BY-GONE TOURIST DAYS
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By-gone Tourist Days
Letters of Travel
By LAURA G. COLLINS
Author of “Immortelles and Asphodels”
ILLUSTRATED
“I consider letters the most vital part of literature”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
CINCINNATI
THE ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY
1900
Copyright, 1899,
By The Robert Clarke Company.
INSCRIPTION.
Respectfully inscribed to the dear friends
to whom the letters were written,
and by them preserved.
CONTENTS.
London Letter—April 7, 1882, | |
Trip on the Atlantic—The Steamer Adriatic—Storm onthe Ocean—Chester—English Cathedrals—To Liverpool—Chatsworth—Stratford—The318th Anniversaryof Shakespeare—Oxford—Magdalen College—“Addison’sWalk”—New College—Sir Joshua Reynolds-Window—AtWarwick—Bodlean Library—AshmoleanMuseum—Spofford Brooks and Canon Liddon. | |
London Letter—June 11, 1882, | |
Seeing London—Advantage of being in a great city—Theboarding-house, just for Americans—WindsorPalace—Gray’s grave—Moncure Conway—Canon Farrar—Bostonians—AmericanCousins—From London onthe way to Scotland. | |
From London to Edinburgh—July 4, 1882, | |
Four hours at York—The Nuns of St. Leonard’s Hospital—St.Mary’s Abbey—“The Five Sisters”—New-castle-on-Tyne—Durham—TheCathedral—St. Cuthbert—TheTomb of Bede—The Legend of Bede—Wanderingminstrels—Scenery on the route—The sunset—A Scotchlady—List of tourists. | |
Scotland Letter—July 21, 1882, | |
Edinburgh—Holyrood Palace—Castle with relics of MaryQueen of Scots—Alexander Swift says—Of traveling—Dumfermline—TheAbbey of Robert Bruce—NewbattleAbbey. | |
Heidelberg Letter—August 16, 1882, | |
In Heidelberg—The Neckar—The places I have been—Sketchesover the line of travel—The scenes visitedfrom England to Heidelberg. | |
Heidelberg Letter—September 3, 1882, | |
Heidelberg; this is home—From Nuremberg—The enchantmentand charms of the old city—The streets,buildings, bridges, churches, museums and galleries—Masterpiecesof Durer, Kraft, Stoss and Vischer—Theworks of numerous artists—The lime tree—The lampthat has been lighted since 1326—The crown princess—TheExposition—Going back some day—A day of rest—CapeColony English ladies—My traveling companion. | |
Baden-Baden—September 19, 1882, | |
Heidelberg on the Neckar—The castle, the Jettenbühl—“DasGrosse Fass”—Mapping out Switzerland—Thefloods—In the Gardens—The Black Forest—The Oos—Thetrees on the banks—To Strassburg. | |
Nuremberg—September 27, 1883, | |
From Heidelberg to Nuremberg—Nuremberg the objectivepoint—Ancestors back to 1570—Up the Neckar—Thescenery—Two historic points—Hotels full—GrandExposition—Superb attractions—Old lime tree—Durer’smonument—The princess and family—A wedding—Travelingalone—German lady—At Baden—Friedrichsbad—Thedays at Strassburg. | |
Munich Letter—September 24, 1882, | |
Old and New Schloss—Trinkhalle and its waters—Thegreat Friedrichsbad—Strassburg Cathedral—The wonderfulclock—St. Thomas Church, with monument toMarshal Saxe—The Strassburg specialty, pâtés-de-fois-gras—Theattractive city, Constance—Monastery whereHuss was imprisoned—The place where Jerome sufferedsentence—From Constance to Lindau—The beauty ofcountry and scenery—The Alps again—Words not equalto doing justice—Innumerable places of attraction—München,the capital of little Bavaria. | |
München Letter—October 11, 1882, | |
Visit to royal palace—A woman’s voice in American English—Walksand drives around München—Looking inthe shop windows—Picking up pictures—Call at thebook-store—“The Last Judgment,” largest oil paintingin the world—Other pictures and sketches—Vesperservice—Munich a large city—Neighbors—A Prussianofficer. | |
Munich Letter—November 18, 1882, | |
Letters, letters, letters—An evening with friends—Myhusband and early childhood—Happy days—Dear hills,beautiful hills, sacred hills—Youthful days—The housewhere I was born—“The Point”—That “exuberantset”—Another Mrs. C.—Bavarian officer—Anticipationof seeing the Alps—A concert—Booth—Letters. | |
München Letter—November 20, 1882, | |
A homesick heart—The leaf from a tree—Views about theold homestead—The royal family at church—Royaldames—One of the princesses, a beautiful woman—Theking—The music—The church—My religion. | |
Munich Letter—December 12, 1882, | |
Repetition—Letter of the “altogethery type”—My style—Love,late in life—Indian summer—“That vale of Aberdeen”—Beautifulold ladies—That singular death-bedspeech—The divine musician—French books—Dutchreading—The epic, Nibelungenlied—The king’s palace. | |
Munich Letter—December 22, 1882, | |
My counterfeit presentment—The crayon portrait—“Paintme as I am”—About my pictures—The home of mychildhood—“The Place of Roses”—Les Petites Miseresde la vie Conjugale—Christmas coming—What Johndid—Christmas, Christmas. | |
Munich Letter—January 2, 1883, | |
Preparations for Christmas—Bavaria and its kings—Thepublic buildings—Music—The house of Wittelsbachdates from 1110—The Maximilians—The king on hisdeath-bed—The present king, Ludwig II—His character—Hisroyal palaces—The Gallery of Ancestors—Theking a poet—His refined taste—The king’s spotlessreputation—Of the kings. | |
München Letter—January 15, 1883, | |
Christmas and New Years—The scathingest tongue—Christmastree—The Nibelungenlied in German—Churchservices—German New Year’s Eve—Our frau’sbanquet. | |
Munich Letter—October 4, 1886, | |
Of writing letters—Ingenious sophism—The little girlthat prayed—The readable letter with a secret—Hisage—Miss B——’s letter—A grand gala day—Sundaythe open day—The king—Royal family—Royal personages—Officersof state—A four o’clock tea. | |
Paris Letter—February 4, 1883, | |
At last in Paradise—From Munich to Paris—The journeya dream—One’s own vernacular—View from my privatebalcony—In sight of the Mackey’s palace—GraceGreenwood in Paris—What an enchantment to knowplaces by sight—The street scenes—Vast concourse ofseething humanity—The weather—The flowers. | |
Paris Letter—February 8, 1883, | |
To begin—Figures—Not writing for fame or filthy lucre—“Twoin one existence”—From Munich to Paris alone—Theexperience of cold—The German cars comfortable—Fallenin love—Paris, London and Munich Compared—Manufactoryof the Gobelins—Pompeian palace—Viewingart—Language—Night—Solitude—To Italyfrom Paris. | |
Paris Letter—September 1, 1883, | |
In Paris again after six months—Good intentions—Feminineinterruption—A flash of inspiration—The lion ofsandstone carved in a grotto—Trip to the glaciers—Firstmule ride—Return from the sublime spectacle—The descentmore difficult than the ascent—English ladies—FromInterlaken to Bern—Lake Leman—The Gardenin which Gibbon wrote the conclusion of his greatwork—Chillon—Passage to Chamony—All the way toGeneva—That book—The Pension—The Madame. | |
Paris Letter—January 1, 1884, | |
Letter—Verses—Christmas Eve—Tree party—My hostessand myself—Salutatory an impromptu poem—The evening’sentertainment—Twelfth Night—I shun sleep—“Characteristics”—Sendingthe book—A letter fromMiss B.—The article on Burns—Finis and reflections. | |
Paris Letter—April 1, 1884, | |
Enjoying Paris in fair weather—President Grevy—Thenumerous entertainments—There is no hostess—Themusical side of Paris—A pleasant American family—Sundayafternoon concert—The music—The audience—Tothe Luxembourg with an American girl. | |
Paris Letter—December 6, 1885, | |
Letter acknowledged—I am again a wandering star—Thedelights of travel—The poor king who lost his head—Thomasa Becket—Whitehall—Government buildings—SawGladstone’s and Salisbury’s seats—Went to TempleBar—Old clocks—The cathedral—Vespers at Little St.Martin’s—Crossed the Channel—Sight-seeing—Cuvierand Humboldt—Experiences, drives and sights—Pleasantpeople we met. | |
Paris Letter—December 13, 1886, | |
Return delayed by storms—Miss B—— came from Sweden—Proposedtrip on the Nile—A line from under oldCheops. | |
Paris Letter—March 8, 1887, | |
Disappointed about the Jerusalem trip—Contributionsfrom every grand division—No date for sailing—Ladiesfrom Louisville, Ky.—The title of the little book—Madamegives a house-warming—Bloom and beauty. | |
Paris Letter—April 26, 1887, | |
Birthday anniversary—Dispensations of conscientiousness—Howthe days go—The sight-seeing never comes to anend—The “Salon” open for the Annual Exposition—Atthe Exposition—Numerous pictures—“Theodora,”Sara Bernhardt’s great character—Two French ladies—Themusical entertainment given me—Paris in themonth of May. | |
Paris Letter—May 29, 1887, | |
The letter and the book—Figures and a woman’s age—Pictures—Millet’s“L’Angelus”—Subjects and characterof paintings—“The little book”—The drive—ChampsElysées as a fashionable resort—The enchantmentof the scenes—“The little book” again, andagain. | |
Venice Letter—June 8, 1883, | |
The letter in fancy from Florence—No rules from theflight of imagination—Longfellow says it for me—Venicein June—Drifting about in a gondola—TheGrand Canal—The dazzling glory of the scene—Atrance; a dream; perfect, perfect Venice!—Allusion toa story of life—A book to come forth—If I am to dieto-morrow ...—The ideal woman and friend—Kentuckygossip—Oh! oh! oh! perfect, perfect Venice! | |
Lucerne Letter—June 26, 1883, | |
The wooden horse of Donatello—Goethe’s palm tree—FromPadua to Verona—Juliet’s tomb—The house ofCapulets—Milan—The cathedral—Grand Victor EmanuelGallery—Pictures in galleries—Visit to libraries—Viewof levées—Italian lakes and scenes—The tropicalbloom—Nightingale songs—The grand climb up theAlps—The glaciers—Snow flower, edelweiss—The ruinsof castles—The moonlight scene—The descent from theAlps—The aching heart, like the dying gladiator. | |
Vienna Letter—October 17, 1883, | |
No end to the beginning—The opera—Letters—The surfaceof things—Below the surface—Knowledge of morebreadth—My hostess—Wagner’s operas—The object ofmy pilgrimage to Vienna—The aurist of Europe—Thespecialist’s quarters—The Imperial Library. | |
Siena Letter—March 4, 1883, | |
Things we saw on the way—Shrine of Petrarch’s Laura—ThePapal palaces—The frescoes—Musée Calvet—VernetGallery and pictures—The moonlight drive to Marseilles—AtCannes—An English lady—Hotel on thesea-front—The moonrise out of the sea—Bishop Littlejohn,of Rhode Island—A tram-drive—Excursion toMonaco and Monte Carlo—Pisa—Geneva—Mt. Blanc. | |
Rome Letter—March 19, 1883, | |
An Ohioan from Granville—Naples and views—Museumsand the palace of Capodimonte—Picture of MichaelAngelo and Vittoria Colonna—Pompeian frescoes—VittoriaColonna’s husband—Vesuvius at night—Longfellow’spoem, “Amalfi”—Paestum—Ideal drive—Museum—Narcissuslistening to Echo—Palm Sunday atSt. Peter’s—The Sistine Chapel—Goethe’s words—Hawthorne’sRome—The Marble Faun—Springtime—Christmasflowers—Christmas souvenirs. | |
Rome Letter—April 4, 1883, | |
Scenes along the coast of Italy—Little villages—Themountains—Monastery of the Capuchins—The macaronifactory—The monastery and monks—Our Paestumday—Vesuvius before the charmed gaze—Birthplace ofTasso—Celebrated places—Second trial of Naples—Tripfrom Naples to Rome—Ancient Capua—MonteCasino, its associations—Rome—Palm Sunday—Variousservices—English lady—Holy Week—Drive on the ViaAppia—The Catacombs and tombs—The grotto—Thetree of Numa’s wisdom. | |
Rome Letter—April 24, 1883, | |
Importance of address in a foreign land—Guercino’sfresco of Aurora—Scene in Imperial Rome—“Romemistress of the world”—Story of Eve—Tasso memorialroom—Swarm of lizards—A view of St. Peter’s—Pompey’sstatue—The Plaza—The Jews’ quarters, calledGhetto—The house of Rienzi—Protestant cemetery—Burialplace of Keats and the heart of Shelley. | |
Rome Letter—May 2, 1883, | |
“While Rome stands, the world stands”—The rounds ofchurches—The galleries and museums—Palaces andshops—“Being in Rome, do as Romans do”—Piazzi diSan Giovanni, the largest in existence—One of theeleven obelisks—Mosaic frescoes—The queen in hercarriage—Church of St. Onafrio, on the Janiculus—Thethree frescoes by Domenichino and Leonardo da Vinci—Tassoburied here—Three churches of the Aventine—Galleries—Artists’quarters—Our Rodgers and Ives—Theirart—Italian artist—Dwight Benton, formerly ofCincinnati, Ohio—Italian scenes. | |
Maiori Letter—April 5, 1886, | |
Apology for delinquent letter—“What a butterfly sheis!”—One of the party sick—On the Mediterranean—Longfellow’spoem—The steep climb—The poor littledonkey—Features of the scene—“The death in life”—Theregion abounds in drives—Talk of Sicily and Africa—Aletter—The sacred few ...—The little book—Blessedbe the potato, henceforth and forever! | |
Naples Letter—May 1, 1886, | |
A drive to Salerno—From there to Paestum—The templeof Neptune—An incident of missing glasses—Return toSalerno—Then to Pompeii—Naples—Friends fromTunis—A steamer for Sicily—Storm at sea—Palermo,its environs—The palaces—The drives and places wevisited—The museum, Metopes, and splendid art—Beautyof the country—The fountain of Arethusa—Romanamphitheater—The quarries—Mt. Etna—Theseven rocks of Cyclops—Messina—That coat of armsof Sicily—The heart-ache of good-byes. | |
Lauterbrunnen Letter—July 29, 1886, | |
Wrought up over letters—“Poaching on your preserves”—Thecause of wit—Friends, their character estimated—Ofwriting—Sojourn in the beautiful valley—TheStaubach—The Jungfrau. | |
Egypt Letter—December 30, 1886, | |
Aboard steamer Prince Abbas—On the Nile—“In theteeth of a storm”—Sunrise and sunset on the Mediterranean—Acquaintances,a citizen from the “hub”—AtAlexandria—The seven wonders—To Cairo—Englishofficers—The Pyramids—Pillars at Heliopolis—“TheVirgin’s tree”—The island of Rhodda—Mosques andtombs—The site of Memphis—“Twelve miles of wonderland”—Theair—The flowers—The guests on steamer—Onecan live too much in books. | |
Egypt Letter From Paris—February 10, 1887, | |
Agreeable surprises—Down the Nile—The atmosphereand mysterious influence of scene—Landing of steamer—Ourdonkey ride—The tombs—The imposing magnificenceof the monuments—Rain in Egypt—Reflections—Picturesto help tell the story—The coming book. | |
Cuba Letter—April 7, 1885, | |
The magical isle of Cuba—Tropical vegetation—Sunrisein the harbor of Havana—The trip on the steamer—MoroCastle—Strange scene on landing—The buildings—Thedrive, atmosphere and scenery—The watch incident—Shoppingexpedition—People we met—To Cerro—Sugarplantations and process of sugar-making—Thecaves—The beautiful island, Cuba—The freedom ofslaves—Spanish government. | |
A Vision of Fatigue, |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
| PAGE | |
| Shakespeare’s Birthplace, from below, Stratford, | [11] |
| Room in Shakespeare’s Home, Stratford, | [12] |
| Mary, Queen of Scots, Edinburgh, | [32] |
| Pension and Garden to which Goethe wrote a Poem, Heidelberg, | [38] |
| The Old Kaiser at Historical Window, | [71] |
| Louis II, the Mad King of Bavaria, | [90] |
| Queen Louise, | [126] |
| The Historic Windmill, | [131] |
| The Old Lion, Lucerne, | [147] |
| The Old Lion at the Arsenal, Venice, | [192] |
| Lord Byron’s Palace, Venice, | [196] |
| Pantheon, Rome, | [242] |
| Strada dei Sepolcri (Street of Tombs), Pompeii, | [248] |
| Quirinal, Rome, | [259] |
| Naples, General View, | [281] |
| Peasant Cart, Palermo, | [283] |
| Interior of Museum, Palermo, | [285] |
| Archimedes, | [288] |
| Head of Medusa, Palermo, | [290] |
LETTER FROM ENGLAND.
