasse ran
narrow crooked little alleys lined with wooden houses of which time and
fire have left scarcely any trace. As you wander round the city tracing
the line of the old walls, you are struck by the general air of
splendor. Most of the houses are large and of a massive style of
architecture, adorned with fanciful gables and bearing the impress of
the period when every inhabitant was a merchant, and every merchant was
lodged like a king. The houses of the merchant princes, richly carved
both inside and out, tell of the wealth and splendor of Nuremberg in her
proudest days. But you will also come upon a hundred crooked little
streets and narrow alleys, which, tho entrancingly picturesque, tell of
yet other days and other conditions.

They tell of those early medieval days when the houses were almost all
of wood and roofed with straw-thatching or wooden tiles; when the
chimneys and bridges alike were built of wood. Only here and there a
stone house roofed with brick could then be seen. The streets were
narrow and crooked, and even in the fifteenth century mostly unpaved. In
wet weather they were filled with unfathomable mud, and even tho in the
lower part of the town trenches were dug to drain the streets, they
remained mere swamps and morasses. In dry weather the dust was even a
worse plague than the mud. Pig-styes stood in front of the houses; and
the streets were covered with heaps of filth and manure and with rotting
corpses of animals, over which the pigs wandered at will. Street police
in fact was practically non-existent. Medievalism is undoubtedly better
when survived.

[Footnote A: From "The Story of Nuremberg." Published by E.P. Dutton &
Co.]




WALLS AND OTHER FORTIFICATIONS[A]

BY CECIL HEADLAM


A glance at the map will show us that Nuremberg, as we know it, is
divided into two almost equal divisions. They are called after the names
of the principal churches, the St. Lorenz, and the St. Sebald quarter.
The original wall included, it will be seen, only a small portion of the
northern or St. Sebald division. With the growth of the town an
extension of the walls and an increase of fortification followed as a
matter of course. It became necessary to carry the wall over the Pegnitz
in order to protect the Lorenzkirche and the suburb which was springing
up around it. The precise date of this extension of the fortifications
can not be fixt. The chronicles attribute it to the twelfth century, in
the reign of the first Hohenstaufen, Konrad III. No trace of a
twelfth-century wall remains; but the chroniclers may, for all that,
have been not very wide of the mark. The mud and wood which supplied the
material of the wall may have given place to stone in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. However that may be, it will be remembered that
the lower part of the White Tower, which is the oldest fragment of
building we can certainly point to dates from the thirteenth century.
All other portions of the second wall clearly indicate the fourteenth
century, or later, as the time of their origin....

Beyond the White Tower the moat was long ago filled up, but the section
of it opposite the Unschlittplatz remained open for a longer period than
the rest, and was called the Klettengraben, because of the burdocks
which took root there. Hereabouts, on a part of the moat, the
Waizenbraeuhaus was built in 1671, which is now the famous Freiherrlich
von Tuchersche Brewery. Here, too, the Unschlitthaus was built at the
end of the fifteenth century as a granary. It has since been turned into
a school.

We have now reached one of the most charming and picturesque bits of
Nuremberg. Once more we have to cross the Pegnitz, whose banks are
overhung by quaint old houses. Their projecting roofs and high gables,
their varied chimneys and overhanging balconies from which trail rich
masses of creepers, make an entrancing foreground to the towers and the
arches of the Henkersteg. The wall was carried on arches over the
southern arm of the Pegnitz to the point of the Saumarkt (or
Troedelmarkt) island which here divides the river, and thence in like
manner over the northern arm. The latter portion of it alone survives
and comprises a large tower on the north bank called the Wasserthurm,
which was intended to break the force of the stream; a bridge supported
by two arches over the stream, which was the Henkersteg, the habitation
of the hangman, and on the island itself a smaller tower, which formed
the point of support for the original, southern pair of arches, which
joined the Unschlitthaus, but were so badly damaged in 1595 by the high
flood that they were demolished and replaced by a wooden, and later by
an iron bridge.

Somewhere in the second half of the fourteenth century, then, in the
reign of Karl IV., they began to build the outer enceinte, which, altho
destroyed at many places and broken through by modern gates and
entrances, is still fairly well preserved, and secures to Nuremberg the
reputation of presenting most faithfully of all the larger German towns
the characteristics of a medieval town. The fortifications seem to have
been thrown up somewhat carelessly at first, but dread of the Hussites
soon inspired the citizens to make themselves as secure as possible. In
times of war and rumors of war all the peasants within a radius of two
miles of the town were called upon to help in the construction of
barriers and ramparts. The whole circle of walls, towers, and ditches
was practically finished by 1452, when with pardonable pride Tucher
wrote, "In this year was completed the ditch round the town. It took
twenty-six years to build, and it will cost an enemy a good deal of
trouble to cross it." Part of the ditch had been made and perhaps
revetted as early as 1407, but it was not till twenty years later that
it began to be dug to the enormous breadth and depth which it boasts
to-day. The size of it was always a source of pride to Nurembergers, and
it was perhaps due to this reason that up till as recently as 1869 it
was left perfectly intact. On the average it is about 100 feet broad.

It was always intended to be a dry ditch, and, so far from there being
any arrangements for flooding it, precautions were taken to carry the
little Fischbach, which formerly entered the town near the modern
Sternthor, across the ditch in a trough. The construction of the ditch
was provided for by an order of the Council in 1427, to the effect that
all householders, whether male or female, must work at the ditch one day
in the year with their children of over twelve years of age, and with
all their servants, male or female. Those who were not able to work had
to pay a substitute. Subsequently this order was changed to the effect
that every one who could or would not work must pay ten pfennige. There
were no exemptions from this liturgy, whether in favor of councillor,
official, or lady. The order remained ten years in force, tho the
amount of the payment was gradually reduced....

At the time of the construction of these and the other lofty towers it
was still thought that the raising of batteries as much as possible
would increase their effect. In practise the plunging fire from
platforms at the height of some eighty feet above the level of the
parapets of the town wall can hardly have been capable of producing any
great effect, more especially if the besieging force succeeded in
establishing itself on the crest of the counterscarp of the ditches,
since from that point the swell of the bastions masked the towers. But
there was another use for these lofty towers. The fact is that the
Nuremberg engineers, at the time that they were built, had not yet
adopted a complete system of flank-works, and not having as yet applied
with all its consequences the axiom that that which defends should
itself be defended, they wanted to see and command their external
defenses from within the body of the place, as, a century before, the
baron could see from the top of his donjon whatever was going on round
the walls of his castle, and send up his support to any point of attack.
The great round towers of Nuremberg are more properly, in fact, detached
keeps than portions of a combined system, rather observatories than
effective defenses.

The round towers, however, were not the sole defenses of the gates.
Outside each one of them was a kind of fence of pointed beams after the
manner of a chevaux-de-frise, while outside the ditch and close to the
bridge stood a barrier, by the side of which was a guard-house. Tho it
was not till 1598 that all the main gates were fitted with drawbridges,
the wooden bridges that served before that could doubtless easily be
destroyed in cases of emergency. Double-folding doors and portcullises
protected the gateways themselves. Once past there, the enemy was far
from being in the town, for the road led through extensive advanced
works, presenting, as in the case of the Laufer Thor outwork, a regular
"place d'armes." Further, the road was so engineered as not to lead in a
straight line from the outer main gates to the inner ones, but rather so
as to pursue a circuitous course. Thus the enemy in passing through from
the one to the other were exposed as long as possible to the shots and
projectiles of the defenders, who were stationed all round the walls and
towers flanking the advanced tambour. This arrangement may be traced
very clearly at the Frauen Thor to-day. The position of the round tower,
it will be observed, was an excellent one for commanding the road from
the outer to the inner gate.

At intervals of every 120 or 150 feet the interior wall is broken by
quadrilateral towers. Some eighty-three of these, including the gate
towers, can still be traced. What the number was originally we do not
know. It is the sort of subject on which chroniclers have no manner of
conscience. The Hartmann Schedel Chronicle, for instance, gives
Nuremberg 365 towers in all. The fact that there are 365 days in the
year is of course sufficient proof of this assertion! The towers, which
rise two or even three stories above the wall, communicated on both
sides with the covered way. They are now used as dwelling-houses. On
some of them there can still be seen, projecting near the roof, two
little machicoulis turrets, which served as guard-rooms for observing
the enemy, and also, by overhanging the base of the tower, enabled the
garrison to hurl down on their assailants at the foot of the wall a
hurricane of projectiles of every sort. Like the wall the towers are
built almost entirely of sandstone, but on the side facing the town they
are usually faced with brick. The shapes of the roofs vary from flat to
pointed, but the towers themselves are simple and almost austere in form
in comparison with those generally found in North Germany, where fantasy
runs riot in red brick. The Nuremberg towers were obviously intended in
the first place for use rather than for ornament.

At the end of our long perambulations of the walls it will be a grateful
relief to sit for a while at one of the "Restaurations" or restaurants
on the walls. There, beneath the shade of acacias in the daytime, or in
the evening by the white light of incandescent gas, you may sit and
watch the groups of men, women, and children all drinking from their
tall glasses of beer, and you may listen to the whirr and ting-tang of
the electric cars, where the challenge of sentinels or the cry of the
night-watchman was once the most frequent sound. Or, if you have grown
tired of the Horn- and the Schloss-zwinger, cross the ditch on the west
side of the town and make your way to the Rosenau, in the
Fuertherstrasse. The Rosenau is a garden of trees and roses not lacking
in chairs and tables, in bowers, benches, and a band. There, too, you
will see the good burgher with his family drinking beer, eating
sausages, and smoking contentedly.

[Footnote A: From "The Story of Nuremberg." Published by E.P. Dutton &
Co.]




ALBERT DUERER[A]

BY CECIL HEADLAM


Among the most treasured of Nuremberg's relics is the low-ceilinged,
gabled house near the Thiergaertnerthor, in which Albert Duerer lived and
died, in the street now called after his name. The works of art which he
presented to the town, or with which he adorned its churches, have
unfortunately, with but few exceptions, been sold to the stranger. It is
in Vienna and Munich, in Dresden and Berlin, in Florence, in Prague, or
the British Museum, that we find splendid collections of Duerer's works.
Not at Nuremberg. But here at any rate we can see the house in which he
toiled--no genius ever took more pains--and the surroundings which
imprest his mind and influenced his inspiration.

If, in the past, Nuremberg has been only too anxious to turn his works
into cash, to-day she guards Albert Duerer's house with a care and
reverence little short of religious. She has sold, in the days of her
poverty and foolishness, the master's pictures and drawings, which are
his own best monument; but she has set up a noble monument to his memory
(by Rauch, 1840) in the Duerer Platz, and his house is opened to the
public between the hours of 8 A.M. and 1 P.M., and 2 and 6 P.M. on week
days. The Albert-Duerer-Haus Society has done admirable work in restoring
and preserving the house in its original state with the aid of Professor
Wanderer's architectural and antiquarian skill. Reproductions of
Duerer's works are also kept here.

The most superficial acquaintance with Duerer's drawings will have
prepared us for the sight of his simple, unpretentious house and its
contents. In his "Birth of the Virgin" he gives us a picture of the
German home of his day, where there were few superfluous knick-knacks,
but everything which served for daily use was well and strongly made and
of good design. Ceilings, windows, doors and door-handles, chests,
locks, candlesticks, banisters, waterpots, the very cooking utensils,
all betray the fine taste and skilled labor, the personal interest of
the man who made them. So in Duerer's house, as it is preserved to-day,
we can still see and admire the careful simplicity of domestic
furniture, which distinguishes that in the "Birth of the Virgin." The
carved coffers, the solid tables, the spacious window-seats, the
well-fitting cabinets let into the walls, the carefully wrought
metal-work we see there are not luxurious; their merit is quite other
than that. In workmanship as in design, how utterly do they put to shame
the contents of the ordinary "luxuriously furnished apartments" of the
present day!

And what manner of man was he who lived in this house that nestles
beneath the ancient castle? In the first place a singularly loveable
man, a man of sweet and gentle spirit, whose life was one of high ideals
and noble endeavor. In the second place an artist who, both for his
achievements and for his influence on art, stands in the very front rank
of artists, and of German artists is "facile princeps." At whatever
point we may study Duerer and his works we are never conscious of
disappointment. As painter, as author, as engraver, or simple citizen,
the more we know of him the more we are morally and intellectually
satisfied. Fortunately, through his letters and writings, his journals
and autobiographical memoirs we know a good deal about his personal
history and education.

Duerer's grandfather came of a farmer race in the village of Eytas in
Hungary. The grandfather turned goldsmith, and his eldest son, Albrecht
Duerer the elder, came to Nuremberg in 1455 and settled in the
Burgstrasse (No. 27). He became one of the leading goldsmiths of the
town; married and had eighteen children, of whom only three, boys, grew
up. Albrecht, or as we call him Albert Duerer, was the eldest of these.
He was born May 21, 1471, in his father's house, and Anthoni Koberger,
the printer and bookseller, the Stein of those days, stood godfather to
him. The maintenance of so large a family involved the father, skilful
artist as he was, in unremitting toil.

His father, who was delighted with Albert's industry, took him from
school as soon as he had learned to read and write and apprenticed him
to a goldsmith. "But my taste drew me toward painting rather than toward
goldsmithry. I explained this to my father, but he was not satisfied,
for he regretted the time I had lost." Benvenuto Cellini has told us how
his father, in like fashion, was eager that he should practise the
"accurst art" of music. Duerer's father, however, soon gave in and in
1486 apprenticed the boy to Michael Wolgemut. That extraordinary
beautiful, and, for a boy of that age, marvelously executed portrait of
himself at the age of thirteen (now at Vienna) must have shown the
father something of the power that lay undeveloped in his son. So "it
was arranged that I should serve him for three years. During that time
God gave me great industry so that I learned many things; but I had to
suffer much at the hands of the other apprentices."

When in 1490 his apprenticeship was completed Duerer set out on his
Wanderjahre, to learn what he could of men and things, and, more
especially, of his own trade. Martin Schongauer was dead, but under that
master's brothers Duerer studied and helped to support himself by his art
at Colmar and at Basle. Various wood-blocks executed by him at the
latter place are preserved there. Whether he also visited Venice now or
not is a moot point. Here or elsewhere, at any rate, he came under the
influence of the Bellini, of Mantegna, and more particularly of Jacopo
dei Barbari--the painter and engraver to whom he owed the incentive to
study the proportions of the human body--a study which henceforth became
the most absorbing interest of his life.

"I was four years absent from Nuremberg," he records, "and then my
father recalled me. After my return Hans Frey came to an understanding
with my father. He gave me his daughter Agnes and with her 200 florins,
and we were married." Duerer, who writes so lovingly of his parents,
never mentions his wife with any affection; a fact which to some extent
confirms her reputation as a Xantippe. She, too, in her way, it is
suggested, practised the art of cross-hatching. Pirkheimer, writing
after the artist's death, says that by her avariciousness and quarreling
nature she brought him to the grave before his day. She was probably a
woman of a practical and prosaic turn, to whom the dreamy, poetic,
imaginative nature of the artist-student, her husband, was intolerably
irritating. Yet as we look at his portraits of himself--and no man
except Rembrandt has painted himself so often--it is difficult to
understand how any one could have been angry with Albert Duerer. Never
did the face of man bear a more sweet, benign, and trustful expression.
In those portraits we see something of the beauty, of the strength, of
the weakness of the man so beloved in his generation. His fondness for
fine clothes and his legitimate pride in his personal beauty reveal
themselves in the rich vestments he wears and the wealth of silken
curls, so carefully waved, so wondrously painted, falling proudly over
his free neck.


[Footnote A: From "The Story of Nuremberg." Published by E.P. Dutton &
Co.]




III

OTHER BAVARIAN CITIES




MUNICH[A]

BY BAYARD TAYLOR


Art has done everything for Munich. It lies on a large flat plain
sixteen hundred feet above the sea and continually exposed to the cold
winds from the Alps. At the beginning of the present century it was but
a third-rate city, and was rarely visited by foreigners; since that time
its population and limits have been doubled and magnificent edifices in
every style of architecture erected, rendering it scarcely secondary in
this respect to any capital in Europe.[B] Every art that wealth or taste
could devise seems to have been spent in its decoration. Broad, spacious
streets and squares have been laid out, churches, halls and colleges
erected, and schools of painting and sculpture established which draw
artists from all parts of the world. All this was principally brought
about by the taste of the present king, Ludwig I., who began twenty or
thirty years ago, when he was crown-prince, to collect the best German
artists around him and form plans for the execution of his grand
design. He can boast of having done more for the arts than any other
living monarch; and if he had accomplished it all without oppressing his
people, he would deserve an immortality of fame....

We went one morning to see the collection of paintings formerly
belonging to Eugene Beauharnais, who was brother-in-law to the present
King of Bavaria, in the palace of his son, the Duke of Leuchtenberg. The
first hall contains works principally by French artists, among which are
two by Gerard--a beautiful portrait of Josephine, and the blind
Belisarius carrying his dead companion. The boy's head lies on the old
man's shoulder; but for the livid paleness of his limbs, he would seem
to be only asleep, while a deep and settled sorrow marks the venerable
features of the unfortunate emperor. In the middle of the room are six
pieces of statuary, among which Canova's world-renowned group of the
Graces at once attracts the eye. There is also a kneeling Magdalen,
lovely in her wo, by the same sculptor, and a very touching work of
Schadow representing a shepherd-boy tenderly binding his sash around a
lamb which he has accidentaly wounded with his arrow.

We have since seen in the St. Michael's Church the monument to Eugene
Beauharnais from the chisel of Thorwaldsen. The noble, manly figure of
the son of Josephine is represented in the Roman mantle, with his helmet
and sword lying on the ground by him. On one side sits History writing
on a tablet; on the other stand the two brother-angels Death and
Immortality. They lean lovingly together, with arms around each other,
but the sweet countenance of Death has a cast of sorrow as he stands
with inverted torch and a wreath of poppies among his clustering locks.
Immortality, crowned with never-fading flowers, looks upward with a
smile of triumph, and holds in one hand his blazing torch. It is a
beautiful idea, and Thorwaldsen has made the marble eloquent with
feeling.

The inside of the square formed by the arcades and the New Residence is
filled with noble old trees which in summer make a leafy roof over the
pleasant walks. In the middle stands a grotto ornamented with rough
pebbles and shells, and only needing a fountain to make it a perfect
hall of Neptune. Passing through the northern arcade, one comes into the
magnificent park called the English Garden, which extends more than four
miles along the bank of the Isar, several branches of whose milky
current wander through it and form one or two pretty cascades. It is a
beautiful alteration of forest and meadow, and has all the richness and
garden-like luxuriance of English scenery. Winding walks lead along the
Isar or through the wood of venerable oaks, and sometimes a lawn of half
a mile in length, with a picturesque temple at its farther end, comes in
sight through the trees.

The New Residence is not only one of the wonders of Munich, but of the
world. Altho commenced in 1826 and carried on constantly since that time
by a number of architects, sculptors and painters, it is not yet
finished; if art were not inexhaustible, it would be difficult to
imagine what more could be added. The north side of the Max Joseph Platz
is taken up by its front of four hundred and thirty feet, which was nine
years in building, under the direction of the architect Klenze. The
exterior is copied after the Palazzo Pitti, in Florence. The building is
of light-brown sandstone, and combines an elegance, and even splendor,
with the most chaste and classic style. The northern front, which faces
the royal garden, is now nearly finished. It has the enormous length of
eight hundred feet; in the middle is a portico of ten Ionic columns.
Instead of supporting a triangular facade, each pillar stands separate
and bears a marble statue from the chisel of Schwanthaler.