HERE to begin? That is the question. The ideas, thoughts, feelings, come, not in battalions, but like the hosts of Alexander, or our own, in “the late unpleasantness,” or like the bubbles in the foam on the crests of the waves “a moment here, then gone forever.” I am wishing for the arms of Briareus, with their hundred hands, to help catch and fix them on the page. Such a trip! The Atlantic was never known to exhibit such a peculiar turbulence of waves and water generally. The steamer Adriatic (in which we sailed April 6th) kept up such a lurching and pitching as I never had an idea of before. One day it was impossible for me to keep my feet, and after trying in vain to dress in the morning, I retired to my berth. But it was as much as the sailors could do to keep their feet, and three were badly hurt. How my friends would have laughed, could they have seen my frantic struggles to accomplish a toilette. The two “steamer trunks” and our hand satchels were chasing each other all around me, and knocking wildly from one side to the other, and I in the midst, shooting and slipping, clutching and grabbing, wildly, frantically, at doors, berth and washstand. But I was so glad not to be seasick, I didn’t mind anything else much.
One spectacle of this turbulence in the “r-r-r-rolling forties,” as the chambermaid called our bearing (I wish I could give that whirr of her r s), was of peculiar and extraordinary sublimity and uniqueness. It kept me at my porthole for I know not how long. The steamer was sweeping right along in an immense hollow, or crater as it were, in the ocean, and in which was comparative calm. Afar off the water rose in encircling ranges of vast mountains—“Alps upon Alps”—capped with white foam. From these snowy cones, like the eruptions of volcanoes, burst forth in swift succession great columns of the seething mass that shot upward apparently to the very heavens and exploded.
I did not know at the time that this was unusual, but in speaking of it afterwards found it had not been observed by the other passengers—all or the most of whom were seasick—nor have I since met with any traveler who had ever seen it; nor read any description of it.
We had a lovely Easter Sunday on the broad Atlantic. The captain presented me with two Easter eggs prepared expressly for me as a testimonial of my good seamanship. I was never seasick. The device was a white star and the name of the steamer—Adriatic. I was the only lady thus honored. We had a pleasant company: R. H. Dana and his wife (a daughter of Longfellow), two charming ladies, relatives of Longfellow, a Unitarian minister and his young sister, all from Boston; and a Mrs. Blake, from Canada. These were the parties we saw the most of, except Mrs. Dana, who was not well. Mr. Dana was one of the most attractive and interesting persons I ever met, the kind that has the effect of a flash of sunlight coming into a room. One of the ladies was a Unitarian, and that brought us together. The minister was going to attend a Unitarian conference of the English Unitarian Church, which met at Liverpool, April 18th. She and I constituted ourselves delegates at large, and decided to attend. We landed Sunday, the 16th, remained till afternoon, attending church at an old cathedral of some note; then lunching at the Northwestern Hotel, and away we came to Chester.
How much do you know about Chester? I’ll take for granted all its history. The “old cathedral city” and the “old walled city” is the way the guide-books speak of it. I walked its two miles of wall, well-preserved, picturesque, and commanding lovely views. I mounted one of the towers on it, called King Charles the First’s, because from it he watched the fatal progress of the battle of Rowton Moor. I looked out of the very queer little windows from which he watched. The old woman who shows it is as bright and keen of tongue, if not as incisive, as Mrs. Poyser. She said she liked Americans, and always enjoyed their visits, and that they paid her every year a most extraordinary honor. “Just think of a whole country celebrating your birthday! Wouldn’t you feel honored? That’s what you Americans do.” She said it with mischievous, snapping eyes. Of course I took in in a moment that the Fourth of July was her birthday. “Ah,” I replied, “and to think of fifty millions of people doing all that honor, and not knowing what they are doing.” “Fifty millions of people!” She came right up to me, and her look changed to amazement—“what a grand country it must be!” I told her it was too bad her name was unknown, and she must give it to me. “Mary Huxley.” I said,
“Why, Mary Huxley, you’ve a very good name,
And I’m sure I think it a crying shame
That it is not better known to fame.”
You ought to have seen her delight. She talked to me down to the very last step, after giving me “a hearty grip” by way of good-bye.
Then I saw Chester Cathedral, where Hugh Lupus, nephew of William the Conqueror, is buried. On Sunday night, some of us attended service there, after which there was an organ recital, a very fine performance. Next morning, all five of us went down into the dark, damp, crypts. The amount of exquisite carving in it is something wonderful. I am not going into the age and size of it and all that. Go to the library and get a book on English Cathedrals and Cathedral Towns and read, and think that that is what your correspondent is seeing. Another one is St. John’s Church, still more ancient, with its abbey, a lovely ivy-covered ruin. I could not bear to leave it. Another feature is the old castle now used as an armory and barracks. The hands of the Romans have left many evidences of their work here in the wall, the columns still standing in place of some kinds of fortifications. The old town is full of queer things, and has a weird sort of fascination; among these “the Rows,” a succession of arcades built on the roofs of ancient triangular-shaped houses. The handsomest shops are in them. The neighborhood has the honor of containing Eaton Hall, the seat of the Duke of Westminster. We visited it, driving and walking all over its splendid walks, and gardens, and lawns, and parks, and getting a first-rate look into the palace. We could not go inside, because it was full of workmen finishing the inside ornamentation. The grounds are ten square miles in extent. There were immense conservatories, full of the rarest flowers and plants. In one I saw the Egyptian lotus floating in full bloom in an immense tank. The head gardener was our guide. He was a very intelligent person, well-mannered and pleasant and clever, because he gave me a handful of flowers and broke off a nice little branch from a cedar of Lebanon, brought from the Holy Land expressly for the place. He gave us a great deal of information about the family; among other things he told me the Duke was not handsome, but a good man. He spoke with emphasis.
The Dee winds through those miles of acres and is spanned by a number of bridges. The villages of the tenantry are pretty and looked comfortable. I saw deer by hundreds in the park. We returned to Liverpool, and remained two days in attendance on the conference. A number of the leading men were there, and we heard them speak and preach. There were Armstrong, Carpenter, Sir Thomas Hayward and others. They were fine-looking men, and extremely interesting. The audience was as enthusiastic and demonstrative as that of our Methodist Conferences.
From Liverpool we whisked away to Rowsley Station, Derbyshire, to the Peacock Inn, the quaintest manor-house, now doing duty according to its name. The object of this was to visit Chatsworth, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, and Haddon Hall, a lovely unused ruin, belonging to the Duke of Rutland. The country in every direction was a vision of beauty—a sea of living green—bespangled with flowers as thickly as the floor of heaven is inlaid with stars; or in Derbyshire, breaking up into great cliffs, showing the beautiful stone which is so generally used in building. The grounds of the inn were washed by the Derwent, a winding stream of exceeding beauty.
We made an early start in a wagonette for Chatsworth. It was an ideal day—the Spring in full burst, with that delicate film of blue mist that always makes me think of a veil, to enhance its charms—the whole way a succession of pictures—vales, swelling uplands, far hills, the Derwent in its curious curves. We were speechless and exclamatory by turns.
Chatsworth is a palace, in the midst of its thousands of acres cultivated and adorned in every possible way; its exquisite lawn laid out in innumerable gardens in Italian, Alpine, German, French, and ever so many other styles; its wonderful conservatory designed by Sir Joshua Paxton, who modeled the Crystal Palace on the same plan, as you no doubt know; and the gorgeousness of the long suite of show rooms. The rooms of course are filled with all that the money and taste of its long generations have accumulated—the rooms in themselves, for their noble dimensions, rich, tasteful and expensive finish; and their lovely views of stream, lakes, meadows, forests, and lovely distances. I saw the hangings of a state bedstead worked by Mary Queen of Scots, and the Countess of Shrewsbury; the rosary of Henry the Eighth; and some portraits of the beautiful duchesses that have distinguished the house (though not Georgiana); and some splendid pieces of statuary. I shall never forget Canova’s Endymion, and Thorwalsden’s Venus. The guide went round the grounds by my side and proved himself a most agreeable fellow—telling me all the family gossip I cared to know. I dare not attempt to get it all in here, though I’ve a misgiving you’d rather hear it than all the rest. I may as well tell you that I always keep close to the guide and—it pays. They are always the head, or one of the gardeners, and are a constant astonishment to me for their good manners, choice language, as well as their intelligence.
I asked if the heir, the Marquis of Hartington (leader in the House of Commons), was handsome; he laughed merrily, shaking his head, “No indeed, he is very plain, and you just ought to see him slouch around here. This is the way he walks”—and he gave an illustration to my infinite amusement. Only he and I were together, the rest were lagging a wide interval behind.
The deer park has two thousand acres and eight hundred head of deer. We saw several different herds of one hundred each, perhaps two hundred.
Next by a short drive, to Haddon Hall on a hill overlooking as fair a scene as eye would care to dwell on. A soft drab stone, time-stained and worn, moss and ivy covered, it is an immense pile built around a quadrangular court, with its ancient rooms sufficiently well-preserved to show in what state it was kept away back in that romantic age. The grand banqueting hall, with antlers for ornaments, its old table in the upper end, with the same old benches, both worm-eaten; besides this the dining hall for daily use, wainscoted to the ceiling in heavy, dark oak panels, and a great round table; the drawing-room with its arras, hangings said to be of the fourteenth century, the bed-rooms hung in the same way; the dancing saloon one hundred and ten by seventeen feet wide, with its grand stained windows, and a bust of one of the countesses taken after her death. I went up Percival tower and stood on it looking down into the “inner court” (the quadrangle) and off over the landscape, and trying to imagine “the olden time.” There is a door opening on to an avenue of yews with a terrace and steps into a walled flower garden with a postern gate in the wall, outside which are steps leading to a bridge across the moat beyond which lies an expanse of open meadow, and a pretty story
says the loveliest daughter of the house stole out this way to “off and away,” with her “young Lochinvar,” he and his steed awaiting her at the hither side of the bridge. The little boy who opened the postern for us, said in answer to us: “This is the gate, and them’s the steps, and that are the bridge she crossed to the ’oss.”
From the Peacock next a. m. to Stratford-on-Avon! Next day was Sunday, and the birthday of Shakespeare. Think of my spending it at his birthplace! It is almost too much to realize. The first afternoon we walked to see his birthhouse (just the outside), the hall where Garrick’s present stands, and the bridge over the Avon from which is a pretty view of the church where he lies. The morning found us all fresh and ready for church. There was fine music and a full congregation. You know the whole service is intoned in the English Church. When the vicar went to his desk for that I dreaded to hear a word, fearing it would not be in harmony with the day. It proved to be the best sermon I ever heard from the Episcopal pulpit, indeed an inspiration. After the congregation was dismissed we asked permission to enter the chancel to see the grave, and I had a collection of the flowers he knew so well to lay upon it. It was “against rule” to let any one in at that hour, but the vicar instantly and courteously accorded us this as soon as he knew we were Americans. I knelt and laid the flowers by the inscription. The “painted bust” is just above the grave. I did not like it. It looked both beefy and beery. Too much so for my ideal of him who the vicar had just said “was the greatest poet and perhaps the greatest being that ever lived.” It was the 318th anniversary. No wonder he chose “Trinity” for his last resting-place. It is a beautiful situation on the Avon, and from the street you walk up a long avenue of lime trees, on either side of which are the graves of centuries. We stayed three days at Stratford, and to-morrow we go, as the great Cardinal went, “by easy roads to Leicester;” we are going to London.
May 1st. We came here Saturday, after such a two days in that “ancient university city,” Oxford, as I hope most fervently I shall repeat in extenso. It was from one extreme enjoyment to something beyond! I stepped into the university founded by Alfred the Great, a huge mass of time-stained and somewhat crumbling marble. I went through Christ College, first into the kitchen. “The very best time you could
have come,” said the usher. Dinner was in full progress! The room is a cube of forty feet. Such a baronial banquet preparation I never saw. The oldest relic is the door leading into the court, where the fuel is kept, heavy, black, battered, iron-bound oak. From the kitchen to the refectory, with its splendid array of pictures. Going out under the tower, we heard “old Tom” ring out the hour in his sonorous tones. To Magdalen College to see the chapel with its wonderful immense window in brown sepia, three hundred years old, representing the day of judgment, and its reredos extending from the floor to the ceiling and from side wall to side wall. Then to “Addison’s Walk,” the loveliest, most sequestered, serpentine, and then long great vista of greenery, bound on either side by lovely streams and wide meadows edged with pollard willows. To New College, with its rival chapel and great window, designed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, representing Faith, Hope, and all the virtues mentionable. Anything more exquisite than Hope was never fashioned by man. The window is made, it is said, of the finest stained glass in the world. We passed by the church where Amy Robsart lies. At Warwick we saw the magnificent tomb of her cruel earl, and the effigy of himself and third wife, carved and colored, reposing thereupon. On to the Bodleian Library, with its treasures of books, rare old manuscripts, ancient illuminated works; I can’t enumerate its treasures, but one of the most curious and interesting was some papyrus rolls from Herculaneum, showing the scorch. Its picture gallery was a perfect fascination, with its portraits and busts of a long array of historical persons whom we have admired, reverenced, loved, and hated, all our lives. It was all an aggravating rush from one thing to another, that one wanted to hang over and study and steep the whole being in. I would go to the Ashmolean Museum to see a few things—Alfred’s jewel, a priceless treasure, the chatelaine watch of Queen Elizabeth, in turquoise and gold, with the chain formed of charms in different devices—two of hair. I wondered if either was her own. Cromwell’s watch right beside hers, heavy, thick, not very large, but looking as if it was meant to stand all the battering of the man’s career. One of the most interesting of all the personal trifles—shall I call them?—was a kind of charm worn by John Hampden in the civil war. This was the motto:
“Against my king I do not fight,
But for my king and kingdom’s right.”
There is not a spot in Oxford that is not enchanting. We staid at the “Mitre Hotel,” the oldest house in the city. Our room was wainscoted to the ceiling, which was divided into three compartments by rich and pretty panels in rich flowers. I did not like to leave it, though walking its floors was a feat of dexterity worthy of being chronicled, they were so sunken and irregular. We came whizzing through the loveliest lowland country, saw Windsor in a misty veil of light rain, and all at once we were in Paddington Station, in the cab, rolling through London streets and directly at our boarding house. We are delightfully situated. Sunday morning we heard Spofford Brooks. He is just across the street. In the afternoon I went to St. Paul’s to hear Canon Liddon. I was all eyes, if not ears. That splendid pile swallowed me up, mind, body and soul. And now with the din and clatter of four female tongues sounding in my ears, I will close this rambling epistle.
L. G. C.
Grosvenor Hotel, Chester, April 17, 1882.
LETTER FROM LONDON.
AM still in this grandest city of the globe. Every day seems a fresh era in life, each hour ushers in new and more delightful experiences. I am confirmed in my opinion that this “little island,” but mighty kingdom of the earth, is to be more to me than all the rest, and that my plan to spend “the season” in London was the very best I could have had. Indeed that was the one feature of this trip entirely clear to me. For the rest, I had a general outline to make headquarters of each of the great art centers, and let the gods provide the goods. No doubt I shall adhere to this in a way. Governor Chamberlain, who was here last year in August, said he could not have believed it would make such a difference to be here “in the season.” I think you know the months of May, June and July constitute that elect time. Well, I have had as perfect a time as one could have in my way. Of course, there is that other—that means being presented at court, and getting into society, the first being the easier of the two! I have not hankered after either. There are some whom I have long admired, it would be a beatitude to know, such as the Earl of Shaftsbury, now eighty-one, whose whole life has been devoted to good and noble works (just last Tuesday he presided at the opening of a bazaar in behalf of a benevolent project), and the Duke of Devonshire and his family, Gladstone, John Bright and such. Alas! “they are a pitch beyond my flight,” and so I am content to let all go. What I have drunk deep of is the great institutions—churches, galleries, the Tower, Parliament houses, hospitals, etc.
The boarding house in which we are is kept by English people, just for Americans, and foreigners. English people do not board; it is not “good form” with them. The host, a very intelligent, affable gentleman, and his wife, a bright, kind, out-spoken lady, say “they have known no Americans that have seen London to such advantage.” They evidently regard us with great respect.
Tuesday was a glorious day. We spent it at Windsor, were all over the palace shown to the public, on the terrace, saw the gorgeous Albert Mausoleum, and St. George’s Chapel with its exquisite monument to Princess Charlotte, the most perfect piece of sculpture I ever saw, and also the touching monument to the Prince Imperial, with his recumbent statue on it, a good likeness in pure white marble. It seems to me quite probable, since seeing it, that Princess Beatrice may have been in love with him. From Windsor we drove through Eaton and a beautiful English lane to Stoke Pogis to see Gray’s grave and the church and graveyard of the “Elegy.” The little church is the most exquisite little gem I ever saw. I wish I dared give you a full description of that day, but it would take a ream of paper.
Well, this is Sunday evening. I went to hear Moncure Conway this forenoon at his own chapel. I was so much interested, more than I have been by any one I have heard but Canon Farrar. You may have heard him when he preached in Cincinnati. You may not agree with or approve of his views, but one cannot help being greatly interested and instructed. He has a scholarly look—the bowed head, that trick caught by bending constantly over books and writing, and a lively, expressive countenance, the kind that shows the effect of constant association with high thoughts and noble sentiments and lofty aspirations. He is in the best sense a teacher. I saw Mr. and Mrs. Taft there, and my friend Miss —— cried out, “Don’t you want to go back and speak to them?” As we were in our carriage, and it was raining, I concluded to forego the pleasure. They are on their way to Vienna. It is rather pleasant to know so many Americans are around, even if you don’t get to speak to them. We have a fresh supply of Bostonians. They are all chattering round the fire like so many daws—my companions du voyage helping their level best. They come and go, come and go, all the time. We often find ourselves laughing at large parties—“Oh! look quick; there they are, another lot of our country-fellows.” They go about in gangs and everybody seems to recognize them at once as “Americans.” I can’t tell how they, the English, know us; but it is very easy for us to distinguish them. Their voices and pronunciation are very markedly different. All have a kind of abdominal pitch and intoning that are very pronounced.
I have found some relatives here, people who settled in England two hundred years ago, when my branch of the family emigrated from Holland to America. They are as purely English as I am American, and this is the first meeting since the original separation. One of my newly-found cousins is in the Somerset House, where he has a government office, and he would show us “what it contained of interest.” It is a government building, registering marriages, births, deaths, keeping records, etc. The way he made us skip round and up and down and through long corridors in upper stories, and deep down in almost the bowels of the earth, was good for our circulation if not for our feet. It was just going through a vast library, for all these things are kept in volumes bound in Russia leather and shelved and catalogued. He invited us for Tuesday evening to meet a party of relatives and special friends he wished me to know; so I am counting on something of an introduction to English life. Thereby is a romance, our meeting, etc.; but of this another time.
Well, our time is up, and on Wednesday I have arranged to leave for our Scottish tour. This takes up the eastern side of England, through York and Durham to Edinburgh, where we shall spend a week. Thence through the Tromcho[A] and lakes, Caledonia canal, Inverness and back to “Auld Reekie,” where we shall excursion to Abbotsford, Jedburg, and next Glasgow and Ayr, and down through western England by the English lakes—Windermere, Coniston, etc., back to London. We may go to Wales, or leave that out for the present and go to the Isle of Wight, and so across the Channel to some place in Brittany or Normandy, where we have “booked” ourselves for a month.
L. G. C.
London, June 11, 1882.
FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH.
E left London on the morning of the 14th, after a seven weeks’ sojourn, and, I must say it, one of perfect delight and satisfaction. Old Londoners could not remember a more charming “season;” the weather called forth rapturous comments, the city was full of attractions, the best and at their best, a most fortunate conjunction; and “all the world” seemed peopling its palaces, crowding its hotels, thronging its temples of art and pleasure, and pushing its way through the packed streets, to enjoy them. Believe me, it took a stout wrench to break away from all that. But as we said to our hostess in response to her amiable urgency to detain us yet longer, “Dear Madam, how shall we ‘see the world,’ unless we ‘move on’?”
A four hours’ railway ride brought us to York, where we “stopped over” till next afternoon to see the Minster, the walls and the ruins of St. Leonard’s Hospital and St. Mary’s Abbey, and the ancient city “in toto.” The sun shone for us in most lavish brilliancy, and we went after lunch to the Cathedral, spending an hour or more wandering “through it with the verger all to ourselves” (which we always account a peculiarly good piece of luck, as much interesting information is to be gained, when he can give you undivided attention).
We stood long before each of the great windows, too rapt in admiration, it must be confessed, to give due heed to the great budget of details our guide was so kindly pouring out for our benefit. The “Five Sisters” was the first that arrested us, consisting of five lancet-shaped lights, fifty-four feet high by thirty wide. It was presented by five maiden sisters, who worked the patterns first. They must have had a busy time of it, and I am glad I was not one of them, but am one who has had the privilege of enjoying their pious handiwork. Next the west and east windows, the first about the size of the “Five Sisters,” the latter said to be the largest in the world. As to the exquisite beauty of each, that is unutterable. We lingered and loitered in nave and choir and transept, till long after the sun had set, and then walked back to our hotel, a palace fit for any queen this world has ever throned; the views from its great French plate glass windows Victoria might be glad to claim. The next morning we attended choral service, and gave the entire forenoon to that splendid seat of Episcopal magnificence. From there we went to the ruins, both being in the same inclosure, a large tract laid out in beautiful walks and far-stretching expanses of lawn, with clumps of trees here and there, and beds and borders of flowers. I wish I had time to tell you how old these crumbling structures are, and the various fortunes to which they have been subjected. Suffice it that both are older than the time of the Conqueror, which surely would seem ancient enough.
In the afternoon we were most reluctant to “stick to our program,” and go on to Durham, but we did. We had a reminder of home on the way in an hour’s stop at Newcastle-on-Tyne—as coal begrimed as Pittsburgh. I was glad to leave it behind, and find fresh, clean air coming into my lungs as it vanished from my sight. We ran into Durham in good time for a climb to its Cathedral, “unequaled in situation on a high hill.” Again we had a verger all to ourselves, and he proved a fellow with some wit, with all his overwhelming “stock in trade” of cathedral knowledge in architecture.
I was so hoarse I could only croak, but too athirst for knowledge to let that hinder. So, as I said something to this effect, “Tell me about that—the book I have does not tell anything, though I got the best I could find”—with the most mischievous smile he burst out, “I think you got something worse, haven’t you?” We were fast friends from that moment till I bowed “good-bye” next day—crossing his willing hand with the inevitable silver shilling. You have read all about this cathedral; that it is a splendid example of Norman, early English, transitional, and perpendicular styles in its different parts; that St. Cuthbert is its patron saint, and his bones rest here; maybe, remember how his monks
“From sea to sea, from shore to shore,
Seven years Saint Cuthbert bore.
And after many wanderings past,
He chose his lordly seat at last,
Where his cathedral huge and vast
Looks down upon the weir;
There deep in Durham’s gothic shade
His reliques are in secret laid,
But none may know the place.”
That was long ago, and now even I “know the place.” I stood upon the flagstones that covered it! Bede is buried there, so I have to tell you that I leaned upon his tombstone and read the inscription:
“Hac sunt in fossa Bedae venerabilis ossa,”
and recalled the story of the monk’s worry over his hexameter, his lucky nap, and the opportune help of that convenient angel, who fixed it up “all right” while he slept the sleep of the righteous. I saw the carved image of the Dun Cow, from which it got its name. I am not so sure that legend is so familiar to you. It took hard work, innumerable questions, search and research, for me to get hold of it, quaint and simple as it is. In that seven years’ quest for a resting-place for the corpse, the monks had stopped with it at a place called Ward Law, from which they could not move it, it seeming fastened to the ground. This set them all praying to know where they should take it. The answer to their prayer was, “Dunholme” (Durham). As they were searching about in great perplexity, they heard a woman, who was looking for her stray cow, call to her neighbor, asking if she had seen it. The cry back was: “She is at Dunholme.” Behold! this quest was ended. And the cow is a beauty of the kind that makes one wish she could be driven home into his own pasture, to be “a possession forever.” She stands sleek and serene in her niche in the outer wall, and seems to follow you with a watchful gaze as you pluck buttercups and clover-blooms, lineal descendants, beyond a doubt, of those on which her prototype fed in the spacious close beneath her.
We tarried atop that green hill and in those sacred precincts, till the fainter day that is far from twilight, though the sun is long gone, warned us of the late hour. Such an evening as we had in ancient Durham—“a dirty hole in general,” as a little Scotch boy wrote of it in 1820. And a little American woman verifies it to-day. First, a street concert by Highlanders in full national costume, with their screeching bagpipes. They ended and vanished. Then came trooping by a large body of the Salvation Army, with their leader, a woman, facing her forces and keeping time with a stick to their singing. She looked like a wild creature, and the spectacle was one more conducive to speculation than to admiration. As their frantic strains died away in the distance, a sweet, clear-ringing child voice burst forth. It soared up to us like a lark,
“Singing as it soars and soaring as it sings.”
We opened our windows and saw a young boy standing in the street alone and without any instrument, singing with an absorption that made him oblivious to his surroundings. He did not even notice the fall of the pennies for which he was singing, till a woman, who had stopped to hear him, gathered them up and put them into his hands.
We felt as if we were listening to an incipient Brignoli. He went too. At eleven o’clock, the daylight not yet merged in night, we fell asleep to harp music, played by a band of Gypsies in most picturesque garb. We hurried to the cathedral next morning for “choral service,” and heard some fine music, which attuned us to our loitering among its ancient memorials. After some hours inside we came out into the lovely day, and strolled off for a walk. From the crest of the hill on which the cathedral is built to the water’s edge its wooded sides are laid out in beautiful shady walks. There we wandered, keeping up a running fire of exclamations at the beautiful broken views, gathering now a wild flower, now a fern, or stretching up for a leaf from the masses of thick foliage on the trees overhead. How the hours shot by! Atop of the hill again, we found our way into a castle, in close neighborhood to the cathedral, a charming old piece of antiquity, with its stores of rare, old curious things. I could fill a quire of old-fashioned letter paper and not do half justice to it. So I shan’t say anything more about it, but shut both eyes and mouth and get away from Durham, already grown fascinating enough to make me wish I could live in the shadow of that ancient pile with its “gothic shade.”
Our route hither lay for the most part of the way along the coast of the German ocean. The white breakers burst right beneath us sometimes, sending their roar to our ears. Away off occasionally glimmered a dream-like sail, or a phantom stretch of smoke from some passing-out-of-our-world vessel. Near enough for a good view we saw,
“Markworth, proud of Percy’s name,”
very literally a “castle by the sea,” as it seemed as if washed by its waves. The country landward was prettily rolling and laid off in fields of grain and pasture. Great flocks of sheep speckled the latter. A Scotch lady got into our “compartment” when we were still some miles from “Dun Edin.” She was very companionable and pointed out all the features of note as they came in sight.
The sun as it went down was a great puzzle to us; it seemed to be setting in the east, and we could not get it to fit the points of the compass stowed away in our craniums. You see it did not set till nearer nine than eight o’clock, and that gave it time to get almost round to where it had started from! The Scotch welcome quite won our hearts. We had written and engaged rooms a week before, so knew we would be expected. The landlady and three daintily-arrayed maids were in the hall, and the former, Mrs. Campbell, stepped forward and took our hands, with the sweetest-voiced welcome! We felt at home at once. Just here I think I must give you a list of the people collected under her roof—tourists, here for a day or weeks, as may chance: an Episcopal High Church curate, from Wales; a Mrs. Smith and her daughter, from Australia; a Mr. Bruce, from the Cape of Good Hope (he was there when Stanley went there with the remnant of the host that made the trip with him “Across the Dark Continent”); a Mr. Masters and wife, from another part of South Africa, he an emigrant from Yorkshire and she a native born, but the daughter of an emigrant; a lady who resides in Oxford and is enthusiastic about it as a place of residence; two young ladies from the south of England; another two, sisters, from London; a Miss Gurley, a Scotch maiden lady, a great traveler and linguist, and altogether charming. She had been to the United States and Canada, three times. While in the United States, she was the guest of Bishop Potter. She belongs to Edinburgh, is living across the Firth, among the hills of Fife, not far from royal Falkland. Add us three Americans, and I think it could be called a mixed household, indeed,
L. G. C.
Edinburgh, July 4, 1882.
EDINBURGH.