The interior of the building does not disappoint the promise of the
outside. It is open every afternoon, in the absence of the king, for the
inspection of visitors. We went early to the waiting-hall, where several
travelers were already assembled, and at four o'clock were admitted into
the newer part of the palace, containing the throne-hall, ball-room,
etc. On entering the first hall, designed for the lackeys and royal
servants, we were all obliged to thrust our feet into cloth slippers to
walk over the polished mosaic floor. The walls are of scagliola marble
and the ceilings ornamented brilliantly in fresco. The second hall, also
for servants, gives tokens of increasing splendors in the richer
decorations of the walls and the more elaborate mosaic of the floor. We
next entered the audience chamber, in which the court-marshal receives
the guests. The ceiling is of arabesque sculpture profusely painted and
gilded....

Finally we entered the Hall of the Throne. Here the encaustic decoration
so plentifully employed in the other rooms is dropt, and an effect even
more brilliant obtained by the united use of marble and gold. Picture a
long hall with a floor of polished marble, on each side twelve columns
of white marble with gilded capitals, between which stand colossal
statues of gold. At the other end is the throne of gold and crimson,
with gorgeous hangings of crimson velvet. The twelve statues in the hall
are called the "Wittelsbach Ancestors" and represent renowned members of
the house of Wittelsbach from which the present family of Bavaria is
descended. They were cast in bronze by Stiglmaier after the models of
Schwanthaler, and then completely covered with a coating of gold; so
that they resemble solid golden statues. The value of the precious metal
on each one is about three thousand dollars, as they are nine feet in
height. We visited yesterday morning the Glyptothek, the finest
collection of ancient sculpture except that in the British Museum I have
yet seen, and perhaps elsewhere unsurpassed north of the Alps. The
building, which was finished by Klenze in 1830, has an Ionic portico of
white marble, with a group of allegorical figures representing Sculpture
and the kindred arts. On each side of the portico there are three niches
in the front, containing on one side Pericles, Phidias and Vulcan; on
the other, Hadrian, Prometheus and Daedalus. The whole building forms a
hollow square and is lighted entirely from the inner side. There are in
all twelve halls, each containing the remains of a particular era in the
art, and arranged according to time; so that, beginning with the clumsy
productions of the ancient Egyptians, one passes through the different
stages of Grecian art, afterward that of Rome, and finally ends with the
works of our own times--the almost Grecian perfection of Thorwaldsen and
Canova. These halls are worthy to hold such treasures, and what more
could be said of them? The floors are of marble mosaic, the sides of
green or purple scagliola and the vaulted ceilings covered with raised
ornaments on a ground of gold. No two are alike in color and decoration,
and yet there is a unity of taste and design in the whole which renders
the variety delightful.

From the Egyptian Hall we enter one containing the oldest remains of
Grecian sculpture, before the artists won power to mold the marble to
their conceptions. Then follow the celebrated Aegina marbles, from the
temple of Jupiter Panhellenius, on the island of Aegina. They formerly
stood in the two porticoes, the one group representing the fight for the
body of Laomedon, the other the struggle for the dead Patroclus. The
parts wanting have been admirably restored by Thorwaldsen. They form
almost the only existing specimens of the Aeginetan school. Passing
through the Apollo Hall, we enter the large Hall of Bacchus, in which
the progress of the art is distinctly apparent. A satyr lying asleep on
a goatskin which he has thrown over a rock is believed to be the work of
Praxiteles. The relaxation of the figure and perfect repose of every
limb is wonderful. The countenance has traits of individuality which led
me to think it might have been a portrait, perhaps of some rude country
swain.

In the Hall of Niobe, which follows, is one of the most perfect works
that ever grew into life under a sculptor's chisel. Mutilated as it is,
without head and arms, I never saw a more expressive figure. Ilioneus,
the son of Niobe, is represented as kneeling, apparently in the moment
in which Apollo raises his arrow, and there is an imploring
supplication in his attitude which is touching in the highest degree.
His beautiful young limbs seem to shrink involuntarily from the deadly
shaft; there is an expression of prayer, almost of agony, in the
position of his body. It should be left untouched. No head could be
added which would equal that one pictures to himself while gazing upon
it.

The Pinacothek is a magnificent building of yellow sandstone, five
hundred and thirty feet long, containing thirteen hundred pictures
selected with great care from the whole private collection of the king,
which amounts to nine thousand. Above the cornice on the southern side
stand twenty-five colossal statues of celebrated painters by
Schwanthaler. As we approached, the tall bronze door was opened by a
servant in the Bavarian livery, whose size harmonized so well with the
giant proportions of the building that until I stood beside him and
could mark the contrast I did not notice his enormous frame. I saw then
that he must be near eight feet high and stout in proportion. He
reminded me of the great "Baver of Trient," in Vienna. The Pinacothek
contains the most complete collection of works by old German artists
anywhere to be found. There are in the Hall of the Spanish Masters half
a dozen of Murillo's inimitable beggar-groups.

It was a relief, after looking upon the distressingly stiff figures of
the old German school, to view these fresh, natural countenances. One
little black-eyed boy has just cut a slice out of a melon, and turns
with a full mouth to his companion, who is busy eating a bunch of
grapes. The simple, contented expression on the faces of the beggars is
admirable. I thought I detected in a beautiful child with dark curly
locks the original of his celebrated infant St. John. I was much
interested in two small juvenile works of Raphael and his own portrait.
The latter was taken, most probably, after he became known as a painter.
The calm, serious smile which we see on his portrait as a boy had
vanished, and the thin features and sunken eye told of intense mental
labor.

[Footnote A: From "Views Afoot." Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.]

[Footnote B: This was written about 1848. The population of Munich is
now (1914), 595,000. Munich is rated as third in importance among German
cities.]




AUGSBURG[A]

BY THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN


In ancient times--that is to say, upward of three centuries ago--the
city of Augsburg was probably the most populous and consequential in the
kingdom of Bavaria. It was the principal residence of the noblesse, and
the great mart of commerce. Dukes, barons, nobles of every rank and
degree, became domiciled here. A thousand blue and white flags streamed
from the tops of castellated mansions, and fluttered along the then
almost impregnable ramparts. It was also not less remarkable for the
number and splendor of its religious establishments. Here was a
cathedral, containing twenty-four chapels; and an abbey or monastery (of
Saints Ulric and Afra) which had no rival in Bavaria for the size of its
structure and the wealth of its possessions. This latter contained a
Library, both of MSS. and printed books, of which the recent work of
Braun has luckily preserved a record; and which, but for such record,
would have been unknown to after ages. The treasures of this library are
now entirely dispersed; and Munich, the capital of Bavaria, is the grand
repository of them. Augsburg, in the first instance, was enriched by the
dilapidations of numerous monasteries; especially upon the suppression
of the order of the Jesuits. The paintings, books, and relics, of every
description, of such monasteries as were in the immediate vicinity of
this city, were taken away to adorn the town hall, churches, capitals
and libraries. Of this collection (of which no inconsiderable portion,
both for number and intrinsic value, came from the neighboring monastery
of Eichstadt), there has of course been a pruning; and many flowers have
been transplanted to Munich.

The principal church, at the end of the Maximilian Street, is that which
once formed the chief ornament of the famous Abbey of Sts. Ulric and
Afra. I should think that there is no portion of the present building
older than the fourteenth century; while it is evident that the upper
part of the tower is of the middle of the sixteenth. It has a nearly
globular or mosque-shaped termination--so common in the greater number
of the Bavarian churches. It is frequented by congregations both of the
Catholic and Protestant persuasion; and it was highly gratifying to see,
as I saw, human beings assembled under the same roof, equally occupied
in their different forms of adoration, in doing homage to their common
Creator.

Augsburg was once distinguished for great learning and piety, as well as
for political consequence; and she boasts of a very splendid
martyrological roll. At the present day, all is comparatively dull and
quiet; but you can not fail to be struck with the magnificence of many
of the houses, and the air of importance hence given to the streets;
while the paintings upon the outer walls add much to the splendid effect
of the whole. The population of Augsburg is supposed to amount to about
thirty thousand. In the time of Maximilian and Charles V. it was, I make
no doubt, twice as numerous.[B]

[Footnote A: From "A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Taur,"
published in 1821.]

[Footnote B: Augsburg has now (1914) a population of 102,000. Woolen and
cotton goods and machinery are its manufactured products.]




RATISBON[A]

BY THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN


It was dark when we entered Ratisbon, and, having been recommended to
the Hotel of the Agneau Blanc, we drove thither, and alighted--close to
the very banks of the Danube--and heard the roar of its rapid stream,
turning several mills, close, as it were, to our very ears. The master
of the hotel, whose name is Cramer, and who talked French very readily,
received us with peculiar courtesy; and, on demanding the best situated
room in the house, we were conducted on the second floor, to a chamber
which had been occupied, only two or three days before, by the Emperor
of Austria himself, on his way to Aix-la-Chapelle. The next morning was
a morning of wonder to us. Our sitting-room, which was a very lantern,
from the number of windows, gave us a view of the rushing stream of the
Danube, of a portion of the bridge over it, of some beautifully
undulating and vine-covered hills, in the distance, on the opposite
side--and, lower down the stream, of the town walls and water-mills, of
which latter we had heard the stunning sounds on our arrival. The whole
had a singularly novel and pleasing appearance.

The Town Hall was large and imposing; but the Cathedral, surrounded by
booths--it being fair-time--was, of course, the great object of my
attention. In short, I saw enough within an hour to convince me that I
was visiting a large, curious, and well-peopled town; replete with
antiquities, and including several of the time of the Romans, to whom it
was necessarily a very important station. Ratisbon is said to contain a
population of about 20,000 souls.[B]

The cathedral can boast of little antiquity. It is almost a building of
yesterday; yet it is large, richly ornamented on the outside, especially
on the west, between the towers--and is considered one of the noblest
structures of the kind in Bavaria. The interior wants that decisive
effect which simplicity produces. It is too much broken into parts, and
covered with monuments of a very heterogeneous description. Near it I
traced the cloisters of an old convent or monastery of some kind, now
demolished, which could not be less than five hundred years old. The
streets of Ratisbon are generally picturesque, as well from their
undulating forms, as from the antiquity of a great number of the
houses. The modern parts of the town are handsome, and there is a
pleasant intermixture of trees and grass plats in some of these more
recent portions. There are some pleasing public walks, after the English
fashion; and a public garden, where a colossal sphinx, erected by the
late philosopher Gleichen, has a very imposing appearance. Here is also
an obelisk erected to the memory of Gleichen himself, the founder of
these gardens; and a monument to the memory of Kepler, the astronomer;
which latter was luckily spared in the assault of this town by the
French in 1809.

But these are, comparatively, every-day objects. A much more interesting
source of observation, to my mind, were the very few existing relics of
the once celebrated monastery of St. Emmeram--and a great portion of the
remains of another old monastery, called St. James--which latter may
indeed be designated the College of the Jacobites; as the few members
who inhabit it were the followers of the house and fortunes of the
Pretender, James Stuart. The Monastery or Abbey of St. Emmeram was one
of the most celebrated throughout Europe; and I suspect that its
library, both of MSS. and printed books, was among the principal causes
of its celebrity. Of all interesting objects of architectural antiquity
in Ratisbon, none struck me so forcibly--and, indeed, none is in itself
so curious and singular--as the Monastery of St. James. The front of
that portion of it, connected with the church, should seem to be of an
extremely remote antiquity. It is the ornaments, or style of
architecture, which give it this character of antiquity. The ornaments,
which are on each side of the doorway, or porch, are quite
extraordinary.

[Footnote A: From "A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour,"
published in 1821.]


[Footnote B: Ratisbon has now (1914) a population of 53,000. Its
manufactured products consist chiefly of pottery and lead pencils.]




IV

BERLIN AND ELSEWHERE




A LOOK AT THE GERMAN CAPITAL[A]

BY THEOPHILE GAUTIER


The train spins along across great plains gilded by the setting sun;
soon night comes, and with it, sleep. At stations remote from one
another, German voices shout German names; I do not recognize them by
the sound, and look for them in vain upon the map. Magnificent great
station buildings are shown up by gaslight in the midst of surrounding
darkness, then disappear. We pass Hanover and Minden; the train keeps on
its way; and morning dawns.

On either side stretched a peat-moss, upon which the mist was producing
a singular mirage. We seemed to be upon a causeway traversing an immense
lake whose waves crept up gently, dying in transparent folds along the
edge of the embankment. Here and there a group of trees or a cottage,
emerging like an island, completed the illusion, for such it was. A
sheet of bluish mist, floating a little above the ground and curling up
along its upper surface under the rays of the sun, caused this aqueous
phantasmagoria, resembling the Fata Morgana of Sicily. In vain did my
geographical knowledge protest, disconcerted, against this inland sea,
which no map of Prussia indicates; my eyes would not give it up, and
later in the day, when the sun, rising higher, had dried up this
imaginary lake, they required the presence of a boat to make them admit
that any body of water could be real.

Suddenly upon the left were massed the trees of a great park; Tritons
and Nereids appeared, dabbling in the basin of a fountain; there was a
dome and a circle of columns rising above extensive buildings; and this
was Potsdam....

A few moments later we were in Berlin, and a fiacre set me down at the
hotel. One of the keenest pleasures of a traveler is that first drive
through a hitherto unknown city, destroying or confirming his
preconceived idea of it. All that is peculiar and characteristic seizes
upon the yet virgin eye, whose perceptive power is never more clear.

My idea of Berlin had been drawn in great measure from Hoffman's
fantastic stories. In spite of myself, a Berlin, strange and grotesque,
peopled with Aulic councillors, sandmen, Kreislers, archivist Lindursts,
and student Anselms, had reared itself within my brain, amid a fog of
tobacco-smoke; and there before me was a city regularly built, stately,
with wide streets, extensive public grounds, and imposing edifices of a
style half-English, half-German, and modern to the last degree.

As we drove along I glanced down into those cellars, with steps so
polished, so slippery, so well-soaped, that one might slide in as into
the den of an ant-lion--to see if I might not discover Hoffman himself
seated on a tun, his feet crossed upon the bowl of his gigantic pipe,
and surrounded by a tangle of grotesque chimeras, as he is represented
in the vignette of the French translation of his stories; and, to tell
the truth, there was nothing of the kind in these subterranean shops
whose proprietors were just opening their doors! The cats, of benignant
aspect, rolled no phosphorescent eyeballs, like the cat Murr in the
story, and they seemed quite incapable of writing their memoirs, or of
deciphering a score of Richard Wagner's.

These handsome stately houses, which are like palaces, with their
columns and pediments and architraves, are built of brick for the most
part, for stone seems rare in Berlin; but the brick is covered with
cement or tinted stucco, to simulate hewn stone; deceitful seams
indicate imaginary layers, and the illusion would be complete, were it
not that in spots the winter frosts have detached the cement, revealing
the red shades of the baked clay. The necessity of painting the whole
facade, in order to mask the nature of the material, gives the effect of
enormous architectural decorations seen in open air. The salient parts,
moldings, cornices, entablatures, consoles, are of wood, bronze, or
cast-iron, to which suitable forms have been given; when you do not look
too closely the effect is satisfactory. Truth is the only thing lacking
in all this splendor.

The palatial buildings which border Regent's Park in London present also
these porticoes, and these columns with brick cores and plaster-fluting,
which, by aid of a coating of oil paint, are expected to pass for stone
or marble. Why not build in brick frankly, since its water-coloring and
capacity for ingeniously varied arrangement furnish so many resources?
Even in Berlin I have seen charming houses of this kind which had the
advantage of being truthful. A fictitious material always inspires a
certain uneasiness.

The hotel is very well located, and I propose to sketch the view seen
from its steps. It will give a fair idea of the general character of the
city. The foreground is a quay bordering the Spree. A few boats with
slender masts are sleeping on the brown water. Vessels upon a canal or a
river, in the heart of a city, have always a charming effect. Along the
opposite quay stretches a line of houses; a few of them are ancient, and
bear the stamp thereof; the king's palace makes the corner. A cupola
upon an octagonal tower rises proudly above the other roofs, the square
sides of the tower adding grace to the curve of the dome.

A bridge spans the river, reminding me, with its white marble groups, of
the Ponte San Angelo at Rome. These groups--eight in number, if my
memory does not deceive me--are each composed of two figures; one
allegorical, winged, representing the country, or glory; the other, a
young man, guided through many trials to victory or immortality. These
groups, in purely classic taste, are not wanting in merit, and show in
some parts good study of the nude; their pedestals are ornamented with
medallions, whereon the Prussian eagle, half-real, half-heraldic, makes
a fine appearance. Considered as a decoration, the whole is, in my
opinion, somewhat too rich for the simplicity of the bridge, which opens
midway to allow the passage of vessels.

Farther on, through the trees of a public garden of some kind, appears
the old Museum, a great structure in the Greek style, with Doric columns
relieved against a painted background. At the corners of the roof,
bronze horses held by grooms are outlined upon the sky. Behind this
building, and looking sideways, you perceive the triangular pediment of
the new Museum.

On crossing the bridge, the dark facade of the palace comes in view,
with its balustraded terrace; the carvings around the main entrance are
in that old, exaggerated German rococo which I have seen before and have
admired in the palace in Dresden. This kind of barbaric taste has
something charming about it, and entertains the eye, satiated with chefs
d'oeuvre. It has invention, fancy, originality; and tho I may be
censured for the opinion, I confess I prefer this exuberance to the
coldness of the Greek style imitated with more erudition than success in
our modern public buildings. At each side stand great bronze horses
pawing the ground, and held by naked grooms.

I visited the apartments of the palace; they are rich and elegant, but
present nothing interesting to the artist save their ancient recessed
ceilings filled with curious figures and arabesques. In the concert-hall
there is a musicians' gallery in grotesque carving, silvered; its effect
is really charming. Silver is not used enough in decorations; it is a
relief from the classic gold, and forms admirable combinations with
colors. The chapel, whose dome rises above the rest of the building, is
well planned and well lighted, comfortable, reasonably decorated.

Let us cross the square and take a look at the Museum, admiring, as we
pass, an immense porphyry vase standing on cubes of the same material,
in front of the steps which lead up to the portico. This portico is
painted in fresco by various hands, under the direction of the
celebrated Peter Cornelius. The paintings form a broad frieze, folding
itself back at each end upon the side wall of the portico, and
interrupted in the middle to give access to the Museum. The portion on
the left contains a whole poem of mythologic cosmogony, treated with
that philosophy and that erudition which the Germans carry into
compositions of this kind; the right, purely anthropologie, represents
the birth, development, and evolution of humanity.

If I were to describe in detail these two immense frescoes, you would
certainly be charmed with the ingenious invention, the profound
knowledge, and the excellent judgment of the artist. The mysteries of
the early creation are penetrated, and everything is faultlessly
scientific. Also, if I should show you them in the form of those fine
German engravings, the lines heightened by delicate shadows, the
execution as accurate as that of Albrecht Duerer, the tone light and
harmonious, you would admire the ordering of the composition, balanced
with so much art, the groups skilfully united one to another, the
ingenious episodes, the wise selection of the attributes, the
significance of each separate thing; you might even find grandeur of
style, an air of magisterial dignity, fine effects of drapery, proud
attitudes, well-marked types, muscular audacities a la Michel Angelo,
and a certain Germanic savagery of fine flavor. You would be struck with
this free handling of great subjects, this vast conceptive power, this
carrying out of an idea, which French painters so often lack; and you
would think of Cornelius almost as highly as the Germans do. But in the
presence of the work itself, the impression is completely different.

I am well aware that fresco-painting, even in the hands of the Italian
masters, skilful as they were in the technical details of their art, has
not the charm of oil. The eye must become habituated to this rude,
lustreless coloring, before we can discern its beauties. Many people who
never say so--for nothing is more rare than the courage to avow a
feeling or an opinion--find the frescoes of the Vatican and the Sistine
frightful; but the great names of Michel Angelo and Raphael impose
silence upon them; they murmur vague formulas of enthusiasm, and go off
to rhapsodize--this time with sincerity--over some Magdalen of Guido, or
some Madonna of Carlo Dolce. I make large allowance, therefore, for this
unattractive aspect which belongs to fresco-painting; but in this case,
the execution is by far too repulsive. The mind may be content, but the
eye suffers. Painting, which is altogether a plastic art, can express
its ideal only through forms and colors. To think is not enough;
something must be done....