E spend our days as usual, “sight-seeing.” The first place we sought was Holyrood Palace. It is not palatial compared to Windsor, Hampton Court, and the situation is not a cheerful one—low, in a kind of a hollow. I can imagine it oppressively gloomy to a young girl of nineteen, just from gay and sunny Paris, and one of the ornaments of its brilliant court. In the picture gallery there is a lovely, full-length portrait of Mary; but there is a still lovelier picture of her at the castle. I saw her apartments, her bed with its faded velvet hangings, that are slowly dropping to pieces too; one of her paintings on marble, much chipped and defaced, showing no little merit; a piece of her embroidery in a glass case; the little mirror hung on the wall she doubtless took much pleasure in seeing her fair face in; the small supper-room, with its closet, where the dreadful murder of Rizzio was begun, and the splotch of blood on the landing at the head of the stairs, where it was finished. How well we seem to know all about her—poor
queen, unfortunate and to be pitied, even if as wicked as her worst enemies think. At the castle, on the hill that springs up in the very heart of the city, another suite of “Queen Mary’s apartments” is shown, in one of which her son was born. The situation of the castle is incomparably fine. It overlooks the entire city and a wide and varied range beyond. Ben Lomond and Ben Ledi show themselves to the north-west, and on a fair day the Pentland hills lie low and purple in another direction; the Firth carries the gaze with it to the sea in the east, and it is dotted with pretty islands, and its thither side is bounded by the misty shores of Fife. This same view is commanded by Arthur’s Seat and Calton Hill. Arthur’s Seat is the highest point—everybody and every guide-book says so, and I know it from experience, having climbed its 823 feet. We make all kinds of excursions in the environs, and find it the easiest thing in the world to keep up our ecstasies.
Alexander Swift says, “Every true Scotsman thinks Edinburgh the most picturesque city in the world.” No wonder. It certainly possesses every feature requisite to constitute that preeminence—“hill, crag, castle, rock, blue stretch of sea, the picturesque ridge of the old town, the squares and terraces of the new”—the quaint streets with their ancient houses “peaked and jagged by gable and roof, and windowed from basement to cope” with those small diamond-paned sashes that seem meant only “to make darkness visible,” and yet other streets of a later and more stately architecture; the Nor’ Lock converted into a dreamland of park and gardens; the splendid monuments arresting the eye in every direction to recall the illustrious dead and give proof of the appreciation and taste of the living; the hills, crags and slopes that “stand dressed in living green,” and the squares and terraces a mass of verdure and flowers—all these and more are the charms of this “Edina, Scotia’s darling.” Add to them the innumerable resorts, historic, beautiful, grand!—Oh! everything—all around in every direction, and one’s sympathy leaps forth to meet that of “every Scotsman.”
Now, shall I tell you what a “Bohemian” I have grown to be? Perhaps you will be shocked, but really it is the most fascinating life conceivable, and not to be condemned untried. We go where, and when, and how we please; en grandes dames, in the conventional splendor of full dress and the swellest turnout of the stand, this always “under protest.” Oftener, we set our own “locomotives” to the way and find unsuspected Edens. But oftenest and to my heart’s delight, we mount to a super-royal perch atop of the “tram,” as the street car is called here, and “view the landscape o’er” at such advantage as no crown or throne can command. And that’s the way we went to Morning Side, Edinburgh’s Clifton, and to Portobello, its sea-bathing resort. Don’t be alarmed though; we are not setting a fashion, only following one already established. If only this mode of traveling were practicable for everywhere. Alas! instead the railway comes in to sadly curtail the enchantment of “views.” We had to submit to it in order to see Roslyn Chapel, that ideal morceau of architecture, that exquisite efflorescence of solid rock, that chapel of chapels, “one among ten thousand and altogether lovely.” First we struck through Hawthorden, a walk of three miles, beginning with an ordinary park that quickly led to an ivy-mantled ruin, hung on the very brink of a beetling crag, the rock-ribbed foundation of which dropped almost sheer to a swift and clamorous stream two or three hundred feet below. In this underlying basement of rock, queer caverns had been hewn, but farther back than dates reach. We explored them notwithstanding some hesitation, which, however, gave way to the liveliest enthusiasm. In one we came across a sword of Robert Bruce in an open wire case. The meshes were about an inch in length; by counting them I found the sword measured fifty-eight inches. I wondered how much taller the warrior was than his weapon of warfare! Leaving these caverns we were soon descending a path that brought us to the edge of the stream and then ran along it the rest of the way. Anything wilder or more beautiful is rarely met, but I have seen Trenton Falls in my own native land, and it surpasses. Climbing the hill again at the end of the three miles we reached the chapel. Another day we spent at Dunfermline. In the Abbey we stood on the grave of Robert Bruce; it is right under the pulpit. In the ancient and long-disused, but well-preserved, nave we saw that inexplicable caprice or trick of architecture, one of the great Norman columns that scanned from one place shows the upper half much smaller than the lower; from another, the reverse effect, and from yet another, a pillar of perfect proportion. The ruins of the old palace and part of the abbey are very touching and beautiful. It too has “a den,” as every deep wooded and rocky glen with a stream running through its dark length is called. We sat on the rustic seat under a grand old tree and looked at the ruins and moralized, raved over the vistas, shadows, flashing sunlight and—munched our lunch. Saturday we skimmed away on the wings of the delicious morning as well as the wings of steam to Dalkeith and Newbattle Abbey to spend the day between the two. The former is the favorite seat of the Duke of Buccleugh, the latter that of his son-in-law, the Marquis of Lothian. The ducal palace is positively ugly; but it has its complement of grand state apartments filled with fine pictures and the usual quota of superb articles of vertu and bric-a-brac.
Newbattle Abbey is a charming home. Its park boasts some rare old trees, among them a giant beech that is “a monarch of the forest” verily, measuring twenty-three feet in girth. Thursday we start on our excursion to the Highlands; it will take a week. We shall return here for a fresh departure. Then look out for another half quire of this moving matter.
L. G. C.
HEIDELBERG.
N Heidelberg. Think of it! What an energetic idler I am grown! The Neckar lies a pistol-shot from my windows; high hills rise on the thither side, looking so home-like—Maysville home, like Mr. W.’s, where you came once upon a time. When my glance darts out the windows and rests upon them, suddenly I catch my breath, and I am not sure whether it is pain or pleasure I feel. Half way up they are cultivated, but the tops are wooded. Just over my head the old castle looms up among the trees. “The Gardens” of this pension where I am lead right up to it. I shall climb to it to-morrow for the first time. Reached here day before yesterday, late; got settled yesterday for a good rest; shall stay here till the latest season for Switzerland; then it and on to Munich for another rest.
Here’s “a mere mention” of where I have been since I wrote from “Edina, Scotia’s darling.” From there to the English lakes we saw ten each lovelier than the last. I wish you
were within sound; how I would rave to you! Then ruins. Furness Abbey and Fountain’s Abbey, both beyond Melrose, and Dryburg in some respects. London for a week (where we parted). Then to Rochester for its cathedral, castle (a ruin) and Gad’s Hill, Canterbury. Oh! Oh! Oh!
Dover, Ostend, “The Belfry of Bruges,” Ghent, Brussels, seeing the king and queen gratis, Antwerp, The Hague, Rotterdam (the loveliest and liveliest of them all), Amsterdam, Cologne, Bonn, and a pilgrimage to the graves of Niebuhr and Bunsen, Coblenz, Mayence—from Bonn to Mayence being the grand Rhine trip. “The castled crag of Drachenfels,” and innumerable other castled crags, sometimes as many as three in sight; the Lurlieberg; the sweet, song-famous Bingen; the world-wide known wine district, Rheingau, whence come the costliest wines in the world—Johannisberger, Reiderheimer, Steinberger, etc. I saw the Schloss Johannisbergers crowning a lovely vine-clad knoll, the entire vineyard or vineyards comprised in forty acres. The Schloss is a very extensive chateau, but ugly; belongs to Prince Richard Metternich, and yields a neat little income of £8,000 ($40,000). Some of our tobacco acres do almost as well! We climbed the precipitous rock on which “the majestic fortress of Ehrenbrietstein” is situated. It is opposite Coblenz, and we crossed the Rhine to reach it on a bridge of boats. I saw three bridges of this kind. I guess they have been handed down since Caesar’s time. I could not find out their special merit. They are not particularly striking—just a number of boats, sharp at both ends, side by side, with the solid flooring and railing of any bridge.
The view from the fortress is one of the finest on this glorious stretch of seventy miles, and I was glad to see it.
I wish I could lend you my eyes for a few minutes, so you could see what I saw. You’d come over and see it all, if it cost you that farm you spoke of in one of your letters, or another book!
L. G. C.
Heidelberg, August 15, 1882.
HEIDELBERG.
AM just home, this is “home” for the present, from a week’s delight at Nuremberg. “Delight,” how feeble that sounds. Enchantment, fascination, the absorption that makes one lovingly linger and loth to come away. It is the quaintest, most charming old city, I verily believe, that the sun shines on. From its streets, sometimes wider, sometimes narrower, but always crookeder, to its curious houses with their high-peaked gables and red-tiled roofs, with regular rows of such funny hooded windows let into them, and the upper stories all cut up into the most lavishly ornate towers, balconies, and sculptures; from its ramparts with towers of various forms at intervals, and its dry moat, thirty-five yards wide and thirty-five feet deep, to the river running through and dividing the town into nearly equal parts, spanned by old and historic bridges; from the churches, museums and galleries filled with the masterpieces of Durer, Kraft, Stoss and Vischer, to the shops with their bewildering medley of carvings in wood and ivory, and castings in terra-cotta, bronze and brass, by the thousand nameless artists of to-day; from—oh! everything to everything. Just leave all the rest of Europe out if you can’t get it and Nuremberg in. Think how you’d feel to see a lime tree planted by Queen Kunigunde in the year 1002! or a lamp that has never been allowed to go out since it was first lighted in 1326! or a wedding in the Rathhaus! I saw them all. And saw besides, the Crown Princess and her daughter, and was not struck blind by the sight! And there was a great exposition in progress, and yesterday the anniversary celebration of the victory at Sedan. The exposition was a grand and most artistic spectacle; and all “United Germany” a spectacular display of multitudinous flags, and processions enlivened with human huzzas and band music! I wish I dare tell you the half I saw, or a tithe of the ravishment of mind and soul wrought by that picturesque, haunting, old ancestral city of mine. My great grandfather went to America from it. Did I ever tell you? Do you wonder I could not bear to tear myself away? I am going back some day if I have the ghost of a chance.
To-day I have been resting; too tired for church, for anything but this careless scamper over a sheet of paper. Had an interruption in a call from some Cape Colony English ladies, tourists as we are, whom we met at Inverness and went with to the battle-field of Culloden; and again at Dunkeld. My traveling companion, Miss S—— of Boston, struck them quite unexpectedly again yesterday on the “Old Bridge” that crosses the Neckar, which I think I called Maine in my last to you. They are very agreeable, and their party consists of the mother and five daughters. Well, I do think the sheets of paper of the present day have the most limited capacity. I am not half begun and this is used up! Pshaw!
L. G. C.
Heidelberg, September 3, 1882.
BADEN-BADEN.
S a reward for your reformation I write to you on this precious sheet. You see I have come to be wonderfully attached to Heidelberg, the beautiful, the quaint, the historically poetic, learned and picturesque old town on the Neckar. It seems like another home. So I could not show my appreciation of you in a more complimentary way than by sending this little series of pictures. Have you ever been here, I wonder? You did not say, but you wrote as if you knew it by sight as well as by heart. As I cannot know, I will venture an explanation. The panorama speaks for itself. Put on your “specs” and look at the castle, half way up the berg, “the Jettenhuhl, a wooded spur of the Konigestuhl.” Look at it from the “Terrasse.” Thus you’ll get something of an idea of it. The Gesprente Thurm is the one that was blown up by the French. The thickness of the walls, twenty-one feet, and the solid masonry, held it so well that only a fragment, as it were, gave way. It still hangs as if ready to be replaced. “Das Grosse Fass Gebaude,” too, you will have no difficulty in making out. If you only had it with its 49,000 gallons of wine, but wouldn’t you divide with your neighbors! The columns in the portico that shows in the Schlosshof are the four brought from Charlemagne’s palace at Ingelheim by the Count Palatine Ludwig, some time between 1508-44. The Zum Ritter has nothing to do with the castle, but is an ancient structure (1592) in the Renaissance style, and one of the few that escaped destruction in 1693. It is a beautiful, highly ornamental building, and I wish you could see it, if you have not seen it.
All the above information, I beg you to believe, I do not intend you to think was evolved from my inner consciousness, but gathered from the—nearest guide-book!
I am so much obliged to you for mapping out Switzerland to me. I have been trying my best to get all those “passes” into my brain. Now, thanks to your letter, I have them all in the handiest kind of a bunch. Ariel like, “I’ll do my bidding gently,” and as surely, if I get there. But there are dreadful reports of floods and roads caved in and bridges swept away and snows and—enough of such exciting items as sets one thinking—“to go or not to go?” We are this far on the way. Reached here this afternoon. Have spent the evening sauntering in the gardens, the Conversationhaus, the bazaar, mingling with the throng, listening to the band, and comparing what it is with what it was. It was a gay and curious spectacle, but on the whole had “the banquet-hall deserted” look. The situation is most beautiful. It lies, you know, at the entrance of the Black Forest, among picturesque, thickly-wooded hills, in the valley of the Oos, and extends up the slope of some of the hills. The Oos is a most turbid, turbulent stream; dashes through part of the town with angry, headlong speed. There is an avenue along its bank of oaks, limes and maples, bordered with flower-beds and shrubberies, and adorned with fountains and handsome villas. We shall devote to-morrow to seeing all there is to be seen, and go to Strassburg to-morrow evening for two or three days. From there to Constance, and then hold our “Council” as to further movements.
L. G. C.
Baden-Baden, September 19, 1882.
FROM HEIDELBERG TO NUREMBERG.
UST after I last wrote I left my companions to worry along over their “German lessons,” and ran away to Nuremberg. A very pleasant party was going there on the way to Vienna, and wished me to go along. Of all Germany, divided or united, Nuremberg was my objective point; for in addition to its special attraction as “the most perfect surviving specimen of mediaeval architecture in Europe,” it has a nearer interest to me in that it was the home of my father’s paternal ancestors, as far back as 1570. So I went with alacrity. We left Heidelberg at the reasonable hour of 10:50 a. m. Thanks to the moderate form of tourist life I have adopted, neither the hours of my “beauty sleep” nor that last supreme “forty winks” of the luxuriant morning sleeper, are ever interfered with. Our way lay up the Neckar, and as the train left the Carlsthor it glided—literally glided, the rate of speed not exceeding from twelve to fifteen miles an hour, and it “the fast train,” too!—along the bank of the river, under an avenue of trees, giving ample time for one to take in views that one might delight to shut her eyes and recall in the dreamland hours of some future paradise. There were cone-shaped, beautiful, castle-capped mountains, the long winding valley with the river showing in many a lovely curve and shoot; village after village, in the mellowest tints of Indian red, brown, and drab, gathered around its church or chapel, almost every one with an amazing tall spire; ranges of wooded hills that came together in one direction, or retreated from each other in another, disclosing wonderful vistas;—and the weather! One moment a burst of sunlight; the next a veil of fleecy white clouds that changed into the mistiest blue; presently a dash of rain; then the brilliant clearing up again. Thus continued both views and weather to Heilbronn, forty-two miles. There are two historic points, Wimpfen am Berg, which occupies an old Roman station destroyed by the Huns under Attila; and Sinzheim, where Turenne gained a victory in 1674. I own their history was not half so interesting to me as their beauty. From Heilbronn to Nuremberg, over a hundred miles, the country was one great stretch of farming land, fine soil, and admirably cultivated.
We ran into Nuremberg in a pelting rain. All the hotels full. After being turned away from five, with the most proper apologies be it said, we found lodging, but “no rations” except breakfast, at a private house. This was duly served: coffee, rolls, butter and eggs, the last raw! Fancy our amusement. Having left our names at the various hotels for the first vacancy, next morning the Golden Eagle found a place for us beneath its sheltering wings. We were fortunate in the time of our visit—a grand exposition was in progress. Nearly all of “united Germany,” as well as “little Bavaria,” seemed thronging the hotels and crowding the streets. The Crown Prince and his family occupied two hotels. The exposition continues, and is really a superb attraction. As for the quaint, picturesque old city itself, I cannot believe there is another so fascinating. From its streets, sometimes wide, oftener narrow, always crooked; its houses, eight and ten stories high, with their lofty-peaked gables and red-tiled roofs, with five or more tiers of the funniest little windows; its churches, monuments, and repositories of the best productions of that brilliant constellation of workers—Durer, Kraft, Vischer, Stoss and Hirschvogel—who lived and flourished there together; its shops, tempting with pictures, carvings, castings, and—toys; its museums, that it would take days to tell you about; its curious old bridges spanning the river Pegnitz, that divides it into two parts; the fortifications, consisting of a rampart running round the entire old city, with towers at intervals, and a dry moat, thirty-five feet deep and as many yards wide; its old berg, or castle, that rises on a lofty sandstone rock with “the wide extended prospect” from its walls and windows, and the old lime tree in the court, planted by Queen Kunigunde somewhere from 1004 to 1024; to the cemetery where Durer is buried, with its singular, but the most impressive monuments, plain, massive, low monoliths, with large plates inserted in the tops bearing the inscriptions. From first to last, everywhere and everything, the old town, all alive with the quickest beating of the pulse of the nineteenth century, was a delight and wonder.
Do not dream of a half description of anything; there was too much for one pen—too much for a thousand pens. But you never saw lions, life size, made out of soap, did you? Or temples, pagodas, monuments of every design, made out of buttons, matches, tacks, not mere toys, but big enough for out doors?
Among others of these artistic and architectural structures, was a tall shaft monument of tobacco, fine-cut, twist, stem, and leaves, labeled—fancy my heart-throb on reading—“Maryland,” “Virginia,” “Kentucky.” And these are some of the innumerable sights I saw at the exposition. What else did I see?
“Pussy-cat, Pussy-cat, where have you been?
I have been to London to see the Queen.”
I saw the crown princess and her daughter! I looked at them and they looked at me—took me in as they did the shop-windows, trees, whatever came within the sweep of their roving glance—just as I did them! Such a plain, insignificant little party as they were! The crown prince was not with them. Just two ordinary open carriages, the princess in the first, with her daughter by her side; in the other, a lady and gentleman in attendance. They came out from a shop of carvings just as we were approaching it to enter. And I saw a wedding at the chapel of the Rathhaus (town hall)! Neither the bride nor groom was on the sunny side of forty. She was dressed in a rich heavy black silk, with a white illusion head-dress, that was voluminous enough for a veil, though evidently not intended for one. The ceremony was apparently a simple civil service, conducted by the magistrate, or whatever he was, and an assistant. The bridal party was accompanied by one person only—a gray-haired old gentleman.
How the days sped by! The first thing I knew, ere I was half ready to leave, my last day had come. I bought a package of Nuremberg’s famous gingerbread, and bidding my pleasant party “good-bye,” most reluctantly betook myself to my home-bound train. Traveling, as I was, alone, I was put in the special “ladies’” car, “Fuer Damen,” as it is labeled. Presently, another “lone female” was put in, who proved to be a young German lady. I began to stumble in German to her. She smiled, and replied in tolerable English, it being one of the five languages of which she was in a manner mistress; and she was just beginning the sixth! “I have so much time,” she said simply, in explanation of such learning. She was educated in Geneva. If she is an average example of its pupils, Geneva’s schools must be indeed desirable. And the next thing I knew, our five weeks at Heidelberg were gone, and it was time to “move on” again.
We started for Munich via Baden-Baden, Strassburg and Switzerland—an attractive programme, but not less did it hurt to say another “good-bye” to the pleasant friends we had made—the beautiful Pension, which had come to have a real home feeling; the romantic “ancient university town,” and the grand old castle, both Longfellow-haunted to me; and to the various charming places in the environs—become almost as familiar as the favorite haunts of childhood. Our bright little Fraulein, whose dainty motions made one think of a bird’s, said in her very best English: “You must tired once more get, and soon again come home.” Her eyes were brimming with tears. The good frau mother took me in her arms, and in German fashion pressed each of my cheeks against each of hers. It was a most charming family.
We spent a night at Baden, the great Spa—the ex-gambling hell—the beautiful city that has risen from its degradation and put on robes of innocence. This is due to the efforts of the present and the preceding grand duke, both men of exceptionally noble characters, and warmly honored and loved. The former prosperity and popularity given by the seductions of the gambling bank have been succeeded and surpassed by attractions of a different and higher kind. Instead of the dreadful fascinations of the Cursall, the palatial Friedrichsbad, said to be the most complete bathing establishment in the world, offers the healing and luxury of its thermal and mineral baths. It takes its name from the reigning grand duke, who was its chief and most intensely interested projector. But his wise exertions and princely tastes have apparently known no restrictions. They have been shown in the erection of other magnificent buildings, in the laying out and exquisite adornment of public parks and promenades; indeed in doing everything possible to render Baden not only a delightful summer resort, but suitable for a permanent home.
It is provided with theaters, balls, fine music, scientific lectures, etc. The results justify his efforts and sagacious foresight. Wealthy families of rank all over Germany are making it a home. Do I seem to dwell on Baden and its grand duke? Well, I may as well admit, all the homage I am capable of is evoked by such a man and such a work. I have his photograph and many little pictures of his Baden! Have you ever read in a way that impressed you to remembrance of the beautiful situation of Baden? The highest compliment that can be bestowed, as the guide-book says, is this: “It vies with Hiedelberg.” It lies among picturesque wooded hills, at the entrance of the Black Forest, on the Oehlbach; it is on the right bank of the stream, and runs up “a slope of the Battert,” the summit of which is crowned by the New Schloss, one of the grand duke’s residences. It has a Saratoga look. Haven’t all watering places a close kin look? But it has its own foreign look too, and distinctive features, even from those of Weisbaden, its rival.
On the left bank of the Oos—“the well corrected Oos,” as I have seen it called somewhere, because it has been confined for some distance between high stone walls—are the pleasure grounds, the Conversationhaus (the old Cursaal), the Trinkhalle on one side of an open square, full of avenues of shade trees, and in one corner of which is the gay and fanciful “Music-Kiosk,” where the band plays, and the Lichtenthale Allee. This last is an avenue of “vanishing distances,” of lime trees, oaks, maples, flower-beds, shrubberies, fountains, and all kinds of ornamental seats scattered through it. The Oos, the most turbid, turbulent strip of a river, dashes along as if in a perfect fury at those confining walls. The walls themselves, though, are a special feature of the rare loveliness that meets the glance on every side; they are so festooned and draped with vines one can scarce more than guess at the stones so veiled. The Virginia creeper was so in excess the river seemed rushing between a running fire of crimson flames. It was indeed “exceeding beautiful.” In the evening we walked in the brilliantly lighted square, peering into the gay shop windows, stopping to listen to the band, mingling with the throngs of well-dressed people, and bringing up in the “great saloon” (fifty-four yards long and seventeen wide) of the Conversationhaus for a rest and a study of the novel scene. Finally we strolled through the two old gambling saloons (the Landscape and the Italian) and ever so many others, and lost ourselves in admiration of the beauty and comfort. The next day we spent in driving to the Old Schloss, six miles from town, on a high “berg,” and to all the points of most interest. The Old Schloss is a very romantic old ruin, and commands the finest views around Baden. From it we went to the New Schloss, and were shown through a number of handsome saloons and the apartment of the grand duke and duchess. It was such a perfect little gem of an apartment that I must give you a peep into it. A comparatively quite small oblong room, with two doors opposite each other and in the middle of each wall. One end of the oblong was a dead wall, the other a large bay window of the loveliest stained glass, in pictures of all the choicest points about Baden. Only the center pane was plain glass; it too, though, framing a lovely view of the scene outside. The doors were rather doorways, being, I should think, ten feet high by four wide, all apparently one solid magnificent mirror. As one steps across the threshold, himself or herself is beheld before, behind, on either hand, overhead, in infinite repetition. The French custodian made merry in showing off this ingenious and amusing trick of reflecting surfaces. After this came the Friedrichsbad, with its innumerable varieties of baths, the Trinkhalle and a glass of its steaming water, and—“and other things too numerous to make mention of,” to quote from our old town crier.
With decided reluctance we set our faces toward Strassburg, where, to be sure, we wished to go, but we did not feel ready to leave Baden.
We spent two days at Strassburg. You know there was the grand Cathedral, with its grander clock, to see, the fortifications, some fine public parks, and the immense Alsatian bows with the women attached, besides a lunch on the famous local dish, pates de foie gras. I circumnavigated the Cathedral, loitered through and through it, and finally sat down before the clock at the stroke of eleven, to watch it through the next hour. I saw the little boy come out and strike his quarter and disappear, the youth, the middle-aged man, the old man; and then the grand midday procession of puppets representing the Apostles, pass before another puppet representing Christ, making fitting reverence, all but that dreadful Judas, who turned his back on him. The cock, too, performed beautifully, flapped his wings and stretched out his neck, and crowed a sure-enough chanticleer crow, loud enough and cheerily enough to waken the soundest sleeper and make the laziest willing to creep out of bed. The little angel turned his hour-glass, the show was over, and I came away very much impressed with that wonder of mechanism which has been running and regulating itself ever since 1842, and is calculated to do this for an unlimited number of years. And don’t you think I did right to shut my ears and refuse to listen to a young Yankee “Paul Pry,” recently from a six months’ sojourn in Strassburg, who wished to make me believe there was a man behind performing a la—the organ-grinder! The Alsatian bows were a perpetual feast of fun, but as a feast of the palate once is often enough for me of the pates de foie gras.
From Strassburg through the Black Forest by rail was a run of 728 miles. We had a series of thirty-eight tunnels in succession. The very foundation rocks of the earth seem to have been blasted and dug through to make this admirable road; the round charms of which could not be summed up in a Summer day’s gossip.
L. G. C.
Munich, September 27, 1882.
LETTER FROM MUNICH.
ADEN was perfect in its way, and we left reluctantly. We “did” it quite thoroughly—had a six mile drive to the Old Schloss, a fine old ruin, on top of a high hill, with beautiful views of bergs, valleys, and the town.
Then a visit to the New Schloss, one of the residences of the Grand Duke. We were shown through some noble apartments, which I’ll describe to you in detail when we meet. We went to the Trinkhalle and drank some of the streaming water. The others made faces, but I did not find it unpleasant. Then through the great Friedrichsbad, the principal bath-house. I believe it furnishes every kind known to science or desired by either suffering or luxurious humanity. And so on. At Strassburg, the Cathedral with that wonderful clock! “The half has not been told,” and it does not begin to come up to the reality. The way that cock flaps its wings, stretches its neck and crows is enough to make all created cocks die of envy. At St. Thomas Church, with its magnificent monument to Marshal Saxe; and its most singular chapel, containing the bodies of the Duke of Nassau and his daughter—the former embalmed, the latter a slowly crumbling skeleton—both dressed in the very clothes they wore! I cannot imagine a more ghastly and singular spectacle than that of each lying there in an air-tight coffin, the entire top of glass, thus allowing a full view.[B] Yet it was not revolting to me, except as the dead were made a spectacle of. I gazed at them with an equal fascination and reverence. We were much interested in the fortifications, great numbers of soldiers and their drilling.
And we did not fail to indulge in the Strassburg specialty of pates de foie gras. I was reminded of a criticism on a juvenile composition of mine by one who knew how not to withhold the wholesome truth: “Its individuality is not sufficiently palpable.” At Constance we held our “Council,” and the reports from Switzerland being very unfavorable, decided to put it off to a more auspicious season.
Constance is a most charmingly situated and attractive little city. We stayed at the Insel Hotel, the old monastery, in which Huss was imprisoned, you know; and I saw the cell in which he was confined. It was underground, and its walls were washed by the waters of the lake. I set my feet on that white spot in the slab of the nave of the Cathedral where he stood when he was condemned to be burned at the stake. You remember it is said to remain dry always, even when the rest is wet. Finally, we drove to the stone that marks the place where he and Jerome suffered that dreadful sentence. It is a pile of rocks, all overgrown with ivy and other vines, except where slabs show through bearing commemorative inscriptions.
From Constance to Lindau we had an enchanting sail over an emerald sea, with many a pretty village gleaming along its shore, “like a white swan on her reedy nest;” and then green hills, that soon turned into denser clouds, as it were, and directly, almost in a flash, the snow-covered Alps!
Railway from Lindau here; and such a succession of pictures! Long, green valleys, dotted with picturesque villages; chains of wooded knolls; ranges of dark, pine-covered mountains, overtopped in places with a vast jumble of cones; snow-covered Alps again, that shone in the sunlight like molten silver! Words avail little toward reproducing such a panorama. Only one’s own eyes can do it even the faintest justice. I hope you have seen it, or, if not, will some day soon, before you grow an old man. Have had a long, lazy, inconsequential, just-going-anywhere-I-pleased stroll this perfect afternoon. The sky is without a fleck; the air crystal clear; the sunshine just that happy mingling of warmth and bracing quality that makes mere animal existence an ecstasy. I could have walked to the uttermost ends of the earth in it. The streets are wide, clean, admirably paved, handsomely built; fine houses of beautiful designs in a soft, creamy-white stone. Parks, gardens, avenues, open squares, trees, flowers, grass, and grand monuments are innumerable. I felt as if I were under a spell of enchantment. What a place to shrink from was “indoors!” I stayed out till the very last moment.
What a city indeed is this München, the capital of “pretentious little Bavaria!” Think of the days of delight before me in its vast halls of art! I am sure you will, and with an added invocation out of your kind heart for whatever else may be good for me.
L. G. C.
MÜNCHEN.
HIS moment finished the second reading of yours of 22d. Ah! there are some things you don’t have any conception of; for instance, you don’t know how good it is to get a letter from home in a foreign land. I do. Oh! Oh! Oh!