[Illustration: BERLIN: UNTER DEN LINDEN]

[Illustration: BERLIN: THE BRANDENBURG GATE]

[Illustration: BERLIN: THE ROYAL CASTLE AND EMPEROR WILLIAM BRIDGE]

[Illustration: BERLIN: THE WHITE HALL IN THE ROYAL CASTLE]

[Illustration: BERLIN: THE NATIONAL GALLERY AND FREDERICK'S BRIDGE]

[Illustration: BERLIN: THE GENDARMENMARKT]

[Illustration: THE COLUMN OF VICTORY IN BERLIN]

[Illustration: THE MAUSOLEUM AT CHARLOTTENBURG]

[Illustration: THE NEW PALACE AT POTSDAM]

[Illustration: THE CASTLE OF SANS SOUCI, POTSDAM]

[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE, TOMB OF CHARLEMAGNE]

[Illustration: THE ROYAL PALACE OF SCHOENBRUNN, NEAR VIENNA
(The man on the sidewalk at the left is the Emperor Francis Joseph)]

[Illustration: SALZBURG, AUSTRIA]


I shall not now give an inventory of the Museum in Berlin, which is rich
in pictures and statues; to do this would require more space than is at
my command. We find represented here, more or less favorably, all the
great masters, the pride of royal galleries. But the most remarkable
thing in this collection is the very numerous and very complete
collection of the primitive painters of all countries and all schools,
from the Byzantine down to those which immediately precede the
Renaissance. The old German school, so little known in France, and on
many accounts so curious, is to be studied to better advantage here than
anywhere else. A rotunda contains tapestries after designs by Raphael,
of which the original cartoons are now in Hampton Court.

The staircase of the new Museum is decorated with those remarkable
frescoes by Kaulbach, which the art of engraving and the Universal
Exposition have made so well known in France. We all remember the
cartoon entitled "The Dispersion of Races," and all Paris has admired,
in Goupil's window that poetic "Defeat of the Huns," where the strife
begun between the living warriors is carried on amidst the disembodied
souls that hover above that battlefield strewn with the dead. "The
Destruction of Jerusalem" is a fine composition, tho somewhat too
theatrical. It resembles a "close of the fifth act" much more than
beseems the serious character of fresco painting. In the panel which
represents Hellenic civilization, Homer is the central figure; this
composition pleased me least of all. Other paintings as yet unfinished
present the climacteric epochs of humanity. The last of these will be
almost contemporary, for when a German begins to paint, universal
history comes under review; the great Italian painters did not need so
much in achieving their master-pieces. But each civilization has its
peculiar tendencies, and this encyclopedic painting is a characteristic
of the present time. It would seem that, before flinging itself into its
new career, the world has felt the necessity of making a synthesis of
its past....

This staircase, which is of colossal size, is ornamented with casts from
the finest antiques. Copies of the metopes of the Pantheon and friezes
from the temple of Theseus are set into its walls, and upon one of the
landings stands the Pandrosion, with all the strong and tranquil beauty
of its Caryatides. The effect of the whole is very grand. At the present
day there is no longer any visible difference between the people of one
country and of another. The uniform domino of civilization is worn
everywhere, and no difference in color, no special cut of the garment,
notifies you that you are away from home. The men and women whom I met
in the street escape description; the flaneurs of the Unter den Linden
are exactly like the flaneurs of the Boulevard des Italiens. This
avenue, bordered by splendid houses, is planted, as its name indicates,
with lindens; trees "whose leaf is shaped like a heart," as Heinrich
Heine remarks--a peculiarity which makes Unter den Linden dear to
lovers, and eminently suited for sentimental interviews. At its entrance
stands the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great. Like the
Champs-Elysees in Paris, this avenue terminates at a triumphal arch,
surmounted by a chariot with four bronze horses. Passing under the arch,
we come out into a park in some degrees resembling the Bois de Boulogne.

Along the edge of this park, which is shadowed by great trees having all
the intensity of northern verdure, and freshened by a little winding
stream, open flower-crowded gardens, in whose depths you can discern
summer retreats, which are neither chalets, nor cottages, nor villas,
but Pompeiian houses with their tetrastylic porticos and panels of
antique red. The Greek taste is held in high esteem in Berlin. On the
other hand, they seem to disdain the style of the Renaissance, so much
in vogue in Paris; I saw no edifice of this kind in Berlin.

Night came; and after paying a hasty visit to the zoological garden,
where all the animals were asleep, except a dozen long-tailed paroquets
and cockatoos, who were screaming from their perches, pluming
themselves, and raising their crests, I returned to my hotel to strap
my trunk and betake myself to the Hamburg railway station, as the train
would leave at ten, a circumstance which prevented me from going, as I
had intended, to the opera to hear Cherubini's "Deux Journees," and to
see Louise Taglioni dance the Sevillana....

For the traveler there are but two ways: the instantaneous proof, or the
prolonged study. Time failed me for the latter. Deign to accept this
simple and rapid impression.

[Footnote A: From "A Winter in Russia." By permission of, and by
arrangement with, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1874.
Since Gautier wrote, Berlin has greatly increased in population and in
general importance. What is known as "Greater Berlin" now embraces about
3,250,000 souls. Many of the quaint two-story houses, which formerly
were characteristic of the city, have given way to palatial houses and
business blocks. Berlin is a thoroughly modern commercial city. It ranks
among European cities immediately after London and Paris.]




CHARLOTTENBURG[A]

BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE


Then we drove to Charlottenburg to see the Mausoleum. I know not when I
have been more deeply affected than there; and yet, not so much by the
sweet, lifelike statue of the queen as by that of the king, her husband,
executed by the same hand.[B] Such an expression of long-desired rest,
after suffering the toil, is shed over the face--so sweet, so heavenly!
There, where he has prayed year after year--hoping, yearning,
longing--there, at last, he rests, life's long anguish over! My heart
melted as I looked at these two, so long divided--he so long a mourner,
she so long mourned--now calmly resting side by side in a sleep so
tranquil.

We went through the palace. We saw the present king's writing desk and
table in his study, just as he left them. His writing establishment is
about as plain as yours. Men who really mean to do anything do not use
fancy tools. His bedroom, also, is in a style of severe simplicity.
There were several engravings fastened against the wall; and in the
anteroom a bust and medallion of the Empress Eugenie--a thing which I
should not exactly have expected in a born king's palace; but beauty is
sacred, and kings can not call it parvenu. Then we went into the queen's
bed-room, finished in green, and then through the rooms of Queen Louisa.
Those marks of her presence, which you saw during the old king's
lifetime, are now removed; we saw no traces of her dresses, gloves, or
books. In one room, draped in white muslin over pink, we were informed
the Empress of Russia was born.

In going out to Charlottenburg, we rode through the Thiergarten, the
Tuileries of Berlin. In one of the most quiet and sequestered spots is
the monument erected by the people of Berlin to their old king. The
pedestal is Carrara marble, sculptured with beautiful scenes called
garden pleasures--children in all manner of outdoor sports, and parents
fondly looking on. It is graceful, and peculiarly appropriate to those
grounds where parents and children are constantly congregating. The
whole is surmounted by a statue of the king, in white marble--the finest
representation of him I have ever seen. Thoughtful, yet benign, the old
king seems like a good father keeping a grave and affectionate watch
over the pleasures of his children in their garden frolics. There was
something about these moss-grown gardens that seemed so rural and
pastoral, that I at once preferred them to all I had seen in Europe.
Choice flowers are planted in knots, here and there, in sheltered nooks,
as if they had grown by accident: and an air of sweet, natural wildness
is left amid the most careful cultivation. The people seemed to be
enjoying themselves less demonstratively and with less vivacity than in
France, but with a calm inwardness. Each nation has its own way of being
happy, and the style of life in each bears a certain relation of
appropriateness to character. The trim, dressy, animated air of the
Tuileries suits admirably with the mobile, sprightly vivacity of society
there. Both, in their way, are beautiful; but this seems less formal,
and more according to nature.

[Footnote A: From "Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands."]

[Footnote B: King Frederick William III. and Queen Louise are here
referred to. Since Mrs. Stowe's visit (1854) the Emperor William I. and
the Empress Augusta have been buried in this mausoleum.]




LEIPSIC AND DRESDEN[A]

BY BAYARD TAYLOR


I have now been nearly two days in wide-famed Leipsic, and the more I
see of it, the better I like it. It is a pleasant, friendly town, old
enough to be interesting and new enough to be comfortable. There is much
active business-life, through which it is fast increasing in size and
beauty. Its publishing establishments are the largest in the world, and
its annual fairs attended by people from all parts of Europe. This is
much for a city to accomplish situated alone in the middle of a great
plain, with no natural charms of scenery or treasures of art to attract
strangers. The energy and enterprise of its merchants have accomplished
all this, and it now stands in importance among the first cities of
Europe.

On my first walk around the city, yesterday morning, I passed the
Augustus Platz--a broad green lawn on which front the university and
several other public buildings. A chain of beautiful promenades
encircles the city on the site of its old fortifications. Following
their course through walks shaded by large trees and bordered with
flowering shrubs, I passed a small but chaste monument to Sebastian
Bach, the composer, which was erected almost entirely at the private
cost of Mendelssohn, and stands opposite the building in which Bach once
directed the choirs. As I was standing beside it a glorious choral
swelled by a hundred voices came through the open windows like a tribute
to the genius of the great master.

Having found my friend, we went together to the Sternwarte, or
observatory, which gives a fine view of the country around the city, and
in particular the battlefield. The castellan who is stationed there is
well acquainted with the localities, and pointed out the position of the
hostile armies. It was one of the most bloody and hard-fought battles
which history records. The army of Napoleon stretched like a semicircle
around the southern and eastern sides of the city, and the plain beyond
was occupied by the allies, whose forces met together here.
Schwarzenberg, with his Austrians, came from Dresden; Bluecher, from
Halle, with the Emperor Alexander. Their forces amounted to three
hundred thousand, while those of Napoleon ranked at one hundred and
ninety-two thousand men. It must have been a terrific scene. Four days
raged the battle, and the meeting of half a million of men in deadly
conflict was accompanied by the thunder of sixteen hundred cannon. The
small rivers which flow through Leipsic were swollen with blood, and the
vast plain was strewed with more than fifty thousand dead.

It is difficult to conceive of such slaughter while looking at the quiet
and tranquil landscape below. It seemed more like a legend of past ages,
when ignorance and passion led men to murder and destroy, than an event
which the last half century witnessed. For the sake of humanity it is to
be hoped that the world will never see such another.

There are some lovely walks around Leipsic. We went yesterday afternoon
with a few friends to the Rosenthal, a beautiful meadow, bordered by
forests of the German oak, very few of whose Druid trunks have been left
standing. There are Swiss cottages embowered in the foliage where every
afternoon the social citizens assemble to drink their coffee and enjoy a
few hours' escape from the noisy and dusty streets. One can walk for
miles along these lovely paths by the side of the velvet meadows or the
banks of some shaded stream. We visited the little village of Golis, a
short distance off, where, in the second story of a little white house,
hangs the sign, "Schiller's Room." Some of the Leipsic "literati" have
built a stone arch over the entrance, with the inscription above: "Here
dwelt Schiller in 1795, and wrote his Hymn to Joy." Everywhere through
Germany the remembrances of Schiller are sacred. In every city where he
lived they show his dwelling. They know and reverence the mighty spirit
who has been among them. The little room where he conceived that sublime
poem is hallowed as if by the presence of unseen spirits.

I was anxious to see the spot where Poniatowsky fell. We returned over
the plain to the city, and passed in at the gate by which the Cossacks
entered, pursuing the flying French. Crossing the lower part, we came to
the little river Elster, in whose waves the gallant prince sank. The
stone bridge by which we crossed was blown up by the French to cut off
pursuit. Napoleon had given orders that it should not be blown up till
the Poles had all passed over as the river, tho narrow, is quite deep
and the banks are steep. Nevertheless, his officers did not wait, and
the Poles, thus exposed to the fire of the enemy, were obliged to plunge
into the stream to join the French army, which had begun retreat toward
Frankfort. Poniatowsky, severely wounded, made his way through a garden
near, and escaped on horseback into the water. He became entangled among
the fugitives, and sank. By walking a little distance along the road
toward Frankfort we could see the spot where his body was taken out of
the river; it is now marked by a square stone covered with the names of
his countrymen who have visited it. We returned through the narrow
arched way by which Napoleon fled when the battle was lost.

Another interesting place in Leipsic is Auerbach's Cellar, which, it is
said, contains an old manuscript history of Faust from which Goethe
derived the first idea of his poem. He used to frequent this cellar, and
one of his scenes in "Faust" is laid in it. We looked down the arched
passage; not wishing to purchase any wine, we could find no pretense for
entering. The streets are full of book-stores, and one-half the business
of the inhabitants appears to consist in printing, paper-making and
binding. The publishers have a handsome exchange of their own, and
during the fairs the amount of business transacted is enormous.

At last in this "Florence of the Elbe," as the Saxons have christened
it! Exclusive of its glorious galleries of art, which are scarcely
surpassed by any in Europe, Dresden charms one by the natural beauty of
its environs. It stands in a curve of the Elbe, in the midst of green
meadows, gardens and fine old woods, with the hills of Saxony sweeping
around like an amphitheater and the craggy peaks of the highlands
looking at it from afar. The domes and spires at a distance give it a
rich Italian look, which is heightened by the white villas embowered in
trees gleaming on the hills around. In the streets there is no bustle of
business--nothing of the din and confusion of traffic which mark most
cities; it seems like a place for study and quiet enjoyment.

The railroad brought us in three hours from Leipsic over the eighty
miles of plain that intervene. We came from the station through the
Neustadt, passing the Japanese palace and the equestrian statue of
Augustus the Strong. The magnificent bridge over the Elbe was so much
injured by the late inundation as to be impassable; we were obliged to
go some distance up the river-bank and cross on a bridge of boats. Next
morning my first search was for the picture-gallery. We set off at
random, and after passing the church of Our Lady, with its lofty dome of
solid stone, which withstood the heaviest bombs during the war with
Frederick the Great, came to an open square one side of which was
occupied by an old brown, red-roofed building which I at once recognized
from pictures as the object of our search.

I have just taken a last look at the gallery this morning, and left it
with real regret; for during the two visits Raphael's heavenly picture
of the Madonna and Child had so grown into my love and admiration that
it was painful to think I should never see it again. There are many mere
which clung so strongly to my imagination, gratifying in the highest
degree the love for the beautiful, that I left them with sadness and the
thought that I would now only have the memory. I can see the inspired
eye and godlike brow of the Jesus-child as if I were still standing
before the picture, and the sweet, holy countenance of the Madonna still
looks upon me. Yet, tho this picture is a miracle of art, the first
glance filled me with disappointment. It has somewhat faded during the
three hundred years that have rolled away since the hand of Raphael
worked on the canvas, and the glass with which it is covered for better
preservation injures the effect. After I had gazed on it a while, every
thought of this vanished.

The figure of the Virgin seemed to soar in the air, and it was difficult
to think the clouds were not in motion. An aerial lightness clothes her
form, and it is perfectly natural for such a figure to stand among the
clouds. Two divine cherubs look up from below, and in her arms sits the
sacred Child. Those two faces beam from the picture like those of
angels. The mild, prophetic eye and lofty brow of the young Jesus chain
one like a spell. There is something more than mortal in its
expression--something in the infant face which indicates a power
mightier than the proudest manhood. There is no glory around the head,
but the spirit which shines from those features marks its divinity. In
the sweet face of the mother there speaks a sorrowful foreboding mixed
with its tenderness, as if she knew the world into which the Savior was
born and foresaw the path in which he was to tread. It is a picture
which one can scarce look upon without tears.

There are in the same room six pictures by Correggio which are said to
be among his best works--one of them, his celebrated Magdalen. There is
also Correggio's "Holy Night," or the Virgin with the shepherds in the
manger, in which all the light comes from the body of the Child. The
surprise of the shepherds is most beautifully exprest. In one of the
halls there is a picture of Van der Werff in which the touching story of
Hagar is told more feelingly than words could do it. The young Ishmael
is represented full of grief at parting with Isaac, who, in childish
unconsciousness of what has taken place, draws in sport the corner of
his mother's mantle around him and smiles at the tears of his lost
playmate.

Nothing can come nearer real flesh and blood than the two portraits of
Raphael Mengs, painted by himself when quite young. You almost think the
artist has in sport crept behind the frame and wishes to make you
believe he is a picture. It would be impossible to speak of half the
gems of art contained in this unrivalled collection. There are twelve
large halls, containing in all nearly two thousand pictures.

The plain south of Dresden was the scene of the hard-fought battle
between Napoleon and the allied armies in 1813. On the heights above the
little village of Raecknitz, Moreau was shot on the second day of the
battle. We took a footpath through the meadows, shaded by cherry trees
in bloom, and reached the spot after an hour's walk. The monument is
simple--a square block of granite surmounted by a helmet and sword, with
the inscription, "The hero Moreau fell here by the side of Alexander,
August 17, 1813," I gathered as a memorial a few leaves of the oak which
shades it.

By applying an hour before the appointed time, we obtained admission to
the royal library. It contains three hundred thousand volumes--among
them, the most complete collection of historical works in existence.
Each hall is devoted to a history of a separate country, and one large
room is filled with that of Saxony alone. There is a large number of
rare and curious manuscripts, among which are old Greek works of the
seventh and eighth centuries, a Koran which once belonged to the Sultan
Bajazet, the handwriting of Luther and Melanchthon, a manuscript volume
with pen-and-ink sketches by Albert Duerer, and the earliest works after
the invention of printing. Among these latter was a book published by
Faust and Schaeffer, at Mayence, in 1457. There were also Mexican
manuscripts written on the aloe leaf, and many illuminated monkish
volumes of the Middle Ages.

We were fortunate in seeing the Gruene Gewoelbe, or Green Gallery, a
collection of jewels and costly articles unsurpassed in Europe. The
first hall into which we were ushered contained works in bronze. They
were all small, and chosen with regard to their artistical value. Some
by John of Bologna were exceedingly fine, as was also a group in iron
cut out of a single block, perhaps the only successful attempt in this
branch. The next room contained statues, and vases covered with reliefs
in ivory. The most remarkable work was the fall of Lucifer and his
angels, containing ninety-two figures in all, carved out of a single
piece of ivory sixteen inches high. It was the work of an Italian monk,
and cost him many years of hard labor. There were two tables of
mosaic-work that would not be out of place in the fabled halls of the
Eastern genii, so much did they exceed my former ideas of human skill.
The tops were of jasper, and each had a border of fruit and flowers in
which every color was represented by some precious stone, all with the
utmost delicacy and truth to nature. It is impossible to conceive the
splendid effect it produced. Besides some fine pictures on gold by
Raphael Mengs, there was a Madonna, the largest specimen of
enamel-painting in existence.

However costly the contents of these halls, they were only an
introduction to those which followed. Each one exceeded the other in
splendor and costliness. The walls were covered to the ceiling with rows
of goblets, vases, etc., of polished jasper, agate, and lapis lazuli.
Splendid mosaic tables stood around with caskets of the most exquisite
silver and gold work upon them, and vessels of solid silver, some of
them weighing six hundred pounds, were placed at the foot of the
columns. We were shown two goblets, each prized at six thousand thalers,
made of gold and precious stones; also the great pearl called the
"Spanish Dwarf," nearly as large as a pullet's egg, globes and vases cut
entirely out of the mountain-crystal, magnificent Nuremberg watches and
clocks, and a great number of figures made ingeniously of rough pearls
and diamonds.