I came in from the opera, Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” in German, in a “rapt ecstasy,” and, in the act of seating myself at our “after the play little supper,” I saw your letter lying on my plate. I am intuitive; I knew it was from you. I picked it up and laid it down with the address on the under side. What would “Goggles” say to that? No; he is not a woman; he is not Miss S——. The French have a proverb that runneth in this wise: “La patience c’est la genie.” If it had been wisdom those keen little epigrammatists would not have missed it so. However, I do not wish to discourage you in the exercise of that passive virtue; rather let it “work its good and perfect work.” Miss S——, not “Goggles,” then said: “Why are you not going to read your letter; will it keep?” Of course I blushed and hung down my head and simpered, and—but you’ve seen the process many a time. Now, what would you give to know how soon I got through with that dainty meal, and hurried away to be “all alone to myself,” to pore over the letter that confessed to two “love letters” to another woman. It does not need you or anybody else to convince me I am the superarchangelic creature I was reported to you. I know it myself now! See how good I am to write at this late hour, not finding it possible to put you off to that will-o’-the-wisp time, “a more convenient season.” And so glad of the love letters; not jealous a bit, because they went where I want them to go! “Don’t worry in well doing,” “effuse,” “flow like the lava,” “let all the currents of your being set that way,” and so come into possession of that great estate which all the kingdoms of the earth cannot match—“a noble woman nobly planned.” Oh, please, I did not write those letters for any one but my sister-in-law. She cut them up, and pieced them together again to suit them to “print,” After they were published she wrote what she had done, begging my forgiveness, but making such an appeal in behalf of the paper I not only could not condemn, I even had to tell her she might do as she pleased with my letters to her, only my name must not be known in connection with them. You fairly frighten me when you speak of them in the same breath with your friends Mr. W—— and “E. A.” Indeed, I feel timid about writing to you, since you have such letters as theirs. Only, we write to each other for the simple “fun of the thing,” not giving much heed to anything else, don’t we? And, on the whole, I hail from “Old Kaintuck,” and that doesn’t mean cowardice in any direction exactly!
I wish you could have been with me in Nuremberg—my heart city. You’d have seen things too—all that I did not see; and between us there would not have been much left behind. I am going back there some day—ah! that misty future—it may be as the children are credited with saying, though I never heard them, “before soon,” and it may be when I die and am resurrected there. This Bavarian soil has a curiously homey tread. I can easily see how I might linger here, “maybe for years, maybe forever.” So much to do; so many places to go to; so much to see; such food for thought, imagination, for dolce far niente. You know the kind of pabulum that witching state of existence claims, but who can describe it? I am tempted to give you “a sample day” out of this wonder life in Munich. Do I count egotistically when I admit I count on your caring for it, because I count on the interest of friendship? Did I tell you to expect and excuse repetitions? Think how many letters I write, and every one wishes to hear everything, and I try not to disappoint.
We are fortunate in pensions. I am on Maximilian Platz, and my windows look out on, first, the Schiller Monument Platz, an exquisite memorial platz, all to itself; a semi-circle, with a thick half belt of trees for the background; in front an oval plat of grass, bordered with a bed of flowers, in the center of which stands the statue in bronze on a white marble pedestal. Just in front of it, grown in the grass, is an evergreen wreath; beyond it rise, above a thicket of trees in their rich Autumn tints, the towers of the Wittelsbach Palace, the residence of Ludwig (grandfather of the present king) after his abdication, Brienner strasse on one side and Maximilian Platz (a great semicircular street) on the other. By the way, they converge, the latter here running into the other, and thus making an end of itself, from a spacious boulevard and driveway, around which are blocks of fine edifices in a cream-colored stone. Immediately beneath my windows is a small triangular platz, a bijou of a beer garden, in trees and vines, a gorgeous mosaic of greens, golds, browns and scarlets, and bowers and tables, and chairs and shaded lamps, the kind that make moonlight.
Well, I begin the day with my breakfast in my own apartment, all alone. That’s the custom of the country, you know, not my indolence. With that spectacle to interest and claim my eager eyes, I shall give you day before yesterday. At 10 a. m. Miss S—— and I went to the palace, which means an entire square composed of three immense palaces—the Konigsbau, the Alte Residenz, or Old Palace, and the Festsaalbau—each occupying one side of the square; the fourth being filled up with the Court Chapel and Court Theater. The greater part of all these is accessible, which makes so much to be seen it has to be taken in “broken doses,” so zu sagen. The Schatzkammer (Treasury) was our objective point. We ran the gauntlet of soldiers on guard, a spacious court with a handsome fountain, a kind of cloistered stretch with a wonderful grotto of shells, a maze of small ante-rooms, till finally, in a state of perfect bewilderment, we were taken in hand by the major-domo, who procured our tickets (a little ceremony requiring your cards and a silver mark), and ushered us into—oh! Monte Christo, the Arabian Nights, that stately pleasure dome that Kublai-Khan decreed in Zanadu! We wandered through them all. First, through a long gallery called the Stammbaum (Genealogical Tree), containing the portraits of the princes and princesses of the house of Wittelsbach. The room itself is most attractive in gold, gilt and white ornamentation, what space is left from the pictures—a collection that any family might be proud of. At the end, “Open Sesame,” and a great door flies back, and we enter. I wish I had Ovid’s pen, with which he wrote the description of the Palace of the Sun! Such a blaze of diamonds and rubies, and pearls and emeralds, and all the gems of the earth! There was the Hausdiamant, a monster brilliant “in the Order of the Golden Fleece;” and the Palatinate pearl, half black, half white; strings of buttons by the yard of diamonds, a central one as large as a silver quarter, encircled by smaller ones; breast-plates, as it were, of pear-shaped pearls dangling from a mesh of diamonds; crowns of diamonds that had a blinding brilliancy; cabinets filled with vessels made from rich stones and inlaid with the most precious stones; a copy of Trajan’s Pillar it took the goldsmith twenty years to execute; and more of such royal belongings than I could get into a day’s description.
And one thing not put down in the catalogue: As I was standing transfixed by some ornaments in pink rubies and diamonds, over my shoulder sounded the tones of a woman’s voice in American English. You ought to have heard the suppressed fervor of my exclamation under my breath: “Oh, you blessed American tongue!” I turned to confront a most agreeable countrywoman, just as eager as myself for recognition on that ground alone. I met her again at the opera to-night, and we had another chat. I think her husband is an artist, as they live in Florence, and he told me he had been over here sixteen or seventeen years, and was “longing to get back home.” On leaving the palace, Miss S—— came home; but I wasn’t half ready for indoors—never am except at meal-times and bed-time! So I wandered around the streets in the sunshine, looking in the shop windows and picking up a picture here and there—among
them that of the “Vier Konige,” as the old Kaiser calls it, himself holding his baby great-grandson with as proud an air as if it was his own first-born son, with his son and grandson on either side. Four living generations in the same picture is indeed a spectacle to be made a note of.
Another picture was that including the empress, crown princess, and the young mother herself holding her little king. It is a picture beaming with both pride and happiness. That must have been one of life’s happy moments—one of the few supreme flashes of earthly felicity. And on compulsion—dinner, always in Germany a mid-day meal. I am a true Bohemian now; but I was a housekeeper once, and I don’t like to derange the order of a household, so I am always “on time.” After dinner, out again by myself, Miss S—— having a German lesson. First, a call at a book-store for a variety of Munich gossip. The proprietor is a handsome young man—cultivated, traveled, of good family—his father being a captain in the army, and a very genial, well-mannered person. I drop in on him quite often. He has been all over the United States, even to Cincinnati. I did not ask him about W——! As I sauntered out—I do everything just as the whim takes me—I thought I’d have a droschke drive, so I hailed one and stepped in. Oh! the earth, air and sky of these Munich days! A whole week of them, too, of that kind that makes one exclaim, “Mere existence is a luxury.”
After awhile I dismissed it at the door of the Kaulbach Gallery. It is not a large one, only a large room, as full as it can hold of the sketches and a few pictures of that popular Munich artist. It is on a retired street; a very pretty, tasteful building in a garden. A few, from one to three or four persons at a time, were coming and going the hour and a half I loitered. I am not going to bore you or any one with a catalogue or description of pictures, but one was so beautiful and touching I want you to look at it a moment through the lens of my—pen. A city still in the shadow of the night; gleams of dawn in the east; just floating up into the clear, higher air an angel clasping a little child in its arms, with only the words “Zu Gott;” such a common idea, so simply wrought out, but I could not get away from it.
The sketches were intensely interesting. Some were outlines with pencil or pen; others quite fully worked out, of nearly all his great masterpieces.
The cunning of his good right hand seemed never to have been at a loss. His portrait, painted by himself, stood on an easel, with three fadeless chaplets placed upon it by that loving homage which honors alike those who give and those who receive.
Out again and on again, turning my feet obstinately from the “home stretch.” Several squares took me to the “English Garden,” founded by Count Rumford, our uneuphonious “Mr. Thompson.” Acres of greenery in drives, walks, bowers, lakes, streams, etc., right on the edge of the city. Like Kane and the Polar Sea, I stood on the brink but didn’t jump in. I did not quite like strolling in its shady depths by myself. I had driven through, and the knowledge which neutralizes temptation might have had as much influence to the abstinence as the discretion. No bringing myself to the self-application of the word cowardice! Besides, there was counter-attraction somewhere within several squares which I had not seen, Ludwigkirche, with its altar painting, “The Last Judgment,” the largest oil painting in the world, sixty-three feet high and thirty-nine feet broad. Did you know that? I didn’t till the guide-book told me. You are welcome to my hard-earned information. I wish I had time to say something I want to just “in this connection.” Hm! I haven’t; I must hurry on. Of course, the painting is a masterpiece of art. Isn’t that the conventional expression that slips so “trippingly” from the half-fledged tourist? Among the spirits of the blessed is that of King Ludwig, crowned with laurels, attained presumably after his separation from Lola; also that of Dante, the poet of heaven and hell, in a red garment; and of Fra Angelico, the painter of Paradise, in the Dominican robe. I did not give a close inspection to the spirits of the other order. Vesper service was in progress, and I sat and watched the devout at their aves and paternosters, a scene in its way food for rather painful meditation. Such mechanical worship; such slavish superstition! Descending the entrance steps as I left the church, I was struck by their worn appearance. The daily tread of the multitudes of worshipers has left them almost unsafe. Then I lagged along Ludwig Strasse, the fine street entirely originated by that same King Ludwig who had public spirit and energy enough to hide a multitude of faults.
The sun was leaving me so fast I had to turn homeward, which I did as reluctantly as you turn back from some of your long tramps, I suspect. Isn’t a Munich day a rather fascinating span of life? I match the above day by day. Do you know what a large city it is—230,000 population? And how grand and clean and comfortable? I am wishing I could transport it to the United States for myself and my elect ones to dwell in! For oh! such bread and butter and coffee as abound! There! the weakness for creature comfort will not be thrust aside!
Don’t you want to know what neighbors I have? A banker at the end of this etage, a widower with a cherub of a child, and in the next suite of apartments to mine—a baron! Such a splendid-looking man! If he had only come sooner—you know the adage about propinquity—before I had quite lost my heart! I couldn’t help it. I was taken “so unawares”—not in the least dreaming what would be the issue—when I could not wrest my gaze from that superb creature in such brilliant array. Don’t tell on me! A Prussian officer! His uniform is the acme of taste, gorgeousness and becomingness; his off-duty saunter on the street the ultimatum of grace; his easy, dignified, unconscious bearing the perfection of deportment. He never stares at one. It was the merest accident that our eyes met, and the damage was done. Our glances got tangled in each other, and the more we struggled the more hopeless the knot. His name? You promise not to betray this weakness—but could I be a true American woman and come abroad and not lose my heart? His name is Legion; for I can’t tell them apart any more than I can help adoring them all—the graceful, gracious, gorgeous beings of gold and plumes and cockades and pompons, and altogether such uniforms! For what else were they made, indeed? See how I take you into my confidence? And now then, father confessor, having made a clean breast of it, I shall betake myself to my couch, in the words of “Goggles,” to “sleep the sleep of youth, innocence and beauty.” Did you say you were going to write fortnightly or weekly? The first will be best.
L. G. C.
München, October 23, 1882.
MUNICH.
AY, how many copies have you of those foaming sheets you sent me from M—— for a letter? And to how many other addresses have they been sent? I am curious to know. They were never evoked by me—of that I am sure. Nor do I attribute their existence to the overwhelming influence of any other special feminine divinity; rather to one of those supreme intervals—his satanic majesty’s own—when
“The d—l finds for idle hands
Some mischief still to do.”
You were alone; you were “in a state of mind;” you
“Sat in revery and watched
The changing colors of the waves that broke
Upon the idle seashore of the mind.”
You summoned up “spirits of that vasty deep, red, white and blue;” the flimsy creatures, what were they but shades of all your divinities, the slim maidens of your boyhood, the stately goddesses of your cavalier period, “the pretty widows” of your “old bachelor” era? And so with the prodding of that flock of shadows and the impulse of your besetting iniquity you wrote that sample letter—good for one, good for all? I can see the whole performance. Thankee, sir; I am not to be mistaken for one of that throng. There is nothing gregarious about me. Just leave me out when you give your “free lunch” feasts of sauce and sugar-plums! You—
But I enjoyed the composition “all the same.” What a pity you have never taken to novel writing. This letter—I can’t call it mine, you see, because it belongs to all of them—ah! this letter “shows your hand.” Believe me, you’ve missed your field in literature. Are you too old to begin over? I ask this because I am beginning to have misgivings in the face of my old sturdy belief that one never outgrew the ability to do if only the will were not wanting. I—I—how shall I admit it? I find there are things I can’t do. Of course it is because one grows old, even with the best intentions not to. No, I never want to; and here I am minus the roses of other days and plus wrinkles and gray hairs beyond all calculation, and seriously contemplating a mouthful of false teeth. Sigh for me! Was ever anything so lamentable? I am so glad you told me about your evening with my dear friends, the F——s. How plain you made me see the familiar room. It was good of you all to remember me so. They are of earth’s choicest—so high-souled, so loyal, so good. I have yet to see the man who does not do homage to Mrs. F——, and the Doctor is one I delight to love and honor. I hope you met my other friend, Mr. W——, of whom I dreamed last night. I was talking to you, and used this expression: “All the wrong he has ever done in his life—all and the only—is to have always done the right.” When I awoke I remembered it. How long I have known him—nearly from the beginning—away back yonder when I was a wee thing in pinafores. He said so pleasantly of that long acquaintance: “The first time I saw her she was so high” (meaning the midget I was) “and swinging in an apple tree; and she swung into my heart, and has been swinging there ever since.” Are not those the kind of words “for remembrance?” How good he has been to me. Some day I’ll make your heart throb, as these human hearts of ours are quick to do, hearing of the great and noble of earth, telling of all he has been to me and done for me in this life of mine, that has been more sorrow and heartache, you know, than comes to many. If you could know him as I do—I think, no—I know you would appreciate my affection and reverence. His life has been a constant growth, grace overcoming nature, the lower giving way to the higher, conquest upon conquest, till I almost tremble at that nearness to perfection which means fitness for that better Elsewhere, the ultimatum of all our hopes and dreams. Here are words of a man about him: “Isn’t his the tenderest, the lovingest, the gentlest, the purest, the whitest and best soul God ever gave to man?” Did ever you know any man speak so of another? Think what mine will be when I give them leave. Do you observe that I speak to you with perfect freedom, having no fear to express my enthusiasm? It is because I know you will not transmute the pure gold of such a friendship into any drosser metal. Ah! I shall indeed be disappointed if you do not meet him. You should call on his wife. You would find her very companionable. You remember her that rainy noon call, I am sure.
Dear old M——! It is looking its best for you, is it? Its best cannot be easily surpassed. Those beautiful hills that I seem to have climbed and scrambled over almost as soon as I learned to walk! How it thrilled me to read your words about them! Ah! you cannot know how they look to my eyes, that always see them in a twofold light—that of my vanished past as well as the present! My husband and I were always sweethearts. I do not clearly remember anything farther back than my love for him. He used to bring me the wild flowers that grew all over them; and we have climbed them together many a time and gazed at their beauty together, and planned the future that lay ahead of us in that wonderful sheen and glow that is visible only to such untried and happy beings. Dear hills! beautiful hills! sacred hills! Yes, I know them in their length and breadth, from their high crests almost to their foundation stones. Did you know I was a grangeress before we met? Well, I had that kind of possession of them also. From the top of mine, I could stand by a tall, bare trunk—torso, may I say?—of a monarch in its time, and look westward over the range, including Water-works Hill, to Mr. W——’s. I and my dog did it often; sometimes in the dewy mornings; sometimes the sunny noons; sometimes in the long, tranquil slants of the setting sun. Oh! I know those hills, every foot of them, at all hours of the day, in every light, under every shadow, from their oaks and beeches down to their bramble thickets; every wild flower, every noxious weed, petrifactions, pebbles! What have they that is not a part of my very being? Do you wonder I love them?
I wish some one had had a long enough memory to show you where I was born, not because of that unimportant event, but because you can see even now what an exquisite spot it must have been. It is “the point” where Limestone Creek runs into the Ohio. I am always thankful I was born on the banks of a river and in the shadow of the “everlasting hills.” We were playfellows, as it were. The shells I have scraped together; the sand hills I have heaped up; the stolen wades in the edge of the water; the skiff rows; the fishing with pin-hooks and worm-bait! Ah! my beautiful river; that you want to spoil to me by crossing against my wish! Is it you who are so “cruel?” If you are still in M——, ask Dr. F—— to show you “the little house where I was born.” It was my grandfather’s, and my father’s is near by. Make some excuse, you two, to get a walk all about them, just to see the views. You will thank me for it, I know.
Why did you not tell me who that “exuberant set” was? Give me the names. There is no curiosity about me, you see. As for that counterpart, I don’t like to feel there is another so like me. I cannot imagine who she could have been. Next time don’t let her escape you. Clutch her with, if need be, that fierce brigand salutation adapted “Your name or your life.” There has been an annoying individual of that kind here. She even had the exasperating presumption to have not only my initials, but my name. Think of another “Mrs. Laura Collins” roving around Europe, and getting your letters and opening them. Do you think it was any satisfaction to read her indorsement, “opened but not read by Mrs. Laura Collins.” The only thing that reconciled me was that she was “Mrs. G. L. C.,” instead of “L. G. C.” I am glad she has flown “to other parts,” and hope we shall not clash again. But wasn’t it aggravating? I did not have any mail for two weeks on account of her getting and keeping it. That “Bayerische Vereinsbank,” and I let her have “a piece of our mind,” I can tell you, about it. Don’t be vicious about my “Bavarian officer.” That special one I have not seen again, though I “own up” to an eager scanning of every one I meet. To be sure, I have not the least idea I should know him, but I can’t keep from looking for him. It was such a peculiar experience, that rencontre. Think of having to lift your eyes to look at one exactly as if in answer to a call, in spite of yourself, and being overcome in the same instant by an utter helplessness to look away, while you became conscious that each was “slowing up in passing,” for you know not what might happen next. It was terrifying too, because I am sure he felt as I did, that nothing ought to happen, except that each should keep straight on. We did somehow manage to. But you see I can’t keep from telling you everything—after a few rods—I could not help it—I looked after him! not, however, without some feminine craftiness. I made believe I was attracted by a pretty shop window. Oh—h—h—h!
He, too, standing transfixed in the street, was looking back. Then was a shock! Then how each hurried away! I plunged into the shop, and quite bewildered the clerk with various wants. I simply did not know what I was asking for. And he! Ah! what has become of him? Alas! I know I shall never see him again! And also, I know equally well—and this is the saddest of it—I should not know him if I did! Could any one be more harmless?
My charming Munich is showing its kinship to the Alps. The snow is falling fine, thick and fast. I am not quite delighted, because I do not like the “beautiful snow.” I meant to have had one whole year of summer time, getting to Italy before cold weather. But Miss B——’s sickness changed my arrangements. The party I joined were to winter here for study. Now it will be January or February before we see that “sunny clime.” Still, I am told by those who have been there that February, March and April are the months for it. I want to see it only under the most favorable circumstances, so am content to wait. To-night we are to attend a concert of the choicest music, given by some of Germany’s finest musicians. We have had two seasons of opera already. I don’t know how many more we are to have. Booth is to be here by and by, and we mean to give him a welcome indeed! As for chronicling all I am doing, I can’t think of wearying you to that extent. But be sure I have no idle days. They are all as full as they can hold. They will do to talk about in that wonderful “by and by” we have laid out in the future. I am sure there are some points in your letter I have not taken up; but I dare not take them up now, lest such length of letter frighten you into breaking off the correspondence. So much valuable time as the reading exacts—how can you spare it? Besides, those points will keep!
I shall expect a full and true and most minute report of your entire visit. Don’t keep an item back. It will be ever so mean if you did not write that “next Sunday.” Won’t you be glad you did, if you did, when you read this? But indeed and indeed, I am very grateful for your letters, and am your friend to my finger tips.
L. G. C.
Munich, November 18, 1882.
MUNICH.
OUR second Sunday letter just received and read “twice over.” You can’t realize the pleasure it gives me. No woman is material for a full-blooded Bohemian. Giving myself, as I am trying to do, wholly up to this life, few would believe what a homesick heart is nearly all the time beating beneath my vivacious words—a heart sick for the home broken up forever; for the dear ones that will meet me no more on any threshold this side the grave. Think how I must feel, reading your words about my lost home—how they take me back to it. I shall never see it again. I could not bear it. Yet I am very grateful to you for thinking to tell me about it; the beautiful tree; the kindly intention to send me a leaf; the plan to see it again. May I tell you such thoughtfulness has the tenderness of a woman in it? My mother would have done the same. Thank you for it. And believe me, my heart has never before so accepted you as a friend. It is very gratifying to me to know that you are so delighted with M——. I have always thought it one of the most beautiful, picturesque bits of earth my eyes have ever seen.
Did I not write that Heidelberg, so famous in song and story and guide-books for its scenery, reminds me of it? It is fortunate you are such a walker and climber. No one who is not can know the beauty of this little planet. Be sure to go over all Mr. W——’s hill, or, rather, his chain. I think you will say it is unequaled, or almost so. If you could only have him for a companion, he would show you many points we have enjoyed so many times, morning, noon, and night. There is a moonrise view that would make you speechless with ecstasy. He found it out for the rest of us. One special hillside is full of wild flowers in the later springtime, where in the earlier spring he has a charming little sugarcamp. We have had such frolics and picnics in the sugar-making season! Be sure to find “Maple Point,” and the oak tree with the gnarled roots, where we sat to gaze and talk. You can see away across the river there, even to the home of your friends.
We had quite a snowfall on Saturday. Sunday was a day of steady cold. It and to-day were one of the innumerable church feasts—the anniversary of the founding of the order of St. Elizabeth. You know the story—her great charitableness and her husband’s opposition; how he caught her going out with a basket of food and commanded her to uncover it; and lo! when she obeyed, the contents had been changed into flowers—to meet the emergency! Well, the royal family here, the ladies only, belong to this order, and enter into the celebration with great ardor. The first day, the service is a brilliant one, the princesses in fine carriage toilettes, with their gilt and crimson prie-dieu and seats, on magnificent rugs, the priests in splendid vestments, the royal usher in blue and silver, and another gorgeous attendant in scarlet and gold. The service is for the living. The royal dames give alms. The service to-day was for the dead, with a total change of programme; the church draped in mourning, the princesses and their seats and desks, the priests, and a grand catafalque. This was lighted by innumerable tall wax candles, in tall silver candlesticks. The music was low and solemn; the people subdued and sympathetic. I was much interested in the spectacle. Besides, I had such close and satisfactory views of royalty! And, let me tell you, royalty looked at me with quite as much curiosity as I looked at them. One of the princesses is a daughter of the Emperor of Austria. You know the empress is said to be the most beautiful woman on a European throne. She was a Bavarian princess, and her portraits here justify that verdict. This daughter of hers, the wife of a Bavarian prince, cousin to the king, is a tall, elegant-looking creature, one of the most so I have ever seen, with pretty brown eyes, sunny light brown hair and fine complexion. Her mouth and nose spoil her for a beauty. She looks happy and good. The king likes her, and sometimes invites her to dine with him, without including her husband! Don’t think there is any scandal; this is simply one of his eccentricities. He may be mad, he is queer, but his reputation is as spotless as a woman’s. Poor king! You know it was a love affair that upset him. You don’t know how my sympathies are enlisted in his behalf. And he really seems just to miss being a grand being. The concert was a wild German enthusiasm. The handsome tenor—tenors are always handsome—“nicht war?”—sang twelve songs, so clamorous was the audience; and he looked like—“Goggles,” only “Goggles” is even handsomer.
Oh! I have so much to tell you; but yesterday and to-day in the cold, damp church—no
fire or heat even—have given me a dreadful cold, and I must stop and cosset myself and try to get rid of it. Thank you for your liberality about my religion. You are right in your suspicion. Even my good friend Dr. F—— calls me “heterodox.” Indeed, I believe my only religion is, that the life be right and then the soul cannot be false.
L. G. C.
Munich, November 20, 1882.
MUNICH.
OU couldn’t do it again!” I never repeat myself. It would indeed lower my “crest of haught” to find such barrenness or stinginess of entertaining powers as that shows. “Madam, there be those more gifted who make a point of repetition; it is set quite above your contempt,” will you say? Do not I know that? I can quote you the prettiest kink in rhyme “o’ that side of the question.” Listen:
“That’s your wise thrush; he sings his song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
That first, wild, passionate rapture.”
And I could show you in the daintiest script where one “not all unknown to fame,” a latter-day writer of much popularity, as I have seen stated, raves and raves again over “the sweet widows.” Such things stare me in the face and might silence me, so potent is the force of example. But was ever woman made so meek and yet so set in her own way? Even your taunt does not goad me to a second letter of “the altogethery” type. I—I think indeed I only wish to show you I know the trick of that style without the help of wine or whisky. Pitiable pair, your Byron and Sheridan! Please, sir, you insist upon my style so much, you wonder more and more where I picked it up. I am urged to ask, is it all style and no sense? I am sure I told you once I picked it up where I picked up my brains. I don’t see why you do not accept that statement. You will never get nearer the truth, will you?
“True it is, and pity ’t is ’t is true.”
I re-read the passage at once, and it reads just as I wrote you—“in,” not “within.” I reckon you’ll have to come down, “Capting Scott;” not I “cushion my claws.” But a victory is twice a victory when the victor is generous. I shall not sing peans over your “altogetheriness.” “Poetical justice” is divine when it is on the right side of the river.
How you linger in the land of enchantment! Who would not under the same witchery? “The divine weather” and Hood will help us out—
“Oh! there’s nothing in life like making love,
Save making hay in fine weather.”
It is always violent when the attack comes late in life-like whooping cough, measles, etc. But I’d by all odds rather have it then than not at all. The life that misses that delicious frenzy is a failure. Yes, I see you like the Indian summer. Just a sentence about it from your sympathetic pen, and you make picture days float before inward eyes. The languid, indolent, dreamy lapse of the autumnal sunshine; the ground beneath the walnut trees black with fallen nuts—I can hear them dropping from the branches, and the excited barking of the pretty gray squirrel; “clear, running brooks,” their babble somewhat deadened by their “freighted argosies” of dead leaves; flecks of grass here and there, green as that of early summer; misty distances, half blue, half gold; purplish shadows where the sun does not strike; flocks and herds browsing as if they too were more than half dreaming; farm-houses dotting the landscape, with their great orchards near by—oh! the heaps and heaps of “golden pippins,” “rosy-cheeked bellflowers,” “Rome beauties,” “tawny russets,” and so on; and the cider-press, with its running stream, and the big bucketfuls carried to the house; and the sheets of “piping hot” gingerbread waiting for them!
Yes, that is what you make me see. And maybe one’s sweetheart made it while he was fetching the cider! Be sure they will eat and drink together! Don’t you see their eyes foaming over with felicity? Bless me! I shouldn’t wonder if you were the very fellow. Napoleon knew all about that sort of bliss: “The happiest hours of my life were those I spent eating cherries with my little sweetheart when I was a boy.”
Shouldn’t wonder if they had a frolic shooting the seeds, should you? It used to be a farm, that place “on the Ohio side” you took in with the “Germantown view.” Perhaps that’s where you got your “Indian Summer of life” taste!
When your gaze went wandering and “lingering lovingly” in that direction, did it light on the two mounds that give their own interest to
“That vale of Aberdeen,
The vale of gold and green?”
There’s a distich of Mr. W——’s for you—I hope so. Were you alone? or accompanied by “an exuberant set,” I wonder. Surely, either way, some one must have told you of the mounds. Perhaps your “most pretentious” prattler would have told you they were antediluvian as well as anti-historic. It is plain she would have given some astonishing turn to the crank of knowledge. And had your exclamatory friend been present he might have added to the hilarity of the occasion with some such remark as—I have had so many interruptions, that flash of brilliancy has escaped me. Please put it in for me. You can do that, though you begged off on the cat. Yet you knew! You did not fool me a bit with that pretense of worrying all night. In fact, if you only remember that I am on the shady side—almost shaky—of the autumn of life, the “Indian Summer” which you enjoy, you will forbear any attempt in that direction. How gently you put it—“You’ll know about it one of these days,” just as if I didn’t already know. Some “antique gems” are afraid of their antiquity: others are worldly-wise enough to know it is that which gives them their value: while a rare few shine resplendent in that gracious acceptance of the course of nature, which takes captive “Old Father Time,” and converts the awful conqueror into the loyalest henchman. I at least feel no shame of my plus half-century of years. Though, maybe, my counter weakness is the hope of growing into one of that “rare few,” the beautiful “old ladies” I have known, and loved, and revered, and been made a little friend of when I was young! Their memory is one of my richest treasures. And now that their crown of years is hovering over my own head, may I prove worthy to wear it.