The officer showed me a hen's egg of silver. There was apparently
nothing remarkable about it, but by unscrewing it came apart and
disclosed the yolk of gold. This again opened, and a golden chicken was
seen; by touching a spring a little diamond crown came from the inside,
and, the crown being again taken apart, out dropt a valuable diamond
ring. The seventh hall contains the coronation-robes of Augustus II. of
Poland, and many costly specimens of carving in wood. A cherry-stone is
shown in a glass case which has one hundred and twenty-five facets, all
perfectly finished, carved upon it.

The next room we entered sent back a glare of splendor that perfectly
dazzled us; it was all gold, diamond, ruby, and sapphire. Every case
sent out such a glow and glitter that it seemed like a cage of
imprisoned lightnings. Wherever the eye turned it was met by a blaze of
broken rainbows. They were there by hundreds, and every gem was a
fortune--whole cases of swords with hilts and scabbards of solid gold
studded with gems, the great two-handed coronation sword of the German
emperors, daggers covered with brilliants and rubies, diamond buttons,
chains, and orders, necklaces and bracelets of pearl and emerald, and
the order of the Golden Fleece made in gems of every kind.

We were also shown the largest known onyx, nearly seven inches long and
four inches broad. One of the most remarkable works is the throne and
court of Aurungzebe, the Indian king, by Dinglinger, a celebrated
goldsmith of the last century. It contains one hundred and thirty-two
figures, all of enameled gold and each one most perfectly and
elaborately finished. It was purchased by Prince Augustus for
fifty-eight thousand thalers,[B] which was not a high sum, considering
that the making of it occupied Dinglinger and thirteen workmen for seven
years.

It is almost impossible to estimate the value of the treasures these
halls contain. That of the gold and jewels alone must be many millions
of dollars, and the amount of labor expended on these toys of royalty is
incredible. As monuments of patient and untiring toil they are
interesting, but it is sad to think how much labor and skill and energy
have been wasted in producing things which are useless to the world and
only of secondary importance as works of art. Perhaps, however, if men
could be diverted by such playthings from more dangerous games, it would
be all the better.

[Footnote A: From "Views Afoot." Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.]

[Footnote B: A Prussian or Saxon thaler is about seventy cents. Author's
note--The thaler went out of use in Germany in 1906.]




WEIMAR IN GOETHE'S DAY[A]

BY MADAME DE STAEL


Of all the German principalities, there is none that makes us feel so
much as Weimar the advantages of a small state, of which the sovereign
is a man of strong understanding, and who is capable of endeavoring to
please all orders of his subjects, without losing anything in their
obedience. Such a state is as a private society, where all the members
are connected together by intimate relations. The Duchess Louisa of Saxe
Weimar is the true model of a woman destined by nature to the most
illustrious rank; without pretension, as without weakness, she inspires
in the same degree confidence and respect; and the heroism of the
chivalrous ages has entered her soul without taking from it any thing of
her sex's softness. The military talents of the duke are universally
respected, and his lively and reflective conversation continually brings
to our recollection that he was formed by the great Frederic. It is by
his own and his mother's reputation that the most distinguished men of
learning have been attracted to Weimar, and by them Germany, for the
first time, has possest a literary metropolis; but, as this metropolis
was at the same time only an inconsiderable town, its ascendency was
merely that of superior illumination; for fashion, which imposes
uniformity in all things, could not emanate from so narrow a circle.

Herder was just dead when I arrived at Weimar; but Wieland, Goethe, and
Schiller were still there. Their writings are the perfect resemblances
of their character and conversation. This very rare concordance is a
proof of sincerity; when the first object in writing is to produce an
effect upon others, a man never displays himself to them, such as he is
in reality; but when he writes to satisfy an internal inspiration which
has obtained possession of the soul, he discovers by his works, even
without intending it, the very slightest shades of his manner of
thinking and acting.

The residence in country towns has always appeared to me very irksome.
The understanding of the men is narrowed, the heart of the women frozen
there; people live so much in each other's presence that one is opprest
by one's equals; it is no longer this distant opinion, the reverberation
of which animates you from afar like the report of glory; it is a minute
inspection of all the actions of your life, an observation of every
detail, which prevents the general character from being comprehended;
and the more you have of independence and elevation of mind, the less
able you are to breathe amidst so many little impediments.

This painful constraint did not exist at Weimar; it was rather a large
palace than a little town; a select circle of society, which made its
interest consist in the discussion of all the novelties of art and
science: women, the amiable scholars of some superior men, were
constantly speaking of the new literary works, as of the most important
public events. They enjoyed the whole universe by reading and study;
they freed themselves by the enlargement of the mind from the restraint
of circumstances; they forgot the private anecdotes of each individual,
in habitually reflecting together on those great questions which
influence the destiny common to all alike. And in this society there
were none of those provincial wonders, who so easily mistake contempt
for grace, and affectation for elegance.

[Footnote A: From "Germany."]




ULM[A]

BY THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN


We were now within about twenty English miles of Ulm. Nothing particular
occurred, either by way of anecdote or of scenery, till within almost
the immediate approach or descent to that city--the last in the Suabian
territories, and which is separated from Bavaria by the River Danube. I
caught the first glance of that celebrated river (here of comparatively
trifling width) with no ordinary emotions of delight. It recalled to my
memory the battle of Blenheim, or of Hochstedt; for you know that it was
across this very river, and scarcely a score of miles from Ulm, that the
victorious Marlborough chased the flying French and Bavarians--at the
battle just mentioned. At the same moment, almost, I could not fail to
contrast this glorious issue with the miserable surrender of the town
before me--then filled by a large and well-disciplined army, and
commanded by that nonpareil of generals, J.G. Mack!--into the power of
Bonaparte almost without pulling a trigger on either side--the place
itself being considered, at the time, one of the strongest towns in
Europe. These things, I say, rushed upon my memory, when, on the
immediate descent into Ulm, I caught the first view of the tower of the
minster which quickly put Marlborough, and Mack, and Bonaparte out of my
recollection.

I had never, since quitting the beach at Brighton, beheld such an
English-like looking cathedral--as a whole; and particularly the tower.
It is broad, bold, and lofty; but, like all edifices, seen from a
neighboring and perhaps loftier height, it loses, at first view, very
much of the loftiness of its character. However, I looked with
admiration, and longed to approach it. This object was accomplished in
twenty minutes. We entered Ulm about two o'clock: drove to an excellent
inn (the White Stag--which I strongly recommend to all travelers), and
ordered our dinner to be got ready by five; which, as the house was
within a stone's cast of the cathedral, gave us every opportunity of
visiting it beforehand. The day continued most beautiful: and we sallied
forth in high spirits, to gaze at and to admire every object of
antiquity which should present itself.

The Cathedral of Ulm is doubtless among the most respectable of those on
the Continent. It is large and wide, and of a massive and imposing style
of architecture. The buttresses are bold, and very much after the
English fashion. The tower is the chief exterior beauty. Before we
mounted it, we begged the guide, who attended us, to conduct us all over
the interior. This interior is very noble, and even superior, as a piece
of architecture, to that of Strasburg. I should think it even longer and
wider--for the truth is, that the tower of Strasburg Cathedral is as
much too tall, as that of Ulm Cathedral is too short, for its nave and
choir. Not very long ago, they had covered the interior by a whitewash;
and thus the mellow tint of probably about five centuries--in a spot
where there are few immediately surrounding houses--and in a town of
which the manufactories and population are comparatively small--the
latter about 14,000--thus, I say, the mellow tint of these five
centuries (for I suppose the cathedral to have been finished about the
year 1320) has been cruelly changed for the staring and chilling effects
of whiting.[B]

The choir is interesting in a high degree. At the extremity of it is an
altar--indicative of the Lutheran form of worship being carried on
within the church--upon which are oil paintings upon wood, emblazoned
with gilt backgrounds--of the time of Hans Burgmair, and of others at
the revival of the art of painting in Germany. These pictures turn upon
hinges, so as to shut up, or be thrown open; and are in the highest
state of preservation. Their subjects are entirely Scriptural; and
perhaps old John Holbein, the father of the famous Hans Holbein, might
have had a share in some of them. Perhaps they may come down to the time
of Lucas Cranach. Wherever, or by whomsoever executed, this series of
paintings, upon the high altar of the Cathedral of Ulm, can not be
viewed without considerable satisfaction. They were the first choice
specimens of early art which I had seen on this side of the Rhine; and
I, of course, contemplated them with the hungry eye of an antiquary.

After a careful survey of the interior, the whole of which had quite the
air of English cleanliness and order, we prepared to mount the famous
tower. Our valet, Rohfritsch, led the way; counting the steps as he
mounted, and finding them to be about 378 in number. He was succeeded by
the guide. Mr. Lewis and myself followed in a more leisurely manner;
peeping through the interstices which presented themselves in the open
fretwork of the ornaments, and finding, as we continued to ascend, that
the inhabitants and dwelling houses of Ulm diminished gradually in size.
At length we gained the summit, which is surrounded by a parapet wall of
some three or four feet in height. We paused a minute, to recover our
breath, and to look at the prospect which surrounded us. The town, at
our feet, looked like the metropolis of Laputa. Yet the high ground, by
which we had descended into the town--and upon which Bonaparte's army
was formerly encamped--seemed to be more lofty than the spot whereon we
stood. On the opposite side flowed the Danube; not broad, nor, as I
learned, very deep; but rapid and in a serpentine direction.

Upon the whole, the Cathedral of Ulm is a noble ecclesiastical edifice;
uniting simplicity and purity with massiveness of composition. Few
cathedrals are more uniform in the style of their architecture. It seems
to be, to borrow technical language, all of a piece. Near it, forming
the foreground of the Munich print, are a chapel and a house surrounded
by trees. The Chapel is very small, and, as I learned, not used for
religious purposes. The house (so Professor Veesenmeyer informed me) is
supposed to have been the residence and offices of business of John
Zeiner, the well-known printer, who commenced his typographical labors
about the year 1740, and who uniformly printed at Ulm; while his brother
Gunther as uniformly exercised his art in the city whence I am now
addressing you. They were both natives of Reutlingen, a town of some
note between Tuebingen and Ulm.

[Footnote A: From "A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour,"
published in 1821.]

[Footnote B: Ulm has now (1914) a population of 56,000.]




AIX-LA-CHAPELLE AND CHARLEMAGNE'S TOMB[A]

BY VICTOR HUGO


For an invalid, Aix-la-Chapelle is a mineral fountain--warm, cold,
irony, and sulfurous; for the tourist, it is a place for redouts and
concerts; for the pilgrim, the place of relics, where the gown of the
Virgin Mary, the blood of Jesus, the cloth which enveloped the head of
John the Baptist after his decapitation, are exhibited every seven
years; for the antiquarian, it is a noble abbey of "filles a abbesse,"
connected with the male convent, which was built by Saint Gregory, son
of Nicephore, Emperor of the East; for the hunter, it is the ancient
valley of the wild boars; for the merchant, it is a "fabrique" of cloth,
needles, and pins; and for him who is no merchant, manufacturer, hunter,
antiquary, pilgrim, tourist, or invalid, it is the city of Charlemagne.

Charlemagne was born at Aix-la-Chapelle, and died there. He was born in
the old place, of which there now only remains the tower, and he was
buried in the church that he founded in 796, two years after the death
of his wife Fastrada. Leo the Third consecrated it in 804, and tradition
says that two bishops of Tongres, who were buried at Maestricht, arose
from their graves, in order to complete, at that ceremony, 365 bishops
and archbishops--representing the days of the year. This historical and
legendary church, from which the town has taken its name, has undergone,
during the last thousand years, many transformations. No sooner had I
entered Aix than I went to the chapel.... The effect of the great
"portail" is not striking; the facade displays the different styles of
architecture--Roman, Gothic, and modern--without order, and
consequently, without grandeur; but if, on the contrary, we arrive at
the chapel by Chevet, the result is otherwise. The high "abside" of the
fourteenth century, in all its boldness and beauty, the rich workmanship
of its balustrades, the variety of its "gargouilles," the somber hue of
the stones, and the large transparent windows--strike the beholder with
admiration.

Here, nevertheless, the aspect of the church--imposing tho it is--will
be found far from uniform. Between the "abside" and the "portail," in a
kind of cavity, the dome of Otho III., built over the tomb of
Charlemagne in the tenth century, is hid from view. After a few moments'
contemplation, a singular awe comes over us when gazing at this
extraordinary edifice--an edifice which, like the great work that
Charlemagne began, remains unfinished; and which, like his empire that
spoke all languages, is composed of architecture that represents all
styles. To the reflective, there is a strange analogy between that
wonderful man and this great building.

After having passed the arched roof of the portico, and left behind me
the antique bronze doors surmounted with lions' heads, a white rotundo
of two stories, in which all the "fantasies" of architecture are
displayed, attracted my attention. At casting my eyes upon the ground,
I perceived a large block of black marble, with the following
inscription in brass letters:--

"Carolo Magno."

Nothing is more contemptible than to see, exposed to view, the bastard
graces that surround this great Carlovingian name; angels resembling
distorted Cupids, palm-branches like colored feathers, garlands of
flowers, and knots of ribbons, are placed under the dome of Otho III.,
and upon the tomb of Charlemagne.

The only thing here that evinces respect to the shade of that great man
is an immense lamp, twelve feet in diameter, with forty-eight burners;
which was presented, in the twelfth century, by Barbarossa. It is of
brass, gilt with gold, has the form of a crown, and is suspended from
the ceiling above the marble stone by an iron chain about seventy feet
in length.

It is evident that some other monument had been erected to Charlemagne.
There is nothing to convince us that this marble, bordered with brass,
is of antiquity. As to the letters, "Carolo Magno," they are not of a
late date than 1730.

Charlemagne is no longer under this stone. In 1166 Frederick
Barbarossa--whose gift, magnificent tho it was, does by no means
compensate for this sacrilege--caused the remains of that great emperor
to be untombed. The Church claimed the imperial skeleton, and,
separating the bones, made each a holy relic. In the adjoining
sacristy, a vicar shows the people--for three francs seventy-five
centimes--the fixt price--"the arm of Charlemagne"--that arm which held
for a time the reins of the world. Venerable relic! which has the
following inscription, written by some scribe of the twelfth century:

"Arm of the Sainted Charles the Great."

After that I saw the skull of Charlemagne, that cranium which may be
said to have been the mold of Europe, and which a beadle had the
effrontery to strike with his finger.

All were kept in a wooden armory, with a few angels, similar to those I
have just mentioned, on the top. Such is the tomb of the man whose
memory has outlived ten ages, and who, by his greatness, has shed the
rays of immortality around his name. "Sainted, Great," belong to
him--two of the most august epithets which this earth could bestow upon
a human being.

There is one thing astonishing--that is, the largeness of the skull and
arm. Charlemagne was, in fact, colossal with respect to size of body as
well as extraordinary mental endowments. The son of Pepin-le-Bref was in
body, as in mind, gigantic; of great corporeal strength, and of
astounding intellect.

An inspection of this armory has a strange effect upon the antiquary.
Besides the skull and arm, it contains the heart of Charlemagne; the
cross which the emperor had round his neck in his tomb; a handsome
ostensorium, of the Renaissance, given by Charles the Fifth, and
spoiled, in the last century, by tasteless ornaments; fourteen richly
sculptured gold plates, which once ornamented the arm-chair of the
emperor; an ostensorium, given by Philippe the Second; the cord which
bound our Savior; the sponge that was used upon the cross; the girdle of
the Holy Virgin, and that of the Redeemer.

In the midst of innumerable ornaments, heaped up in the armory like
mountains of gold and precious stones, are two shrines of singular
beauty. One, the oldest, which is seldom opened, contains the remaining
bones of Charlemagne, and the other, of the twelfth century, which
Frederick Barbarossa gave to the church, holds the relics, which are
exhibited every seven years. A single exhibition of this shrine, in
1696, attracted 42,000 pilgrims, and drew, in ten days 80,000 florins.
This shrine has only one key, which is in two pieces; the one is in the
possession of the chapter, the other in that of the magistrates of the
town. Sometimes it is opened on extraordinary occasions, such as on the
visit of a monarch....

The tomb, before it became the sarcophagus of Charlemagne, was, it is
said, that of Augustus. After mounting a narrow staircase, my guide
conducted me to a gallery which is called the Hochmuenster. In this place
is the arm-chair of Charlemagne. It is low, exceedingly wide, with a
round back; is formed of four pieces of white marble, without ornaments
or sculpture, and has for a seat an oak board, covered with a cushion of
red velvet. There are six steps up to it, two of which are of granite,
the others of marble. On this chair sat--a crown upon his head, a globe
in one hand, a scepter in the other, a sword by his side, the imperial
mantle over his shoulders, the cross of Christ round his neck, and his
feet in the sarcophagus of Augustus--Carolus Magnus in his tomb, in
which attitude he remained for three hundred and fifty-two years--from
852 to 1166, when Frederick Barbarossa, coveting the chair for his
coronation, entered the tomb. Barbarossa was an illustrious prince and a
valiant soldier; and it must, therefore, have been a moment singularly
strange when this crowned man stood before the crowned corpse of
Charlemagne--the one in all the majesty of empire, the other in all the
majesty of death. The soldier overcame the shades of greatness; the
living became the despoliator of inanimate worth. The chapel claimed the
skeleton, and Barbarossa the marble chair, which afterward became the
throne where thirty-six emperors were crowned. Ferdinand the First was
the last; Charles the Fifth preceded him.

In 1804, when Bonaparte became known as Napoleon, he visited
Aix-la-Chapelle. Josephine, who accompanied him, had the caprice to sit
down on this chair; but Napoleon, out of respect for Charlemagne, took
off his hat, and remained for some time standing, and in silence. The
following fact is somewhat remarkable, and struck me forcibly. In 814
Charlemagne died; a thousand years afterward, most probably about the
same hour, Napoleon fell.

In that fatal year, 1814, the allied sovereigns visited the tomb of the
great "Carolus." Alexander of Russia, like Napoleon, took off his hat
and uniform; Frederick William of Prussia kept on his "casquette de
petite tenue;" Francis retained his surtout and round bonnet. The King
of Prussia stood upon the marble steps, receiving information from the
provost of the chapter respecting the coronation of the emperors of
Germany; the two emperors remained silent. Napoleon, Josephine,
Alexander, Frederick William, and Francis, are now no more.

A few minutes afterward I was on my way to the Hotel-de-Ville, the
supposed birthplace of Charlemagne, which, like the chapel, is an
edifice made of five or six others. In the middle of the court there is
a fountain of great antiquity, with a bronze statue of Charlemagne. To
the left and right are two others--both surmounted with eagles, their
heads half turned toward the grave and tranquil emperor.

The evening was approaching. I had passed the whole of the day among
these grand and austere "souvenirs;" and, therefore, deemed it essential
to take a walk in the open fields, to breathe the fresh air, and to
watch the rays of the declining sun. I wandered along some dilapidated
walls, entered a field, then some beautiful alleys, in one of which I
seated myself. Aix-la-Chapelle lay extended before me, partly hid by the
shades of evening, which were falling around. By degrees the fogs gained
the roofs of the houses, and shrouded the town steeples; then nothing
was seen but two huge masses--the Hotel-de-Ville and the chapel. All the
emotions, all the thoughts and visions which flitted across my mind
during the day, now crowded upon me. The first of the two dark objects
was to me only the birthplace of a child; the second was the
resting-place of greatness. At intervals, in the midst of my reverie, I
imagined that I saw the shade of this giant, whom we call Charlemagne,
developing itself between this great cradle and still greater tomb.

[Footnote A: From "The Rhine." Translated by D.M. Aird.]




THE HANSEATIC LEAGUE[A]

BY JAMES HOWELL


The Hans, or Hanseatic League, is very ancient, some would derive the
word from hand, because they of the society plight their faith by that
action; others derive it from Hansa, which in the Gothic tongue is
council; others would have it come from Hander see, which signifies near
or upon the sea, and this passeth for the best etymology, because their
towns are all seated so, or upon some navigable river near the sea. The
extent of the old Hans was from the Nerve in Livonia to the Rhine, and
contained sixty-two great mercantile towns, which were divided into four
precincts. The chiefest of the first precinct was Luebeck, where the
archives of their ancient records and their prime chancery is still, and
this town is within that verge; Cullen is chief of the second precinct,
Brunswick of the third, and Dantzic of the fourth. The kings of Poland
and Sweden have sued to be their protector, but they refused them,
because they were not princes of the empire.

They put off also the King of Denmark with a compliment, nor would they
admit the King of Spain when he was most potent in the Netherlands, tho
afterward, when it was too late, they desired the help of the ragged
staff; nor of the Duke of Anjou, notwithstanding that the world thought
he should have married our queen, who interceded for him, and so it was
probable that thereby they might recover their privileges in England. So
I do not find that they ever had any protector but the great Master of
Prussia; and their want of a protector did do them some prejudice in
that famous difference they had with our Queen.

The old Hans had extraordinary immunities given them by our Henry the
Third, because they assisted him in his wars with so many ships, and as
they pretend, the king was not only to pay them for the service of the
said ships but for the vessels themselves if they miscarried. Now it
happened that at their return to Germany, from serving Henry the Third,
there was a great fleet of them cast away, for which, according to
covenant, they demanded reparation. Our king in lieu of money, among
other facts of grace, gave them a privilege to pay but one per cent.,
which continued until Queen Mary's reign, and she by advice of King
Philip, her husband, as it was conceived, enhanced the one to twenty per
cent.

The Hans not only complained but clamored loudly for breach of their
ancient privileges confirmed unto them, time out of mind, by thirteen
successive kings of England, which they pretended to have purchased with
their money. King Philip undertook to accommodate the business, but
Queen Mary dying a little after, and he retiring, there could be nothing
done. Complaint being made to Queen Elizabeth, she answered that as she
would not innovate anything, so she would maintain them still in the
same condition she found them. Hereupon their navigation and traffic
ceased a while, wherefore the English tried what they could do
themselves, and they thrived so well that they took the whole trade into
their own hands, and so divided themselves (tho they be now but one), to
staplers and merchant-adventurers, the one residing constant in one
place, where they kept their magazine of wool, the other stirring and
adventuring to divers places abroad with cloth and other manufacturies,
which made the Hans endeavor to draw upon them all the malignancy they
could from all nations.

Moreover, the Hans towns being a body politic incorporated in the
empire, complained thereof to the emperor, who sent over persons of
great quality to mediate an accommodation, but they could effect
nothing. Then the queen caused a proclamation to be published that the
easterlings or merchants of the Hans should be entreated and used as all
other strangers were, within her dominations, without any mark of
difference in point of commerce. This nettled them more, thereupon they
bent their forces more eagerly, and in a diet at Ratisbon they procured
that the English merchants who had associated themselves into
fraternities in Emden and other places should be declared monopolists;
and so there was a committal edict published against them that they
should be exterminated and banished out of all parts of the empire; and
this was done by the activity of one Sudennan, a great civilian.

There was there for the queen, Gilpin, as nimble a man as Suderman, and
he had the Chancellor of Emden to second and countenance him, but they
could not stop the said edict wherein the Society of English
Merchant-Adventurers was pronounced to be a monopoly; yet Gilpin played
his game so well, that he wrought underhand, that the said imperial ban
should not be published till after the dissolution of the diet, and that
in the interim the Emperor should send ambassadors to England to advise
the queen of such a ban against her merchants. But this wrought so
little impression upon the queen that the said ban grew rather
ridiculous than formidable, for the town of Emden harbored our merchants
notwithstanding and afterward Stade, but they not being able to protect
them so well from the imperial ban, they settled in the town of Hamburg.
After this the queen commanded another proclamation to be divulged that
the easterlings or Hanseatic merchants should be allowed to trade in
England upon the same conditions and payment of duties as her own
subjects, provided that the English merchants might have interchangeable
privilege to reside and trade peaceably in Stade or Hamburg or anywhere
else within the precincts of Hans. This incensed them more, thereupon
they resolved to cut off Stade and Hamburg from being members of the
Hans or of the empire; but they suspended this decision till they saw
what success the great Spanish fleet should have, which was then
preparing in the year eighty-eight, for they had not long before had
recourse to the King of Spain and made him their own, and he had done
them some material good offices; wherefore to this day the Spanish
Consul is taxed of improvidence and imprudence, that there was no use
made of the Hans towns in that expedition.

The queen finding that they of the Hans would not be contented with that
equality she had offered betwixt them and her own subjects, put out a
proclamation that they should carry neither corn, victuals, arms,
timber, masts, cables, minerals, nor any other materials, or men to
Spain or Portugal. And after, the queen growing more redoubtable and
famous, by the overthrow of the fleet of eighty-eight, the easterlings
fell to despair of doing any good. Add hereunto another disaster that
befell them, the taking of sixty sails of their ships about the mouth of
Tagus in Portugal by the Queen's ships that were laden with "ropas de
contrabando," viz., goods prohibited by her former proclamation into the
dominions of Spain. And as these ships were upon point of being
discharged, she had intelligence of a great assembly at Luebeck, which
had met of purpose to consult of means to be revenged of her thereupon
she stayed and seized upon the said sixty ships, only two were freed to
bring news what became of the rest. Hereupon the Pope sent an ambassador
to her, who spoke in a high tone, but he was answered in a higher.

Ever since our merchants have beaten a peaceful and free uninterrupted
trade into this town and elsewhere within and without the Sound, with
their manufactures of wool, and found the way also to the White Sea to
Archangel and Moscow. Insomuch that the premises being well considered,
it was a happy thing for England that that clashing fell out betwixt her
and the Hans, for it may be said to have been the chief ground of that
shipping and merchandising, which she is now come to, and wherewith she
hath flourished ever since. But one thing is observable, that as that
imperial or committal ban, pronounced in the Diet at Ratisbon against
our merchants and manufactures of wool, incited them more to industry.
So our proclamation upon Alderman Cockein's project of transporting no
white cloths but dyed, and in their full manufacture, did cause both
Dutch and Germans to turn necessity to a virtue, and made them far more
ingenious to find ways, not only to dye but to make cloth, which hath
much impaired our markets ever since. For there hath not been the third
part of our cloth sold since, either here or in Holland.

[Footnote A: From "Familiar Letters." "Montaigne and 'Howell's
Letters'," says Thackeray, in one of the "Roundabout Papers," "are my
bedside books." Howell wrote this letter in Hamburg in October, 1632.]




HAMBURG[A]

BY THEOPHILE GAUTIER


To describe a night journey by rail is a difficult matter; you go like
an arrow whistling through a cloud; it is traveling in the abstract. You
cross provinces, kingdoms even, unawares. From time to time during the
night, I saw through the window the comet, rushing down upon the earth,
with lowered head and hair streaming far behind; suddenly glares of
gaslight dazzled my eyes, sanded with the goldust of sleep; or the pale
bluish radiance of the moon gave an air of fairy-land to scenes
doubtless poor enough by day. Conscientiously, this is all I can say
from personal observation; and it would not be particularly amusing if I
should transcribe from the railway guide the names of all the stations
between Berlin and Hamburg.

It is 7 a.m., and here we are in the good Hanse town of Hamburg; the
city is not yet awake, or at most is rubbing its eyes and yawning. While
they are preparing my breakfast, I sally forth at random, as my custom
is, without guide or cicerone, in pursuit of the unknown.

The hotel, at which I have been set down, is situated on the quay of the
Alster, a basin as large as the Lac d'Enghien, which it still further
resembles in being peopled with tame swans. On three sides, the Alster
basin is bordered with hotels and handsome modern houses. An embankment
planted with trees and commanded by a wind-mill in profile forms the
fourth; beyond extends a great lagoon. From the most frequented of these
quays, a cafe painted green and built on piles, makes out into the
water, like that cafe of the Golden Horn where I have smoked so many
chibouques; watching the sea-birds fly. At the sight of this quay, this
basin, these houses, I experienced an inexplicable sensation: I seemed
to know them already. Confused recollections of them arose in my memory;
could I have been in Hamburg without being aware of it? Assuredly all
these objects are not new to me, and yet I am seeing them for the first
time. Have I preserved the impression made by some picture, some
photograph?

While I was seeking philosophic explanations for this memory of the
unknown, the idea of Heinrich Heine suddenly presented itself, and all
became clear. The great poet had often spoken to me of Hamburg, in those
plastic words he so well knew how to use--words that were equivalent to
realities. In his "Reisebilder," he describes the scene--cafe basin,
swans, and townsfolk upon the quays--Heaven knows what portraits he
makes of them! He returns to it again in his poem, "Germania," and there
is so much life to the picture, such distinctness, such relief, that
sight itself teaches you nothing more.

I made the circuit of the basin, graciously accompanied by a snow-white
swan, handsome enough to make one think it might be Jupiter in disguise,
seeking some Hamburg Leda, and, the better to carry out the deception,
snapping at the bread-crumbs offered him by the traveler. On the farther
side of the basin, at the right, is a sort of garden or public
promenade, having an artificial hillock, like that in the labyrinth in
the "Jardin des Plantes." Having gone thus far, I turned and retraced my
steps.

Every city has its fashionable quarter--new, expensive, handsome--of
which the citizens are proud, and through which the guide leads you with
much complacency. The streets are broad and regular, and cut one another
at right angles; there are sidewalks of granite, brick, or bitumen;
there are lamp-posts in every direction. The houses are like palaces;
their classically modern architecture, their irreproachable paint, their
varnished doors and well-scoured brasses, fill with joy the city fathers
and every lover of progress. The city is neat, orderly, salubrious, full
of light and air, and resembles Paris or London. There is the Exchange!
It is superb--as fine as the Bourse in Paris! I grant it; and, besides,
you can smoke there, which is a point of superiority.

Farther on you observe the Palace of Justice, the bank, etc., built in
the style you know well, adored by Philistines of every land. Doubtless
that house must have cost enormously; it contains all possible luxury
and comfort. You feel that the mollusk of such a shell can be nothing
less than a millionaire. Permit me, however, to love better the old
house with its overhanging stories, its roof of irregular tiles, and
all its little characteristic details, telling of former generations. To
be interesting, a city must have the air of having lived, and, in a
sense, of having received from man a soul. What makes these magnificent
streets built yesterday so cold and so tiresome, is that they are not
yet impregnated with human vitality.

Leaving the new quarter, I penetrated by degrees into the chaos of the
old streets, and soon I had before my eyes a characteristic, picturesque
Hamburg; a genuine old city with a medieval stamp which would delight
Bonington, Isabey or William Wyld. I walked slowly, stopping at every
street-corner that I might lose no detail of the picture; and rarely has
any promenade amused me so well.

Houses, whose gables are denticulated or else curved in volutes, throw
out successive overhanging stories, each composed of a row of windows,
or, more properly, of one window divided into sections by carved
uprights. Beneath each house are excavated cellars, subterranean
recesses, which the steps leading to the front door bestride like a
drawbridge. Wood, brick, stone and slate, mingled in a way to content
the eye of a colorist, cover what little space the windows leave on the
outside of the house. All this is surmounted by a roof of red or violet
tiles, or tarred plank, interrupted by openings to give light to the
attics, and having an abrupt pitch. These steep roofs look well against
the background of a northern sky; the rains run off them in torrents,
the snow slips from them; they suit the climate, and do not require to
be swept in winter. Some houses have doors ornamented with rustic
columns, scroll-work, recessed pediments, chubby-cheeked caryatides,
little angels and loves, stout rosettes and enormous shells, all glued
over with whitewash renewed doubtless every year.

The tobacco sellers in Hamburg can not be counted. At every third step
you behold a bare-chested negro cultivating the precious leaf or a Grand
Seigneur, attired like the theatrical Turk, smoking a colossal pipe.
Boxes of cigars, with their more or less fallacious vignettes and
labels, figure, symmetrically disposed, in the ornamentation of the
shop-fronts. There must be very little tobacco left at Havana, if we can
have faith in these displays, so rich in famous brands.

As I have said, it was early morning. Servant-maids, kneeling on the
steps or standing on the window-sills, were going on with the Saturday
scrubbing. Notwithstanding the keen air, they made a display of robust
arms bare to the shoulder, tanned and sunburned, red with that
astonishing vermilion that we see in some of Rubens' paintings, which is
the joint result of the biting of the north wind and the action of water
upon these blond skins; little girls belonging to the poorer classes,
with braided hair, bare arms, and low-necked frocks, were going out to
obtain articles of food; I shivered in my paletot, to see them so
lightly clad. There is something strange about this; the women of
northern countries cut their dresses out in the neck, they go about
bare-headed and bare-armed, while the women of the South cover
themselves with vests, haicks, pelisses, and warm garments of every
description.

Walking on, still at random, I came to the maritime part of the city,
where canals take the place of streets. As yet it was low water, and
vessels lay aground in the mud, showing their hulls, and careening over
in a way to rejoice a water-color painter. Soon the tide came up, and
everything began to be in motion. I would suggest Hamburg to artists
following in the track of Canaletto, Guardi, or Joyant; they will find,
at every step, themes as picturesque as and more new than those which
they go to Venice in search of.

This forest of salmon-colored masts, with their maze of cordage and
their yellowish-brown sails drying in the sun, these tarred sterns with
apple-green decks, these lateen-yards threatening the windows of the
neighboring houses, these derricks standing under plank roofs shaped
like pagodas, these tackles lifting heavy packages out of vessels and
landing them in houses, these bridges opening to give passage to
vessels, these clumps of trees, these gables overtopped here and there
by spires and belfries; all this bathed in smoke, traversed by sunlight
and here and there returning a glitter of polished metal, the far-off
distance blue and misty, and the foreground full of vigorous color,
produced effects of the most brilliant and piquant novelty. A
church-tower, covered with plates of copper, springing from this curious
medley of rigging and of houses, recalled to me by its odd green color
the tower of Galata, at Constantinople....

As the hour advanced, the crowd became more numerous, and it was
largely composed of women. In Hamburg they seem to enjoy great license.
Very young girls come and go alone without anyone's noticing it, and--a
remarkable thing!--children go to school by themselves, little basket on
the arm, and slate in hand; in Paris, left to their own free will, they
will run off to play marbles, tag, or hop-scotch.

Dogs are muzzled in Hamburg all the week, but on Sundays they are left
at liberty to bite whom they please. They are taxed, and appear to be
esteemed; but the cats are sad and unappreciated. Recognizing in me a
friend, they cast melancholy glances at me, saying in their feline
language, to which long use has given me the key:

"These Philistines, busy with their money-getting, despise us; and yet
our eyes are as yellow as their louis d'or. Stupid men that they are,
they believe us good for nothing but to catch rats; we, the wise, the
meditative, the independent, who have slept upon the prophet's sleeve,
and lulled his ear with the whir of our mysterious wheel! Pass your hand
over our backs full of electric sparkles--we allow you this liberty, and
say to Charles Baudelaire that he must write a fine sonnet, deploring
our woes."

As the Luebeck boat was not to leave until the morrow, I went to Wilkin's
to get my supper. This famous establishment occupies a low-ceiled
basement, which is divided into cabinets ornamented with more show than
taste. Oysters, turtle-soup, a truffled filet, and a bottle of Veuve
Cliquot iced, composed my simple bill of fare. The place was filled,
after the Hamburg fashion, with edibles of all sorts; things early and
things out of season, dainties not yet in existence or having long
ceased to exist, for the common crowd. In the kitchen they showed us, in
great tanks, huge sea-turtles which lifted their scaly heads above the
water, resembling snakes caught between two platters. Their little horny
eyes looked with uneasiness at the light which was held near them, and
their flippers, like oars of some disabled galley, vaguely moved up and
down, as seeking some impossible escape. I trust that the personnel of
the exhibition changes occasionally.

In the morning I went for my breakfast to an English restaurant, a sort
of pavilion of glass, whence I had a magnificent panoramic view. The
river spread out majestically through a forest of vessels with tall
masts, of every build and tonnage. Steam-tugs were beating the water,
towing sailing-vessels out to sea; others, moving about freely, made
their way hither and thither, with that precision which makes a
steam-boat seem like a conscious being, endowed by a will of its own,
and served by sentient organs. From the elevation the Elbe is seen,
spreading broadly like all great rivers as they near the sea. Its
waters, sure of arriving at last, are in no haste; placid as a lake,
they flow with an almost invisible motion. The low opposite shore was
covered with verdure, and dotted with red houses half-effaced by the
smoke from the chimneys. A golden bar of sunshine shot across the plain;
it was grand, luminous, superb.

[Footnote A: From "A Winter in Russia." By arrangement with, and by
permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1874. Hamburg
is now the largest seaport on the continent of Europe. London and New
York are the only ports in the world that are larger. Exclusive of its
rural territory, it had in 1905 a population of 803,000.]




SCHLESWIG[A]

BY THEOPHILE GAUTIER


When you are in a foreign country, reduced to the condition of a
deaf-mute, you can not but curse the memory of him who conceived the
idea of building the tower of Babel, and by his pride brought about the
confusion of tongues! An omnibus took possession of myself and my
trunks, and, with the feeling that it must of necessity take me
somewhere, I confidingly allowed myself to be stowed in and carried
away. The intelligent omnibus set me down before the best hotel in the
town, and there, as circumnavigators say in their journals, "I held a
parley with the natives." Among them was a waiter who spoke French in a
way that was transparent enough to give me an occasional glimpse of his
meaning; and who--a much rarer thing!--even sometimes understood what I
said to him.

My name upon the hotel register was a ray of light. The hostess had been
notified of my expected arrival, and I was to be sent for as soon as my
appearance should be announced; but it was now late in the evening, and
I thought it better to wait till the next day. There was served for
supper a "chaud-froid" of partridge--without confiture--and I lay down
upon the sofa, hopeless of being able to sleep between the two
down-cushions which compose the German and the Danish bed....

I explored Schleswig, which is a city quite peculiar in its appearance.
One wide street runs the length of the town, with which narrow cross
streets are connected, like the smaller bones with the dorsal vertebrae
of a fish. There are handsome modern houses, which, as usual, have not
the slightest character. But the more modest dwellings have a local
stamp; they are one-story buildings, very low--not over seven or eight
feet in height--capped with a huge roof of fluted red tiles. Windows,
broader than they are high, occupy the whole of the front; and behind
these windows, spread luxuriantly in porcelain or faience or earthen
flowerpots, plants of every description; geraniums, verbenas,
fuchsias--and this absolutely without exception. The poorest house is as
well adorned as the best. Sheltered by these perfumed window-blinds, the
women sit at work, knitting or sewing, and, out of the corner of their
eye, they watch, in the little movable mirror which reflects the
streets, the rare passer-by, whose boots resound upon the pavement. The
cultivation of flowers seem to be a passion in the north; countries
where they grow naturally make but little account of them in comparison.

The church in Schleswig had in store for me a surprise. Protestant
churches in general, are not very interesting from an artistic point of
view, unless the reformed faith may have installed itself in some
Catholic sanctuary diverted from its primitive designation. You find,
usually, only whitewashed naves, walls destitute of painting or
bas-relief, and rows of oaken benches well-polished and shining. It is
neat and comfortable, but it is not beautiful. The church at Schleswig
contains, by a grand, unknown artist, an altar-piece in three parts, of
carved wood, representing in a series of bas-reliefs, separated by fine
architectural designs, the most important scenes in the drama of the
Passion.

Around the church stand sepulchral chapels of fine funereal fancy and
excellent decorative effect. A vaulted hall contains the tombs of the
ancient Dukes of Schleswig; massive slabs of stone, blazoned with
armorial devices, covered with inscriptions which are not lacking in
character.

In the neighborhood of Schleswig are great saline ponds, communicating
with the sea. I paced the high-road, remarking the play of light upon
this grayish water, and the surface crisped by the wind; occasionally I
extended my walk as far as the chateau metamorphosed into a barrack, and
the public gardens, a miniature St. Cloud, with its cascade, its
dolphins, and its other aquatic monsters all standing idle. A very good
sinecure is that of a Triton in a Louis Quinze basin! I should ask
nothing better myself.

[Footnote A: From "A Winter in Russia." By arrangement with, and by
permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1874.]




LUEBECK[A]

BY THEOPHILE GAUTIER


In the evening the train carried me to Luebeck, across magnificent
cultivated lands, filled with summer-houses, which lave their feet in
the brown water, overhung by spreading willows. This German Venice has
its canal, the Brenta, whose villas, tho not built by Sanmichele or
Palladio, none the less make a fine show against the fresh green of
their surroundings.

On arriving at Luebeck, a special omnibus received me and my luggage, and
I was soon set down at the hotel. The city seemed picturesque as I
caught a glimpse of it through the darkness by the vague light of
lanterns; and in the morning, as I opened my chamber-window, I perceived
at once I had not been mistaken.

The opposite house had a truly German aspect. It was extremely high and
overtopped by an old-fashioned denticulated gable. At each one of the
seven stories of the house, iron cross-bars spread themselves out into
clusters of iron-work, supporting the building, and serving at once for
use and ornament, in accordance with an excellent principle in
architecture, at the present day too much neglected. It is not by
concealing the framework, but by making it distinct, that we obtain more
character.

This house was not the only one of its kind, as I was able to convince
myself on walking a few steps out of doors. The actual Luebeck is still
to the eye the Luebeck of the Middle Ages, the old capital of the
Hanseatic League.[B] All the drama of modern life is enacted in the old
theater whose scenery remains the same, its drop-scene even not
repainted. What a pleasure it is to be walking thus amid the outward
life of the past, and to contemplate the same dwellings which
long-vanished generations have inhabited! Without doubt, the living man
has a right to model his shell in accordance with his own habits, his
tastes, and his manners; but it can not be denied that a new city is far
less attractive than an old one.

When I was a child, I sometimes received for a New Year's present one of
those Nuremberg boxes containing a whole miniature German city. In a
hundred different ways I arranged the little houses of painted wood
around the church, with its pointed belfry and its red walls, where the
seam of the bricks was marked by fine white lines. I set out my two
dozen frizzed and painted trees, and saw with delight the charmingly
outlandish and wildly festal air which these apple-green, pink, lilac,
fawn-colored houses with their window-panes, their retreating gables,
and their steep roofs, brilliant with red varnish, assumed, spread out
on the carpet.

My idea was that houses like these had no existence in reality, but were
made by some kind fairy for extremely good little boys. The marvelous
exaggeration of childhood gave this little parti-colored city a
respectable development, and I walked through its regular streets, tho
with the same precautions as did Gulliver in Liliput. Luebeck gave back
to me this long-forgotten feeling of my childish days. I seemed to walk
in a city of the imagination, taken out of some monstrous toy-box. I
believe, considering all the faultlessly correct architecture that I
have been forced to see in my traveler's life, that I really deserved
that pleasure by way of compensation.

A cloister, or at least a gallery, a fragment of an ancient monastery,
presented itself to view. This colonnade ran the whole length of the
square, at the end of which stood the Marienkirche, a brick church of
the fourteenth century. Continuing my walk, I found myself in a
market-place, where awaited me one of those sights which repay the
traveler for much fatigue: a public building of a new, unforeseen,
original aspect, the old Stadthaus in which was formerly the Hanse hall,
rose suddenly before me.

It occupies two sides of the square. Imagine, in front of the
Marienkirche, whose spires and roof of oxydized copper rise above it, a
lofty brick facade, blackened by time, bristling with three bell-towers
with pointed copper-covered roofs, having two great empty rose-windows,
and emblazoned with escutcheons inscribed in the trefoils of its ogives,
double-headed black eagles on a gold field, and shields, half gules,
half argent, ranged alternately, and executed in the most elaborate
fashion of heraldry.

To this facade is joined a palazzino of the Renaissance, in stone and of
an entirely different style, its tint of grayish-white marvelously
relieved by the dark-red background of old brick-work. This building,
with its three gables, its fluted Ionic columns, its caryatides, or
rather its Atlases (for they are human figures), its semicircular
window, its niches curved like a shell, its arcades ornamented with
figures, its basement of diamond-shaped stones, produces what I may call
an architectural discord that is most unexpected and charming. We meet
very few edifices in the north of Europe of this style and epoch.

In the facade, the old German style prevails: arches of brick, resting
upon short granite columns, support a gallery with ogive-windows. A row
of blazons, inclined from right to left, bring out their brilliant color
against the blackish tint of the wall. It would be difficult to form an
idea of the character and richness of this ornamentation.

This gallery leads into the main building, a structure than which no
scene-painter, seeking a medieval decoration for an opera, ever invented
anything more picturesque and singular. Five turrets, coiffed with roofs
like extinguishers, raise their pointed tops above the main line of the
facade with its lofty ogive-windows--unhappily now most of them
partially bricked up, in accordance, doubtless, with the exigencies of
alterations made within. Eight great disks, having gold backgrounds, and
representing radiating suns, double-headed eagles, and the shields,
gules and argent, the armorial bearings of Luebeck, are spread out
gorgeously upon this quaint architecture. Beneath, arches supported upon
short, thick pillars yawn darkly, and from far within there comes the
gleam of precious metals, the wares of some goldsmith's shop.

Turning back toward the square again, I notice, rising above the houses,
the green spires of another church, and over the heads of some
market-women, who are chaffering over their fish and vegetables, the
profile of a little building with brick pillars, which must have been a
pillory in its day. This gives a last touch to the purely Gothic aspect
of the square which is interrupted by no modern edifice. The ingenious
idea occurred to me that this splendid Stadthaus must have another
facade; and so in fact it had; passing under an archway, I found myself
in a broad street, and my admiration began anew.

Five bell-towers, built half into the wall and separated by tall
ogive-windows now partly blocked up, repeated, with variations, the
facade I have just described. Brick rosettes exhibited their curious
designs, spreading with square stitches, so to speak, like patterns for
worsted work. At the base of the somber edifice a pretty little lodge,
of the Renaissance, built as an afterthought, gave entrance to an
exterior staircase going up along the wall diagonally to a sort of
mirador, or overhanging look-out, in exquisite taste. Graceful little
statues of Faith and Justice, elegantly draped, decorated the portico.

The staircase, resting on arches which widened as it rose higher, was
ornamented with grotesque masks and caryatides. The mirador, placed
above the arched doorway opening upon the market-place, was crowned with
a recessed and voluted pediment, where a figure of Themis held in one
hand balances, and in the other a sword, not forgetting to give her
drapery, at the same time, a coquettish puff. An odd order formed of
fluted pilasters fashioned like pedestals and supporting busts,
separated the windows of this aerial cage. Consoles with fantastic masks
completed the elegant ornamentation, over which Time had passed his
thumb just enough to give to the carved stone that bloom which nothing
can imitate....

The Marienkirche, which stands, as I have said, behind the Stadt-haus,
is well worth a visit. Its two towers are 408 feet in height; a very
elaborate belfry rises from the roof at the point of intersection of the
transept. The towers of Luebeck have the peculiarity, every one of them,
of being out of the perpendicular, leaning perceptibly to the right or
left, but without disquieting the eye, like the tower of Asinelli at
Bologna, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Seen two or three miles away,
these towers, drunk and staggering, with their pointed caps that seem to
nod at the horizon, present a droll and hilarious silhouette.

On entering the church, the first curious object that meets the eye is
a copy of the Todtentanz, or Dance of Death, of the cemetery at Basle. I
do not need to describe it in detail. The Middle Ages were never tired
of composing variations upon this dismal theme. The most conspicuous of
them are brought together in this lugubrious painting, which covers all
the walls of one chapel. From the Pope and the Emperor to the infant in
his cradle, each human being in his turn enters upon the dance with the
inevitable terror. But death is not depicted as a skeleton, white,
polished, cleaned, articulated with copper wire like the skeleton of an
anatomical cabinet: that would be too ornamental for the vulgar crowd.
He appears as a dead body in a more or less advanced state of
decomposition, with all the horrid secrets of the tomb carefully
revealed....

The cathedral, which is called in German the Dom, is quite remarkable in
its interior. In the middle of the nave, filling one whole arch, is a
colossal Christ of Gothic style, nailed to a cross carved in open-work,
and ornamented with arabesques. The foot of this cross rests upon a
transverse beam, going from one pillar to another, on which are standing
the holy women and other pious personages, in attitudes of grief and
adoration; Adam and Eve, one on either side, are arranging their
paradisaic costume as decently as may be; above the cross the keystone
of the arch projects, adorned with flowers and leafage, and serves as a
standing-place for an angel with long wings. This construction, hanging
in mid-air, and evidently light in weight, notwithstanding its
magnitude, is of wood, carved with much taste and skill. I can define
it in no better way than to call it a carved portcullis, lowered halfway
in front of the chancel. It is the first example of such an arrangement
that I have ever seen....

The Holstenthor, a city gate close by the railway station, is a most
curious and picturesque specimen of German medieval architecture.
Imagine two enormous brick towers united by the main portion of the
structure, through which opens an archway, like a basket-handle, and you
have a rude sketch of the construction; but you would not easily
conceive of the effect produced by the high summit of the edifice, the
conical roofs of the towers, the whimsical windows in the walls and in
the roofs, the dull red or violet tints of the defaced bricks. It is
altogether a new gamut for painters of architecture or of ruins; and I
shall send them to Luebeck by the next train. I recommend to their notice
also, very near the Holstenthor, on the left bank of the Trave, five or
six crimson houses, shouldering each other for mutual support, bulging
out in front, pierced with six or seven stories of windows, with
denticulated gables, the deep red reflection of them trailing in the
water, like some high-colored apron which a servant-maid is washing.
What a picture Van den Heyden would have made of this!

Following the quay, along which runs a railway, where freight-trains
were constantly passing, I enjoyed many amusing and varied scenes. On
the other side of the Trave were to be seen, amid houses and clumps of
trees, vessels in various stages of building. Here, a skeleton with
ribs of wood, like the carcass of some stranded whale; there, a hull,
clad with its planking near which smokes the calker's cauldron, emitting
light yellowish clouds. Everywhere prevails a cheerful stir of busy
life. Carpenters are planing and hammering, porters are rolling casks,
sailors are scrubbing the decks of vessels, or getting the sails half
way up to dry them in the sun. A barque just arriving comes alongside
the quay, the other vessels making room for her to pass. The little
steamboats are getting up steam or letting it off; and when you turn
toward the city, through the rigging of the vessels, you see the
church-towers, which incline gracefully, like the masts of clippers.

[Footnote A: From "A Winter in Russia." By arrangement with, and by
permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1874.]

[Footnote B: The decline of Luebeck dates from the first quarter of the
sixteenth century and was chiefly due to the discovery of America and
the consequent diversion of commerce to new directions. Other
misfortunes came with the Thirty Years' War. As early as 1425, one of
the constant sources of Luebeck's wealth had begun to fail her--the
herring, which was found to be deserting Baltic waters. The discovery by
the Portuguese of a route to India by the Cape of Good Hope was another
cause of Luebeck's decline.]




HELIGOLAND[A]

BY WILLIAM GEORGE BLACK


In Heligoland itself there are few trees, no running water, no romantic
ruins, but an extraordinary width of sea-view, seen as from the deck of
a gigantic ship; and yet the island is so small that one can look around
it all, and take the sea-line in one great circle.

Seen from a distance, as one must first see it, Heligoland is little
more than a cloud on the horizon; but as the steamer approaches nearer,
the island stands up, a red rock in the ocean, without companion or
neighbor. A small ledge of white strand to the south is the only spot
where boats can land, and on this ledge nestle many white-walled,
red-roofed houses; while on the rim of the rock, nearly two hundred feet
above, is a sister hamlet, with the church-tower and lighthouse for
central ornaments.

On the Unterland are the principal streets and shops, on the Oberland
are many of the best hotels and government-house. As there is no harbor,
passengers reach the shore in large boats, and get their first glimpse
of the hardy, sun-browned natives in the boatmen who, with bright
jackets and hats of every picturesque curve that straw is capable of,
pull the boat quickly to the steps of the little pier. Crowds of
visitors line the way, but one gets quickly through, and in a few
minutes returns either to familiar quarters in the Oberland, or finds an
equally clean and moderate home among the lodging-house keepers or
seamen. The season is a very short one, only ten weeks out of fifty-two,
but the prices are moderate and the comfort unchallengeable....

Heligoland is only one mile long from pier to Nordkap, and a quarter of
a mile wide at its widest--in all it is three-quarters of a square mile
in size. There are no horses or carts in Heligoland--only six cows, kept
always in darkness, and a few sheep and goats tethered on the Oberland.
The streets are very narrow, but very clean, and the constant
repetition in houses and scarves and flags of the national colors gives
Heligoland a gay aspect; for the national colors are anything but dull.

Green land, red rocks, white strand--nothing could be better descriptive
of the island than these colors. They are easily brought out in domestic
architecture, for with a whitewashed cottage and a red-tiled roof the
Heligolander has only to give his door and window-shutters a coat of
bright green paint, and there are the colors of Heligoland. In case the
unforgettable fact should escape the tourist, the government have worked
the colors into the ingenious and pretty island postage-stamp, and many
of our German friends wear bathing-pants of the same unobtrusive tints.

Life is a very delightful thing in summer in this island. On your first
visit you feel exhilarated by the novelty of everything as much as by
the strong warm sea wind which meets you wherever you go. When you
return, the novelty has worn away, but the sense of enjoyment has
deepened. As you meet friendly faces and feel the grip of friendly
hands, so you also exchange salutations with Nature, as if she, too,
were an old Heligoland friend. You know the view from this point and
from that; but, like the converse of a friend, it is always changing,
for there is no monotony in the sea. The waves lap the shore gently, or
roar tumultuously in the red caverns, and it is all familiar, but none
the less welcome and soothing because of that familiarity. It is not a
land of lotus-eating delights, but it is a land where there is little
sound but what the sea makes, and where every face tells of strong sun
and salt waves. No doubt, much of its charm lies in its contrast to the
life of towns or country places. Whatever comes to Heligoland comes from
over the sea; there is no railway within many a wide mile; the people
are a peculiar people, with their own peculiar language, and an island
patriotism which it would be hard to match....

From the little pier one passes up the narrow white street, no broader
than a Cologne lane, but clean and bright as is no other street in
Europe, past the cafes with low balconies, and the little shops--into
some there are three or four steps to descend, into others there is an
ascent of a diminutive ladder--till the small square or garden is
reached in front of the Conversation House, a spacious building with a
good ball-room and reading-room, where a kiosque, always in summer full
of the fragrant Heligoland roses, detains the passer-by. Then another
turn or two in the street, and the bottom of the Treppe is
approached--the great staircase which winds upward to the Oberland, in
whose crevices grow masses of foliage, and whose easy ascent need not be
feared by any one, for the steps are broad and low.

The older flight of steps was situated about a hundred paces northward
from the present Treppe. It was cut out of the red crumbling rock, and
at the summit passed through a guard-house. Undoubtedly the present
Treppe should be similarly fortified. It was built by the government in
1834. During the smuggling days, it is said, an Englishman rode up to
the Oberland, and the apparition so shocked an old woman, who had never
seen a horse before, that she fell senseless to the ground.

From the Falm or road skirting the edge of the precipice from the head
of the stairs to Government House, one of the loveliest views in all the
world lies before our eyes. Immediately beneath are the winding stairs,
with their constant stream of broad-shouldered seamen, or coquettish
girls, or brown boys, passing up and down, while at each resting-place
some group is sitting on the green-red-white seats gossiping over the
day's business. Trees and plants nestle in the stair corners, and almost
conceal the roadway at the foot.

Lifting one's eyes away from the little town, the white pier sprawls on
the, sea, and countless boats at anchor spot with darkness the shining
water. Farther away, the Duene lies like a bar of silver across the view,
ribbed with emerald where the waves roll in over white sand; and all
around it, as far as the eye can reach, white sails gleam in the light,
until repose is found on the horizon where sea and sky meet in a vapory
haze. At night the Falm is a favorite resort of the men whose houses are
on the Oberland. With arms resting on the broad wall, they look down on
the twinkling lights of the houses far beneath, listen to the laughter
or song which float up from the small tables outside the cafe, or watch
the specks of light on the dark gleam of the North Sea. It is a prospect
of which one could hardly tire, if it was not that in summer one has in
Heligoland a surfeit of sea loveliness....

Heligoland is conjecturally identified with the ocean island described
by Tacitus as the place of the sacred rites of the Angli and other
tribes of the mainland. It was almost certainly sacred to Forsete, the
son of Balder the Sun-god--if he be identified, as Grimm and all Frisian
writers identify him, with Fosite the Frisian god. Forsete, a
personification to men of the great white god, who dwelt in a shining
hall of gold and silver, was among all gods and men the wisest of
judges.

It is generally supposed that Heligoland was first named the Holy Island
from its association with the worship of Forsete, and latterly in
consequence of the conversion of the Frisian inhabitants. Hallier has,
however, pointed out that the Heligolanders do not use this name for
their home. They call the island "det Lunn"--the land; their language
they call "Hollunner," and he suggests that the original name was
Hallig-lunn. A hallig is a sand-island occasionally covered with water.
When the Duene was connected with the rock there was a large stretch of
sand covered by winter floods. Hallig-lunn would then mean the island
that is more than a hallig; and from the similarity of the words to
Heligoland a series of etymological errors may have arisen; but
Hallier's derivation is, after all, only a guess.

[Footnote A: From "Heligoland and the Islands of the North Sea."
Heligoland, an island and fortress in the North Sea, lies thirty-six
miles northwest of the mouth of the Elbe--Hamburg. It was ceded to
Germany by Great Britain in 1890; and is attached to Schleswig Holstein.
As a fortress, its importance has been greatly increased since the
Germans recovered possession of the island.]




V

VIENNA




FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE CAPITAL[A]

BY BAYARD TAYLOR


I have at last seen the thousand wonders of this great capital, this
German Paris, this connecting-link between the civilization of Europe
and the barbaric magnificence of the East. It looks familiar to be in a
city again whose streets are thronged with people and resound with the
din and bustle of business. It reminds me of the never-ending crowds of
London or the life and tumult of our scarcely less active New York. The
morning of our arrival we sallied out from our lodgings in the
Leopoldstadt to explore the world before us. Entering the broad
Praterstrasse, we passed down to the little arm of the Danube which
separates this part of the new city from the old. A row of magnificent
coffee-houses occupy the bank, and numbers of persons were taking their
breakfasts in the shady porticos. The Ferdinand's Bridge, which crosses
the stream, was filled with people; in the motley crowd we saw the
dark-eyed Greek, and Turks in their turbans and flowing robes. Little
brown Hungarian boys were going around selling bunches of lilies, and
Italians with baskets of oranges stood by the sidewalk.

The throng became greater as we penetrated into the old city. The
streets were filled with carts and carriages, and, as there are no
side-pavements, it required constant attention to keep out of their way.
Splendid shops fitted up with great taste occupied the whole of the
lower stories, and goods of all kinds hung beneath the canvas awnings in
front of them. Almost every store or shop was dedicated to some
particular person or place, which was represented on a large panel by
the door. The number of these paintings added much to the splendor of
the scene; I was gratified to find, among the images of kings and dukes,
one dedicated "To the American," with an Indian chief in full costume.

The Altstadt, or "old city," which contains about sixty thousand
inhabitants, is completely separated from the suburbs, whose population,
taking the whole extent within the outer barrier, numbers nearly half a
million.[B] It is situated on a small arm of the Danube and encompassed
by a series of public promenades, gardens and walks, varying from a
quarter to half a mile in length, called the "Glacis." This formerly
belonged to the fortifications of the city, but as the suburbs grew up
so rapidly on all sides, it was changed appropriately to a public walk.
The city is still surrounded with a massive wall and a deep wide moat,
but, since it was taken by Napoleon in 1809, the moat has been changed
into a garden with a beautiful carriage-road along the bottom around the
whole city.

It is a beautiful sight to stand on the summit of the wall and look over
the broad Glacis, with its shady roads branching in every direction and
filled with inexhaustible streams of people. The Vorstaedte, or new
cities, stretch in a circle, around beyond this; all the finest
buildings front on the Glacis, among which the splendid Vienna Theater
and the church of San Carlo Borromeo are conspicuous. The mountains of
the Vienna forest bound the view, with here and there a stately castle
on their woody summits.

There is no lack of places for pleasure or amusement. Besides the
numberless walks of the Glacis there are the imperial gardens, with
their cool shades and flowers and fountains; the Augarten, laid out and
opened to the public by the Emperor Joseph; and the Prater, the largest
and most beautiful of all. It lies on an island formed by the arms of
the Danube, and is between two and three miles square. From the circle
at the end of the Praterstrasse broad carriage-ways extend through its
forests of oak and silver ash and over its verdant lawns to the
principal stream, which bounds it on the north. These roads are lined
with stately horse-chestnuts, whose branches unite and form a dense
canopy, completely shutting out the sun.

Every afternoon the beauty and nobility of Vienna whirl through the
cool groves in their gay equipages, while the sidewalks are thronged
with pedestrians, and the numberless tables and seats with which every
house of refreshment is surrounded are filled with merry guests. Here on
Sundays and holidays the people repair in thousands. The woods are full
of tame deer, which run perfectly free over the whole Prater. I saw
several in one of the lawns lying down in the grass, with a number of
children playing around or sitting beside them. It is delightful to walk
there in the cool of the evening, when the paths are crowded and
everybody is enjoying the release from the dusty city. It is this free
social life which renders Vienna so attractive to foreigners and draws
yearly thousands of visitors from all parts of Europe....

We spent two or three hours delightfully one evening in listening to
Strauss's band. We went about sunset to the Odeon, a new building in the
Leopoldstadt. It has a refreshment-hall nearly five hundred feet long,
with a handsome fresco ceiling and glass doors opening into a
garden-walk of the same length. Both the hall and garden were filled
with tables, where the people seated themselves as they came and
conversed sociably over their coffee and wine. The orchestra was placed
in a little ornamental temple in the garden, in front of which I
stationed myself, for I was anxious to see the world's waltz-king whose
magic tones can set the heels of half Christendom in motion.

After the band had finished tuning their instruments, a middle-sized,
handsome man stept forward with long strides, with a violin in one hand
and bow in the other, and began waving the latter up and down, like a
magician summoning his spirits. As if he had waved the sound out of his
bow, the tones leaped forth from the instruments, and, guided by his eye
and hand, fell into a merry measure. The accuracy with which every
instrument performed its part was truly marvelous. He could not have
struck the measure or the harmony more certainly from the keys of his
own piano than from that large band. The sounds struggled forth so
perfect and distinct that one almost expected to see them embodied,
whirling in wild dance around him. Sometimes the air was so exquisitely
light and bounding the feet could scarcely keep on the earth; then it
sank into a mournful lament with a sobbing tremulousness, and died away
in a long-breathed sigh.

Strauss seemed to feel the music in every limb. He would wave his
fiddle-bow a while, then commence playing with desperate energy, moving
his whole body to the measure, till the sweat rolled from his brow. A
book was lying on the stand before him, but he made no use of it. He
often glanced around with a kind of half-triumphant smile at the
restless crowd, whose feet could scarcely be restrained from bounding to
the magic measure. It was the horn of Oberon realized. The composition
of the music displayed great talent, but its charm consisted more in the
exquisite combination of the different instruments, and the perfect,
the wonderful, exactness with which each performed its part--a piece of
art of the most elaborate and refined character.

The company, which consisted of several hundred, appeared to be full of
enjoyment. They sat under the trees in the calm, cool twilight with the
stars twinkling above, and talked and laughed sociably together between
the pauses of the music, or strolled up and down the lighted alleys. We
walked up and down with them, and thought how much we should enjoy such
a scene at home, where the faces around us would be those of friends and
the language our mother-tongue.

We went a long way through the suburbs one bright afternoon to a little
cemetery about a mile from the city to find the grave of Beethoven. On
ringing at the gate a girl admitted us into the grounds, in which are
many monuments of noble families who have vaults there. I passed up the
narrow walk, reading the inscriptions, till I came to the tomb of Franz
Clement, a young composer who died two or three years ago. On turning
again my eye fell instantly on the word "Beethoven" in golden letters on
a tombstone of gray marble. A simple gilded lyre decorated the pedestal,
above which was a serpent encircling a butterfly--the emblem of
resurrection. Here, then, moldered the remains of that restless spirit
who seemed to have strayed to earth from another clime, from such a
height did he draw his glorious conceptions.

The perfection he sought for here in vain he has now attained in a
world where the soul is freed from the bars which bind it in this. There
were no flowers planted around the tomb by those who revered his genius;
only one wreath, withered and dead, lay among the grass, as if left long
ago by some solitary pilgrim, and a few wild buttercups hung with their
bright blossoms over the slab. It might have been wrong, but I could not
resist the temptation to steal one or two while the old gravedigger was
busy preparing a new tenement. I thought that other buds would open in a
few days, but those I took would be treasured many a year as sacred
relics. A few paces off is the grave of Schubert, the composer whose
beautiful songs are heard all over Germany.

We visited the imperial library a day or two ago. The hall is two
hundred and forty-five feet long, with a magnificent dome in the center,
under which stands the statue of Charles V., of Carrara marble,
surrounded by twelve other monarchs of the house of Hapsburg. The walls
are of variegated marble richly ornamented with gold, and the ceiling
and dome are covered with brilliant fresco-paintings. The library
numbers three hundred thousand volumes and sixteen thousand manuscripts,
which are kept in walnut cases gilded and adorned with medallions. The
rich and harmonious effect of the whole can not easily be imagined. It
is exceedingly appropriate that a hall of such splendor should be used
to hold a library. The pomp of a palace may seem hollow and vain, for
it is but the dwelling of a man; but no building can be too magnificent
for the hundreds of great and immortal spirits to dwell in who have
visited earth during thirty centuries.

Among other curiosities preserved in the collection, we were shown a
brass plate containing one of the records of the Roman Senate made one
hundred and eighty years before Christ, Greek manuscripts of the fifth
and sixth centuries, and a volume of Psalms printed on parchment in the
year 1457 by Faust and Schoeffer, the inventors of printing. There were
also Mexican manuscripts presented by Cortez, the prayer-book of
Hildegard, wife of Charlemagne, in letters of gold, the signature of San
Carlo Borromeo, and a Greek Testament of the thirteenth century which
had been used by Erasmus in making his, translation and contains notes
in his own hand. The most interesting article was the "Jerusalem
Delivered" of Tasso, in the poet's own hand, with his erasures and
corrections.

The chapel of St. Augustine contains one of the best works of
Canova--the monument of the Grand Duchess Maria Christina of
Sachsen-Teschen. It is a pyramid of gray marble, twenty-eight feet high,
with an opening in the side representing the entrance to a sepulcher. A
female figure personating Virtue bears in an urn to the grave the ashes
of the departed, attended by two children with torches. The figure of
Compassion follows, leading an aged beggar to the tomb of his
benefactor, and a little child with its hands folded. On the lower step
rests a mourning genius beside a sleeping lion, and a bas-relief on the
pyramid above represents an angel carrying Christina's image, surrounded
with the emblem of eternity, to heaven. A spirit of deep sorrow, which
is touchingly portrayed in the countenance of the old man, pervades the
whole group.

While we looked at it the organ breathed out a slow, mournful strain
which harmonized so fully with the expression of the figures that we
seemed to be listening to the requiem of the one they mourned. The
combined effect of music and sculpture thus united in their deep pathos
was such that I could have sat down and wept. It was not from sadness at
the death of a benevolent tho unknown individual, but the feeling of
grief, of perfect, unmingled sorrow, so powerfully represented, came to
the heart like an echo of its own emotion and carried it away with
irresistible influence. Travelers have described the same feeling while
listening to the "Miserere" in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. Canova could
not have chiselled the monument without tears.

One of the most interesting objects in Vienna is the imperial armory. We
were admitted through tickets previously procured from the armory
direction; as there was already one large company within, we were told
to wait in the court till our turn came. Around the wall, on the inside,
is suspended the enormous chain which the Turks stretched across the
Danube at Buda in the year 1529 to obstruct the navigation. It has eight
thousand links and is nearly a mile in length. The court is filled with
cannon of all shapes and sizes, many of which were conquered from other
nations. I saw a great many which were cast during the French
Revolution, with the words "Liberte! Egalite!" upon them, and a number
of others bearing the simple letter "N."....

The first wing contains banners used in the French Revolution, and
liberty-trees with the red cap, the armor of Rudolph of Hapsburg,
Maximilian, I., the emperor Charles V., and the hat, sword and order of
Marshal Schwarzenberg. Some of the halls represent a fortification, with
walls, ditches and embankments, made of muskets and swords. A long room
in the second wing contains an encampment in which twelve or fifteen
large tents are formed in like manner. There was also exhibited the
armor of a dwarf king of Bohemia and Hungary who died a gray-headed old
man in his twentieth year, the sword of Marlborough, the coat of
Gustavus Adolphus, pierced in the breast and back with the bullet which
killed him at Luetzen, the armor of the old Bohemian princess Libussa,
and that of the amazon Wlaska, with a steel vizor made to fit the
features of her face.

The last wing was the most remarkable. Here we saw the helm and
breastplate of Attila, king of the Huns, which once glanced at the head
of his myriads of wild hordes before the walls of Rome; the armor of
Count Stahremberg, who commanded Vienna during the Turkish siege in
1529, and the holy banner of Mohammed, taken at that time from the
grand vizier, together with the steel harness of John Sobieski of
Poland, who rescued Vienna from the Turkish troops under Kara Mustapha;
the hat, sword and breastplate of Godfrey of Bouillon, the crusader-king
of Jerusalem, with the banners of the cross the crusaders had borne to
Palestine and the standard they captured from the Turks on the walls of
the Holy City. I felt all my boyish enthusiasm for the romantic age of
the crusaders revive as I looked on the torn and moldering banners which
once waved on the hills of Judea, or perhaps followed the sword of the
Lion-Heart through the fight on the field of Ascalon. What tales could
they not tell, those old standards cut and shivered by spear and lance!
What brave hands have carried them through the storm of battle, what
dying eyes have looked upward to the cross on the folds as the last
prayer was breathed for the rescue of the holy sepulcher.

[Footnote A: From "Views Afoot." Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.]

[Footnote B: The population of Vienna, according to the census of 1910,
was 2,085,888.]




ST. STEPHEN'S CATHEDRAL[A]

BY THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN


Of the chief objects of architecture which decorate street scenery in
Vienna, there are none, to my old-fashioned eyes, more attractive and
thoroughly beautiful and interesting--from a thousand associations of
ideas than places of worship, and of course, among these, none stands
so eminently conspicuous as the mother-church, or the cathedral, which
in this place, is dedicated to St. Stephen. The spire has been long
distinguished for its elegance and height. Probably these are the most
appropriate, if not the only, epithets of commendation which can be
applied to it. After Strasburg and Ulm, it appears a second-rate
edifice. Not but what the spire may even vie with that of the former,
and the nave may be yet larger than that of the latter; but, as a whole,
it is much inferior to either--even allowing for the palpable falling
off in the nave of Strasburg cathedral.

The spire, or tower--for it partakes of both characters--is indeed
worthy of general admiration. It is oddly situated, being almost
detached--and on the south side of the building. Indeed the whole
structure has a very strange, and I may add capricious, if not
repulsive, appearance, as to its exterior. The western and eastern ends
have nothing deserving of distinct notice or commendation. The former
has a porch; which is called "the Giant's porch;" it should rather be
designated as that of the Dwarf. It has no pretensions to size or
striking character of any description. Some of the oldest parts of the
cathedral appear to belong to the porch of the eastern end. As you walk
round the church, you can not fail to be struck with the great variety
of ancient--and to an Englishman, whimsical looking mural monuments, in
basso and alto relievos. Some of these are doubtless both interesting
and curious.

But the spire is indeed an object deserving of particular admiration.
It is next to that of Strasburg in height; being 432 feet of Vienna
measurement. It may be said to begin to taper from the first stage or
floor; and is distinguished for its open and sometimes intricate
fretwork. About two-thirds of its height, just above the clock, and
where the more slender part of the spire commences, there is a gallery
or platform, to which the French quickly ascended, on their possession
of Vienna, to reconnoiter the surrounding country. The very summit of
the spire is bent, or inclined to the north; so much so, as to give the
notion that the cap or crown will fall in a short time.

As to the period of the erection of this spire, it is supposed to have
been about the middle, or latter end, of the fifteenth century. It has
certainly much in common with the highly ornamental Gothic style of
building in our own country, about the reign of Henry VI. The colored
glazed tiles of the roof of the church are very disagreeable and
unharmonizing. These colors are chiefly green, red, and blue. Indeed the
whole roof is exceedingly heavy and tasteless.

I will now conduct you to the interior. On entering, from the southeast
door, you observe, to the left, a small piece of white marble--which
every one touches, with the finger or thumb charged with holy water, on
entering or leaving the cathedral. Such have been the countless
thousands of times that this piece of marble has been so touched, that,
purely, from such friction, it has been worn nearly half an inch below
the general surrounding surface. I have great doubts, however, if this
mysterious piece of masonry be as old as the walls of the church (which
may be of the fourteenth century), which they pretend to say it is.

The first view of the interior of this cathedral, seen even at the most
favorable moment--which is from about three till five o'clock--is far
from prepossessing. Indeed, after what I had seen at Rouen, Paris,
Strassburg, Ulm, and Munich, it was a palpable disappointment. In the
first place, there seems to be no grand leading feature of simplicity;
add to which, darkness reigns everywhere. You look up, and discern no
roof--not so much from its extreme height, as from the absolute want of
windows. Everything not only looks dreary, but is dingy and black--from
the mere dirt and dust which seem to have covered the great pillars of
the nave--and especially the figures and ornaments upon it--for the last
four centuries. This is the more to be regretted, as the larger pillars
are highly ornamented; having human figures, of the size of life,
beneath sharply pointed canopies, running up the shafts. The extreme
length of the cathedral is 342 feet of Vienna measurement. The extreme
width, between the tower and its opposite extremity--or the
transepts--is 222 feet.

There are comparatively few chapels; only four--but many Bethstuehle or
Prie-Dieus. Of the former, the chapels of Savoy and St. Eloy are the
chief; but the large sacristy is more extensive than either. On my first
entrance, while attentively examining the choir, I noticed--what was
really a very provoking, but probably not a very uncommon sight--a maid
servant deliberately using a long broom in sweeping the pavement of the
high altar, at the moment when several very respectable people, of both
sexes, were kneeling upon the steps, occupied in prayer. But the
devotion of the people is incessant--all the day long--and in all parts
of the cathedral.

Meanwhile, service is going on in all parts of the cathedral. They are
singing here; they are praying there; and they are preaching in a third
place. But during the whole time, I never heard one single note of the
organ. I remember only the other Sunday morning--walking out beneath one
of the brightest blue skies that ever shone upon man--and entering the
cathedral about nine o'clock. A preacher was in the principal pulpit;
while a tolerably numerous congregation was gathered around him. He
preached, of course, in the German language, and used much action. As he
became more and more animated, he necessarily became warmer, and pulled
off a black cap--which, till then, he had kept upon his head; the zeal
and piety of the congregation at the same time seeming to increase with
the accelerated motions of the preacher.

In other more retired parts, solitary devotees were seen--silent, and
absorbed in prayer. Among these, I shall not easily forget the head and
the physiognomical expression of one old man--who, having been supported
by crutches, which lay by the side of him--appeared to have come for the
last time to offer his orisons to heaven. The light shone full upon his
bald head and elevated countenance; which latter indicated a genuineness
of piety, and benevolence of disposition, not to be soured, even by the
most bitter of worldly disappointments! It seemed as if the old man were
taking leave of this life, in full confidence of the rewards which await
the righteous beyond the grave.

So much for the living. A word or two now for the dead. Of course this
letter alludes to the monuments of the more distinguished characters
once resident in and near the metropolis. Among these, doubtless the
most elaborate is that of the Emperor Frederick III.--in the florid
Gothic style, surmounted by a tablet, filled with coat-armor, or
heraldic shields. Some of the mural monuments are very curious, and
among them are several of the early part of the sixteenth century--which
represent the chins and even mouths of females, entirely covered by
drapery; such as is even now to be seen and such as we saw on descending
from the Vosges. But among these monuments--both for absolute and
relative antiquity--none will appear to the curious eye of an antiquary
so precious as that of the head of the architect of the cathedral, whose
name was Pilgram.

[Footnote A: From "A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour,"
published in 1821.]




THE BELVEDERE PALACE[A]

BY THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN


To the Belvedere Palace, therefore, let us go. I visited it with Mr.
Lewis--taking our valet with us, immediately after breakfast--on one of
the finest and clearest-skied September mornings that ever shone above
the head of man. We had resolved to take the Ambras, or the little
Belvedere, in our way; and to have a good, long, and uninterrupted view
of the wonders of art--in a variety of departments.

Both the little Belvedere and the large Belvedere rise gradually above
the suburbs; and the latter may be about a mile and a half from the
ramparts of the city. The Ambras contains a quantity of ancient horse-
and foot-armor, brought thither from a chateau of that name, near
Inssbruck, built by the Emperor Charles V. Such a collection of old
armor--which had once equally graced and protected the bodies of their
wearers, among whom the noblest names of which Germany can boast may be
enrolled--was infinitely gratifying to me. The sides of the first room
were quite embossed with suspended shields, cuirasses, and
breast-plates. The floor was almost filled by champions on
horseback--yet poising the spear, or holding it in the rest--yet almost
shaking their angry plumes, and pricking the fiery sides of their
coursers.

Here rode Maximilian--and there halted Charles his son. Different suits
of armor, belonging to the same character, are studiously shown you by
the guide; some of these are the foot-, and some the horse-, armor; some
were worn in fight--yet giving evidence of the mark of the bullet and
battle-ax; others were the holiday suits of armor, with which the
knights marched in procession, or tilted at the tournament. The
workmanship of the full-dress suits, in which a great deal of highly
wrought gold ornament appears, is sometimes really exquisite.

The second, or long room, is more particularly appropriated to the foot-
or infantry-armor. In this studied display of much that is interesting
from antiquity, and splendid from absolute beauty and costliness, I was
particularly gratified by the sight of the armor which the Emperor
Maximilian wore as a foot-captain. The lower part, to defend the thighs,
consists of a puckered or plated steel petticoat, sticking out at the
bottom of the folds, considerably beyond the upper part. It is very
simple, and of polished steel. A fine suit of armor--of black and
gold--worn by an Archbishop of Salzburg in the middle of the fifteenth
century, had particular claims upon my admiration. It was at once chaste
and effective. The mace was by the side of it.

This room is also ornamented by trophies taken from the Turks; such as
bows, spears, battle-axes, and scimitars. In short, the whole is full of
interest and splendor. I ought to have seen the arsenal--which I learn
is of uncommon magnificence; and, altho not so curious on the score of
antiquity, is yet not destitute of relics of the warriors of Germany.
Among these, those which belong to my old bibliomaniacal friend
Corvinus, King of Hungary, cut a conspicuous and very respectable
figure. I fear it will be now impracticable to see the arsenal as it
ought to be seen.

It is now approaching mid-day, and we are walking toward the terrace in
front of the Great Belvidere Palace, built by the immortal Eugene[B] in
the year 1724, as a summer residence. Probably no spot could have been
selected with better judgment for the residence of a Prince--who wished
to enjoy, almost at the same moment, the charms of the country with the
magnificence of a city view, unclouded by the dense fumes which forever
envelop our metropolis. It is in truth a glorious situation. Walking
along its wide and well-cultivated terraces, you obtain the finest view
imaginable of the city of Vienna.

Indeed it may be called a picturesque view. The spire of the cathedral
darts directly upward, as it were, to the very heavens. The ground
before you, and in the distance, is gently undulating; and the
intermediate portion of the suburbs does not present any very offensive
protrusions. More in the distance, the windings of the Danube are seen;
with its various little islands, studded with hamlets and fishing-huts,
lighted up by a sun of unusual radiance. Indeed the sky, above the
whole of this rich and civilized scene, was at the time of our viewing
it, almost of a dazzling hue; so deep and vivid a tint we had never
before beheld. Behind the palace, in the distance, you observe a chain
of mountains which extends into Hungary. As to the building itself, it
is perfectly palatial in its size, form, ornaments, and general effect.

Among the treasures, which it contains, it is now high time to enter and
to look about us. My account is necessarily a mere sketch. Rubens, if
any artist, seems here to "rule and reign without control!" Two large
rooms are filled with his productions; besides several other pictures,
by the same hand, which are placed in different apartments. Here it is
that you see verified the truth of Sir Joshua's remark upon that
wonderful artist: namely, that his genius seems to expand with the size
of his canvas.

His pencil absolutely riots here--in the most luxuriant manner--whether
in the majesty of an altarpiece, in the gaiety of a festive scene, or in
the sobriety of portrait-painting. His Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis
Xavier--of the former class--each seventeen feet high, by nearly
thirteen wide--are stupendous productions in more senses than one. The
latter is, indeed, in my humble judgment, the most marvelous specimen of
the powers of the painter which I have ever seen; and you must remember
that both England and France are not without some of his celebrated
productions, which I have frequently examined.

In the old German School, the series is almost countless; and of the
greatest possible degree of interest and curiosity. Here are to be seen
Wohlgemuths, Albert Duerers, both the Holbeins, Lucas Cranachs,
Ambergaus, and Burgmairs of all sizes and degrees of merit. Among these
ancient specimens--which are placed in curious order, in the very upper
suite of apartments, and of which the backgrounds of several, in one
solid coat of gilt, lighten up the room like a golden sunset--you must
not fail to pay particular attention to a singularly curious old
subject--representing the Life, Miracles, and Passion of our Savior, in
a series of one hundred and fifty-eight pictures--of which the largest
is nearly three feet square, and every other about fifteen inches by
ten. These subjects are painted upon eighty-six small pieces of wood; of
which seventy-two are contained in six folding cabinets, each holding
twelve subjects. In regard to Teniers, Gerard Dow, Mieris, Wouvermann,
and Cuyp, you must look at home for more exquisite specimens. This
collection contains, in the whole, not fewer than fifteen hundred
paintings, of which the greater portion consists of pictures of very
large dimensions. I could have lived here for a month; but could only
move along with the hurried step, and yet more hurrying eye, of an
ordinary visitor.

[Footnote A: From "A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour,"
published in 1821.]

[Footnote B: The celebrated Austrian general, who defeated the Turks in
1697, and shared with Marlborough in the victories of Blenheim and
Malplaquet.]




SCHOENBRUNN AND THE PRATER[A]

BY THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN


About three English miles from the Great Belvedere--or rather about the
same number of miles from Vienna, to the right, as you approach the
capital--is the famous palace of Schoenbrunn. This is a sort of
summer-residence of the Emperor; and it is here that his daughter, the
ex-Empress of France, and the young Bonaparte usually reside.[B] The
latter never goes into Italy, when his mother, as Duchess of Parma, pays
her annual visit to her principality. At this moment her son is at
Baden, with the court. It was in the Schoenbrunn palace that his father,
on the conquest of Vienna, used to take up his abode, rarely venturing
into the city. He was surely safe enough here; as every chamber and
every court yard was filled by the elite of his guard--whether as
officers or soldiers.

It is a most magnificent pile of building; a truly imperial
residence--but neither the furniture nor the objects of art, whether
connected with sculpture or painting, are deserving of anything in the
shape of a catalogue raisonne. I saw the chamber where young Bonaparte
frequently passes the day; and brandishes his flag staff, and beats upon
his drum. He is a soldier (as they tell me) every inch of him; and
rides out, through the streets of Vienna, in a carriage of state drawn
by four or six horses, receiving the homage of the passing multitude.

To return to the Schoenbrunn Palace. I have already told you that it is
vast, and capable of accommodating the largest retinue of courtiers. It
is of the gardens belonging to it, that I would now only wish to say a
word. These gardens are really worthy of the residence to which they are
attached. For what is called ornamental, formal, gardening--enriched by
shrubs of rarity, and trees of magnificence--enlivened by
fountains--adorned by sculpture--and diversified by vistas, lawns, and
walks--interspersed with grottoes and artificial ruins--you can conceive
nothing upon a grander scale than these: while a menagerie in one place
(where I saw a large but miserably wasted elephant)--a flower-garden in
another--a labyrinth in a third, and a solitude in a fourth place--each,
in its turn, equally beguiles the hour and the walk. They are the most
spacious gardens I ever witnessed.

It was the other Sunday evening when I visited the Prater, and when--as
the weather happened to be very fine--it was considered to be full, but
the absence of the court, of the noblesse, necessarily gave a less
joyous and splendid aspect to the carriages and their attendant
liveries. In your way to this famous place of Sabbath evening promenade,
you pass a celebrated coffee-house, in the suburbs, called the
Leopoldstadt, which goes by the name of the Greek coffee-house--on
account of its being almost entirely frequented by Greeks--so numerous
at Vienna. Do not pass it, if you should ever come hither, without
entering it--at least once. You would fancy yourself to be in Greece, so
thoroughly characteristic are the countenances, dresses, and language of
everyone within.

But yonder commences the procession of horse and foot; of cabriolets,
family coaches, German wagons, cars, phaetons and landaulets, all moving
in a measured manner, within their prescribed ranks, toward the Prater.
We must accompany them without loss of time. You now reach the Prater.
It is an extensive flat, surrounded by branches of the Danube, and
planted on each side with double rows of horse-chestnut trees. The
drive, in one straight line, is probably a league in length. It is
divided by two roads, in one of which the company move onward, and in
the other they return. Consequently, if you happen to find a hillock
only a few feet high, you may, from thence, obtain a pretty good view of
the interminable procession of the carriages before mentioned: one
current of them, as it were, moving forward, and another rolling
backward.

But, hark! the notes of a harp are heard to the left, in a meadow, where
the foot passengers often digress from the more formal tree-lined
promenade. A press of ladies and gentlemen is quickly seen. You mingle
involuntarily with them; and, looking forward, you observe a small stage
erected, upon which a harper sits and two singers stand. The company
now lie down upon the grass, or break into standing groups, or sit upon
chairs hired for the occasion--to listen to the notes so boldly and so
feelingly executed. The clapping of hands, and exclamations of bravo
succeed, and the sounds of applause, however warmly bestowed, quickly
die away in the open air. The performers bow, receive a few kreutzers,
retire, and are well satisfied.

The sound of the trumpet is now heard behind you. Tilting feats are
about to be performed; the coursers snort and are put in motion; their
hides are bathed in sweat beneath their ponderous housings; and the
blood, which flows freely from the pricks of their riders' spurs, shows
you with what earnestness the whole affair is conducted. There, the ring
is thrice carried off at the point of the lance. Feats of horsemanship
follow in a covered building, to the right; and the juggler, conjurer,
or magician, displays his dexterous feats, or exercises his potent
spells, in a little amphitheater of trees, at a distance beyond.

Here and there rise more stately edifices, as theaters, from the doors
of which a throng of heated spectators is pouring out. In other
directions, booths, stalls and tables are fixt; where the hungry eat,
the thirsty drink, and the merry-hearted indulge in potent libations.
The waiters are in a constant state of locomotion. Rhenish wine sparkles
here; confectionery glitters there; and fruit looks bright and tempting
in a third place. No guest turns round to eye the company; because he is
intent upon the luxuries which invite his immediate attention, or he is
in close conversation with an intimate friend, or a beloved female. They
talk and laugh--and the present seems to be the happiest moment of their
lives.

All is gaiety and good humor. You return again to the foot-promenade,
and look sharply about you, as you move onward, to catch the spark of
beauty, or admire the costume of taste, or confess the power of
expression. It is an Albanian female who walks yonder, wondering, and
asking questions, at every thing she sees. The proud Jewess, supported
by her husband and father, moves in another direction. She is covered
with brocade and flaunting ribbons; but she is abstracted from
everything around her, because her eyes are cast downward upon her
stomacher, or sideways to obtain a glimpse of what may be called her
spangled epaulettes. Her eye is large and dark; her nose is aquiline;
her complexion is of an olive brown; her stature is majestic, her dress
is gorgeous, her gait is measured--and her demeanor is grave and
composed. "She must be very rich," you say--as she passes on. "She is
prodigiously rich," replies the friend, to whom you put the
question--for seven virgins, with nosegays of choicest flowers, held up
her bridal train; and the like number of youths, with silver-hilted
swords, and robes of ermine and satin, graced the same bridal ceremony.
Her father thinks he can never do enough for her; and her husband, that
he can never love her sufficiently.

Whether she be happy or not, in consequence, we have no time to stop to
inquire, for see yonder! Three "turbaned Turks" make their advances. How
gaily, how magnificently they are attired! What finely proportioned
limbs--what beautifully formed features! They have been carousing,
peradventure, with some young Greeks--who have just saluted them, en
passant--at the famous coffee-house before mentioned. Everything around
you is novel and striking; while the verdure of the trees and lawns is
yet fresh, and the sun does not seem yet disposed to sink below the
horizon. The carriages still move on, and return, in measured
procession. Those who are within, look earnestly from the windows, to
catch a glance of their passing friends. The fair hand is waved here;
the curiously-painted fan is shaken there; and the repeated nod is seen
in almost every other passing landaulet. Not a heart seems sad; not a
brow appears to be clouded with care.

Such--or something like the foregoing--is the scene which usually passes
on a Sunday evening--perhaps six months out of the twelve--upon the
famous Prater at Vienna; while the tolling bell of St. Stephen's tower,
about nine o'clock--and the groups of visitors hurrying back, to get
home before the gates of the city are shut against them--usually
conclude the scene just described.

[Footnote A: From "A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour."
published in 1821.]

[Footnote B: Marie Louise, second wife of Napoleon, and their son, the
King of Rome.]




VI

HUNGARY




A GLANCE AT THE COUNTRY[A]

BY H. TORNAI DE KOEVER


Hungary consists of Hungary proper, with Transylvania (which had
independent rule at one time), Croatia and Slavonia (which have been
added), and the town of Fiume on the shores of the Adriatic Sea.

The lowlands are exceedingly beautiful in the northeast and west, where
the great mountain, peaks rise into the clear blue sky or are hidden by
big white clouds, but no beauty can be compared to the young green
waving corn or the ripe ears when swaying gently in the breeze. One sees
miles and miles of corn, with only a tree here and there to mark the
distances, and one can not help comparing the landscape to a green sea,
for the wind makes long silky waves, which make the field appear to rise
and fall like the ocean. In the heat of midday the mirage, or, as the
Hungarians call it, "Delibab," appears and shows wonderful rivers,
villages, cool green woods--all floating in the air. Sometimes one sees
hundreds of white oxen and church towers, and, to make the picture still
more confusing and wonderful, it is all seen upside down. This, the
richest part of the country, is situated between the rivers Danube and
Theiss, and runs right down to the borders of Servia. Two thirds of
Hungary consist of mountainous districts, but one third has the richest
soil in Europe.

Great rivers run through the heart of the country, giving it the
fertility which is its great source of wealth. The great lowlands, or
"Alfoeld," as the Magyars call them, are surrounded by a chain of
mountains whose heights are nearly equal to some Alpine districts. There
are three principal mountain ranges--the Tatra, Matra, and Fatra--and
four principal rivers--the Danube, Theiss, Drave, and Save. Hungary is
called the land of the three mountains and four rivers, and the emblem
of these form the chief feature in the coat-of-arms of the country.

The Carpathian range of mountains stretches from the northwest along the
north and down the east, encircling the lowlands and sending forth
rivers and streams to water the plains. These mountains are of a
gigantic bulk and breadth; they are covered with fir and pine trees, and
in the lower regions with oaks and many other kinds. The peaks of the
high Tatra are about 9,000 feet high, and, of course, are bare of any
vegetation, being snow-covered even in summer-time. On the
well-sheltered sides of these mountains numerous baths are to be found,
and they abound in mineral waters. Another curious feature are the deep
lakes called "Tengerszem" (Eyes of the Sea). According to folklore they
are connected with the sea, and wonderful beings live in them. However,
it is so far true that they are really of astonishing depth. The summer
up in the Northern Carpathians is very short, the nights always cold,
and there is plenty of rain to water the rich vegetation of the forests.
Often even in the summer there are snowstorms and a very low
temperature.

The Northeastern Carpathians include a range of lower hills running down
to the so-called Hegyalja, where the wonderful vine which produces the
wine of Tokay is grown. The southeastern range of the Carpathians
divides the county of Maramaros from Erdely (Transylvania). The main
part of this country is mountainous and rugged, but here also there is
wonderful scenery. Everything is still very wild in these parts of the
land, and tho mineral waters abound everywhere, the bathing-places are
very primitive.

The only seaport the country possesses is Fiume, which was given to
Hungary by Maria Theresa, who wanted to give Hungary the chance of
developing into a commercial nation. Besides the deep but small mountain
lakes, there are several large ones; among these the most important is
the Balaton, which, altho narrow, is about fifty miles long. Along its
borders there are summer bathing-places, considered very healthy for
children. Very good wine is produced here, as in most parts of Hungary
which are hilly, but not situated too high up among the mountains. The
lake of Balaton is renowned for a splendid kind of fresh-water fish, the
Fogas. It is considered the best fish after trout--some even prefer
it--and it grows to a good size.

The chief river of Hungary is the Danube, and the whole of Hungary is
included in its basin. It runs through the heart of the country, forming
many islands; the greatest is called the Csallokoez, and has over a
hundred villages on it. One of the prettiest and most cultivated of the
islands is St. Margaret's Isle, near Budapest, which has latterly been
joined to the mainland by a bridge. Some years ago only steamers
conveyed the visitors to it; these still exist, but now carriages can
drive on to the island too. It is a beautiful park, where the people of
Budapest seek the shade of the splendid old trees. Hot sulfur springs
are to be found on the island, and there is a bath for the use of
visitors.

The Danube leaves Hungary at Orsova, and passes through the so-called
Iron Gates. The scenery is very beautiful and wild in that part, and
there are many points where it is exceedingly picturesque, especially
between Vienna and Budapest. It is navigable for steamships, and so is
the next largest river, the Theiss. This river begins its course in the
Southeastern Carpathians, right up among the snow-peaks, amid wild and
beautiful scenery, and it eventually empties its waters into the Danube
at Titel. The three largest rivers of Hungary feed the Danube, and by
that means reach the Black Sea.

Hungary lies under the so-called temperate zone, but there does not seem
much temperance in the climate when we think of the terrible, almost
Siberian winters that come often enough and the heat waves occasioning
frequent droughts in the lowlands. The summer is short in the
Carpathians; usually in the months of August and September the weather
is the most settled. June and July are often rainy--sometimes snowstorms
cause the barometer to fall tremendously. In the mountain districts
there is a great difference between the temperature of the daytime and
that of the night. All those who go to the Carpathians do well to take
winter and Alpine clothing with them.

The winter in the mountains is perhaps the most exhilarating, as plenty
of winter sport goes on. The air is very cold, but the sun has great
strength in sheltered corners, enabling even delicate people to spend
the winter there. In the lowlands the summer is exceedingly hot, but
frequent storms, which cool the air for some days, make the heat
bearable. Now and then there have been summers when in some parts of
Hungary rain has not fallen for many weeks--even months. The winter,
too, even in the more temperate parts, is often severe and long, there
being often from eight to ten weeks of skating, altho the last few years
have been abnormally mild. In the valleys of the Carpathians potatoes,
barley, oats, and cabbages are grown, while in the warmer south wheat,
maize, tobacco, turnips, and the vine are cultivated. Down by the
Adriatic Sea the climate is much warmer, but Hungary, as already
mentioned, has only the town of Fiume of her own to boast of. The
visitors who look for a temperate winter and want to get away from the
raw cold must go to the Austrian town of Abbazia, which is reached in
half an hour by steamboat, and is called the Austrian Riviera. Those who
visit Hungary should come in spring--about May--and spend some weeks in
the capital, the lowlands and hilly districts, and go north to the
mountains and bathing-places in the summer months.

Tokay produces some of the finest wine in the world, and the vintage
time in that part of the country is most interesting and picturesque.

[Footnote A: From "Hungary." Published by the Macmillan Co.]




BUDAPEST[A]

BY H. TORNAI DE KOEVER


Budapest is one of the most beautifully situated cities in Europe.
Nobody can ever forget the wonderful sight of the two sister towns
divided by the wide and swiftly flowing Danube, with the steamers and
barges on her waters. Buda, the old stronghold, is on one side with the
fantastic "Gellert" hill, which is a formidable-looking mass of rocks
and caves; farther on is the lovely royal palace with its beautifully
kept gardens clinging to the hillside; then the oldest part, called the
stronghold, which has been rebuilt exactly in the style Matthias
Corvinus built it, and which was demolished during the Turkish invasion.
Here is the old church of Matthias too, but it is so much renovated that
it lacks the appearance of age. Behind the smaller hills larger ones
are to be seen covered with shady woods; these are the villa regions and
summer excursion places for the people.

Along the Danube are green and shady islands of which the most beautiful
is St. Margaret's Isle, and on the other side of the waters is the city
of "Pest," with the majestic Houses of Parliament, Palace of Justice,
Academy of Science, and numerous other fine buildings. At the present
time four bridges join the two cities together, and a huge tunnel leads
through the first hill in Buda into another part of the town. One can
not say which is the more beautiful sight: to look from Pest, which
stands on level ground, up to the varying hilly landscape of Buda; or to
look from the hillside of the latter place on to the fairy-land of Pest,
with the broad silver Danube receding in the distance like a great
winding snake, its scales all aglitter in the sunshine. It is beautiful
by day, but still more so at night, for myriads of lights twinkle in the
water, and the hillsides are dotted as if with flitting fairy-lamps.
Even those who are used to the sight look at it in speechless rapture
and wonder. What must it be like to foreigners!

Besides her splendid natural situation, Budapest has another great
treasure, and this is the great quantity of hot sulfur springs which
exists on both sides of the Danube. The Romans made use of these at the
time of their colonization, and we can find the ruins of the Roman baths
in Aquincum half an hour from Budapest. During the Turkish rule many
Turkish baths were erected in Buda. The Rudas bath exists to this day,
and with its modernized system is one of the most popular. Csaszar bath,
St. Lukacs bath, both in Buda, have an old-established reputation for
the splendid cures of rheumatism. A new bath is being built in Pest
where the hot sulfur water oozes up in the middle of the park--the same
is to be found in St. Margaret's Isle. Besides the sulfur baths there
are the much-known bitter waters in Buda called "Hunyady" and "Franz
Joseph," as well as salt baths.

The city, with the exception of some parts in Buda, is quite modern, and
has encircling boulevards and wide streets, one of the finest being the
Andrassy Street. The electric car system is one of the most modern,
while underground and overground electric railways lead to the most
distant suburbs. The city has a gay and new look about it; all along the
walks trees are planted, and cafes are to be seen with a screen of
shrubs or flowers around them. In the evening the sound of music floats
from the houses and cafes. There are plenty of theaters, in which only
the Hungarian language is used, and a large and beautiful opera-house
under government management. There are museums, institutions of art and
learning, academies of painting and music, schools, and shops, and life
and movement everywhere. At present [1911] the city numbers about
900,000 souls, but the more distant suburbs are not reckoned in this
number.

[Footnote A: From "Hungary." Published by the Macmillan Co.]



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