Wasn’t I right when I said, “all such gravitate to you as apples and cannon-balls to the ground?” I might have said, more simply, as “the sweet widows” gravitate to you, only I didn’t think of that in time. It was the happier “afterthought.” See how you are attracting all the most felicitous marvels of speech and gossip garnered in the memories of the experienced; now rising to the surface and exploding like bubbles in the froth of talk; now bobbing here and there like cork in the current, as light and imperishable! What store you will have for illustrations in some future “Noctes Ambrosion!” That singular death-bed speech I heard of by accident. The person was not a friend; I just knew her, though she was connected by marriage with connections of mine in the same way. It seems to me she died years ago, though I do not know. Who was “the clergyman’s” wife that told you? Why are all your friends left unnamed? Haven’t they been christened yet? It seems the strangest thing that you should have got hold of that speech! The mere fact haunts me. Was Mrs. M—— the divine musician? Front street west of Sutton runs so far—way down around the point, where you’ll lose sight of the old city, “with its dozens and dozens of agreeable people.” I can’t go prying into every house all that way to find out who she was. Please hereafter mention names.
I never read your side-splitting “French book,” “Petty Annoyances,” but I’ll get it to-day if I can. I have read some of that “bad fellow’s” books for the French some years ago. Since I have been here I have been reading Souvestre and Sainte-Beuve. I always liked the former. His was a noble soul, and I am sure he never wrote a word that he repented of on that too early death-bed. Did you ever read his “Au Coin du Feu,” a collection of stories? It shows his sweet, good, wise spirit. You must have read his “Attic Philosopher.” It had a great run, I remember—how many years ago? Sainte-Beuve I feel sure you know. I enjoy his incisiveness and his (on the whole) impartial criticisms. But I am “over head and ears” in Dutch reading: am now deep in the “Nibelungenlied.” Having seen the Nibelungenlied suite of rooms in the king’s palace, I wished to read the story in the original. I had read it in English “ever so long ago”—long enough for the mists of memory to have made a blur over some of the details. I sat up till midnight reading it—couldn’t stop, though knowing I should. It cannot need other evidence of its fascination. The frescoes at the palace no doubt added to the interest. They are hauntingly wonderful and beautiful. Even the extraordinary chanting of the story of each by the stolid guide could not spoil the impression. If ever I have a chance, I’ll favor you with a specimen of his performance. Alas! that I shall not have the cut and tinsel of his royal livery! How I wish you could see all the treasures of this “king’s palaces.” They have been gathered from a range of time reaching as far back as his ancestral line, to 1180. I doubt if any other royal line can quite equal it in many things. And the opinion is not held in the interest of my Bavarian blood either.
Now, tell me quick about “the last from B——.” Don’t keep me waiting. “Dogs and children cannot bear suspense,” and I am just like ’em. And when are you going to tell me all about the sweet detaining cause? I am a paragon of a confidante. Try me. I shan’t tell it to one, and then she can’t tell it to two. And so A. P. R. will have nothing to rue. Impromptu sparkle! Catch it and preserve it under glass.
L. G. C.
MUNICH.
UST see what your last letter has done. You wished my “counterfeit presentment.” Here it is. Will you be pleased with it, I wonder?
Had you called on Mrs. W——, as you should have done, you’d have seen a life-size crayon copy of “that same,” which Mrs. W—— had done in Washington. It is considered a superb picture and a perfect copy, which makes it a matter of inferior moment if it is no particular likeness. It was very well for Cromwell to insist, “Paint me as I am;” but for a woman, if the beauty is there, paint her as she is; if not, paint her as she should be.
The photographs I have rejected, destroyed or hid away from sight forever, because of the lack of this essential! This München artist kept coaxing: “Look brighter;” “smile;” “don’t look so sad;” “you look as if you had not a friend in the world;” till I tried my best. “There, that is good;” “that will do;” “now”—and he “turned the sun on.” All the same, I am not a picture woman, and I know it. “Why, bless you! of course you don’t make a good photograph.”
“Don’t you know why?” said a friend in Philadelphia a few years ago, ere the brown was silver and the roses had faded; “I can tell you.” I looked an eager inquiry. “When you sit for a picture your face is discharged of all expression, and the glow of the roses can’t be shown in black and white.” But wasn’t he a comforter!
Yes, the home of my childhood, but not the house in which I was born, is gone. I was born in the large old-fashioned house nearest the mill. I think it is now occupied by a Mr. L——. You must have noticed it. It is a pleasant-looking place even now; spoiled as all the Point is by those later houses. When we lived there the houses of my father and grandfather were the only ones for perhaps a quarter of a mile. There were, maybe, a dozen houses in “Newtown,” as it was called then. There was no street except on the river bank in front of our places. The front yards of both were full of grass, plants, flowers and shrubbery. My mother had so many roses, ours was called “The Place of Roses.” Each had large gardens and meadows and orchards. Some of the pear trees are living and flourishing now, over a hundred years old!
I thought seriously of buying the place of my grandfather when I sold my other one; went and looked at it several times, but I was too alone to attempt another home. Now I am sure it was best I did not. You can comprehend how it made my heart ache to hear of that fire. I have not been in the house for years; I think not since my father moved into Maysville, and in all probability would never have been again, but the pain is inevitable.
I have found and read “Les Petites Miseres de la vie Conjugale.” Psha! Don’t you believe him—that ruthless anatomist. I believe I could forgive him if he had not made these “Annoyances” so life-like and comical. I laughed even when I was “boiling over with rage” at his revelations. Wish I was not so indolent; I’d write a counter-statement if I were not! I could, and it would be the God’s truth, just as his is the devil’s truth. But for one thing I’d set you to do that “spiriting.” So unfortunately you lack experience! But why couldn’t you, any way, just as well as “Ike Marvel” wrote “Dream Life?” Did you ever read “the Pendant” to “Les Petites Miseres, Les Menages d’une femme vertuense?” I got it at the same time, and found it intensely interesting as a picture of French character and life. But I must not get on to books, or I shall write all night.
Do you know Christmas is coming? It is so near it takes my breath away to think of it. This is Friday night—and Monday! I’ll catch you anyhow, “My Christmas Gift.” Isn’t that the way you shouted it as you tiptoed round in the early dawn of Christmas morning, when you were a boy? And hadn’t you already hung up your little sock the night before, knowing you would find it stuffed full of “goodies and things?” I had a young bachelor friend in C——, “a fellow of infinite jest,” and much curious and quaint humor. He was alone at home, so I sent for him to dine with us.
“What did you do last night, John? Were you not lonesome? Why did you not come round?”
“Oh! I read awhile! Then I ate apples and nuts. It was lots of fun to roast the apples and hear them sizzle and sputter and burst, to say nothing of the eating and burnt fingers. And you never saw ‘a stoker’ (I think that was the word) beat me at keeping up a fire with my nut-shells. When I got tired, I hung up my sock and went to bed.”
Will you do the like? I hope you will have “the goodies and things,” whether you do or not. Yes, I hope you will have the very best Christmas of all your life. It is to be very “gay and festive” here, and I shall see many novel and magnificent sights. Maybe I’ll tell you about some of them.
A merry Christmas! A happy Christmas! The best Christmas of all your life!
L. G. C.
Munich, December 22, 1882.
MUNICH.
LL the world has been at its busiest getting ready for Christmas, and the amount of knitting and embroidery is overwhelming. I pity eyes. Even the blind do the most wonderful knitting. I was at the Blind Asylum not long ago. There were drawers and drawers full of tidies, caps, stockings, drawers, etc. Some of their customs are rather startling just now. Sunday is never very different from other days, except in the church services. The shops are kept open till late in the afternoon. All the world goes to church, and then to the military parade, and to hear the band play in one of the public squares, and then to shop! At home, the afternoons and evenings are spent in fancywork of whatever kind may be on hand, or in games or dancing. The last three weeks, our young ladies have embroidered indefatigably all Sunday, except when at church or shopping. I am sure I don’t like this custom; but Christmas is a grand festival in Germany, you know, and I suppose it would be heart-breaking not to make the most ample preparations. The last two days, cooking has been the duty of the frau-mother. She prepares all her cake, but sends to a regular baker to have the baking done. You ought to have seen the display when it came home! They were brought on great table-tops (I don’t know what else to call them). On one I counted thirteen immense loaves; on another as many or more. All were nicely iced, or dusted with sugar, and they looked very inviting. The baker says no one sends him such rich batter as our frau—so full of almonds, citron, etc. One of the young ladies made “a whole lot” of almond macaroons. They are delicious. What an experience this, of spending Christmas in a German household! We are having a real homelike Christmas-time. A beautiful tree—all of us were called on to help adorn it. Our presents are not wanting. I received a pocket-handerchief embroidered by the oldest daughter, an apron embroidered by the second, and a beautiful satin glove-box embroidered and made by the third, Gretchen. The mother gave me a copy of the “Niebelungenlied” in German, and a great waiter of all kinds of “goodies,” to be kept in my own apartment. But the best gift of all was the warmheartedness. Christmas night, I was at the grandest concert I ever attended: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and a new thing, “Christoforous,” a legend of the Christ-child, arranged in solos, choruses, and for the orchestra. I think it was the first time it has been given here. Jammed house; spell-bound audience; all kinds of people, and toilets to match, from the most superb and fashionable to the very plainest.
It is impossible to live in this wonder city and not find each day adding to one’s admiration for its kings. The most ardent republicanism cannot withhold this. Their munificent public spirit, grand conceptions, fine taste, good judgment, energetic execution, and practical improvements are made manifest in every direction. Bavaria, and especially this, its capital city, have been subjected to much criticism and no little ridicule on account of their so-termed pretentious development—their egotism in attempting to rival Athens and Rome in the style and magnitude of their public buildings; their “towering ambition,” as displayed in the number and size of their art works; all being regarded as quite out of proportion to its insignificant limits and lack of importance as a political factor in the nations of Europe. But whatever creates business attracts population, adds to the prosperity and increases the revenues of a country; and this is surely no contemptible desideratum in its political economy. That these results have been accomplished here is shown by the census. Bavaria became a kingdom in 1806; Munich is the capital, you know; its population in 1840 was about 40,000; in 1850, 100,000; in 1870, 170,000; the last census, it was over 230,000, and gaining all the time. In every direction, new streets are being laid out, new buildings are going up, old ones are being repaired, and the entire city gives the impression of rapid growth and increasing prosperity, all improvements being of the most substantial and imposing character.
The reigning house of Wittelsbach dates from 1180. It has ruled under the titles, duke, elector, one emperor and king; that of duke till 1623; the one emperor, Elector Charles Albert becoming Emperor Charles VIII from 1726 to 1745. Maximilian Joseph succeeded as elector in 1799, holding that title till 1805, when he was invested with that of king—“Maximilian I, King of Bavaria.” The present king is his great-grandson. In otherwise idle hours, I have had the curiosity to make a kind of catalogue of the public work of these rulers. You see, when one is driving or walking in a strange city, the questions are apt to come “in battalions.” In my first drive, the finest streets and buildings evoked some such questions and answers as these: “What street is this?” “Ludwig Strasse, planned and built by King Ludwig!” “What building is this?” “The Royal Library, also built by him.” And so on till I became quite bewildered by the many magnificent structures and institutions of his creation, or of other kings. But I have continued to question, read, and keep count, till I feel quite familiar with these kingly monuments, and have taken much interest in my “busy idleness.”
Maximilian I founded new suburbs: the general hospital which I have visited and inspected closely, and cannot praise too much, a riding school, observatory, and the celebrated bronze foundry, much patronized by the United States. His crowning honor to me is that he was the first German prince who granted a representative government to his people. Ludwig I, his son and successor, began his extraordinary career as patron and lover of art while yet crown prince. His works abound in such numbers, splendor and variety, it is difficult to realize them as the creations of one person, one lifetime. Of course you are familiar with the character of the most, if not all, but perhaps have never taken the trouble to do this little sum in addition. So I shall only mention the names: the Glyphothek Exhibition Building, Propilae, Old Pinakothek, New Pinakothek, Royal Library, University, Bronze Foundry, Stained Glass Manufactory, Konigsbau, Festaalbau, Ludwig’s Kirche, Basilica, Maria Hilf, Royal Chapel, Ludwig Strasse, Feldernhalle, Bavaria, Walhalla, Temple of Liberation—the last two near Ratisbon—Pompaianeum and Donan, Marie Canal, besides many statues and monuments, such as the obelisk on the Carolinenplatz, cast in metal from conquered cannon. His son, Maximilian II, reigned from 1848 to 1864. His attention and efforts seem to have been principally directed to the advancement of science, though he was not behind in the beautifying and practical development of the city. To him it owes the Cornmarket, the Crystal Palace, Railway Station, Old Winter Garden, Lying-in Hospital, Physiological Institute, Maximilian Strasse, Riegerung, Bavarian National Museum, Maximilian Bridge, or rather two bridges in one over the Isar, Maximilianeum, Gasteig Park, etc.; certainly sufficient evidence that his comparatively short reign of sixteen years was not frittered away. This king must have been noble, indeed, and specially qualified for a great and good ruler; such affection and reverence cling to his memory. Only last week I read a most touching reminiscence of him recalled by his physician and spiritual father, Dr. R. von Reindl, who was one of the few present in attendance when the king was on his death-bed. At five o’clock of the day he died, in the morning, the great bell of the Frauen Kirche was rung to summon all Munich to pray for the sick monarch. Hearing it in his sick-room, he asked, “Dear Reindl, what holy day is this?” “Sire,” he replied, “the Bavarian people are praying for their king.” He spoke again: “Ah, am I so near my end? Well, I am ready. I have always wished the best for my people, and never intentionally injured anyone. I ask forgiveness from all.” There is something sublime in such an exhibition of resignation and humility. He was not yet fifty-four years of age, and in the prime of his powers and usefulness. Among the many monuments of Munich, his, at the end of Maximilian Strasse, is the grandest and most imposing.
He stands in his coronation robes, holding the charter, on a pedestal of granite and syenite, around which are beautiful figures representing Peace, Religion, Justice and Strength. It bears the simple, perfect inscription, “Erected by his faithful people.”
The present king, Ludwig II, has, it is said, carried out some of the plans of his father, and is as much given to building castles as was Charlemagne. Doubtless you are familiar with his reputation for eccentricity, as it has a world-wide publicity. So extreme has been its exhibition, it has obtained for him the title of “the mad king.” It is difficult to get a fair estimate of him; but if he is mad, there is, like Hamlet’s, “method in his madness.” He held his own against the Kaiser in the adjustment of United Germany; would not be swallowed by the whale, though he was such a little fish. He works daily for hours on state matters, and signs no papers without his full personal examination. He is credited with being so shrewd that neither his ministers nor others can get the advantage. “No fooling him to the top o’ his bent.” He is kind-hearted and benevolent—gave forty thousand marks, against the Kaiser’s fifteen thousand, to the recent sufferers from the inundations; and he seems to keep watch for, and is swift to reward, any special exhibition of merit in science or art. All this on the one hand; on the other there is quite as much. He lives his own life, regardless of everything but his own will and tastes. He absents himself from his capital. He lives alone, leading a singularly isolated life—he would seem to be a misanthrope. He does the most anomalous things. Here is a specimen: one of his residences (Residenz is the name of the royal palaces here), six miles from the city, is interesting for its pictures and extensive and fine grounds. He spent some weeks there last summer, and won the idolatrous worship of the villagers and country folk around, by mingling with them and treating them with the utmost kindness. One of the picture galleries is called “the Gallery of Ancestors,” its walls being hung with portraits of five hundred of the Wittelsbach house. Well, he ordered a magnificent banquet laid in this gallery, calling it “the feast of the ancestors;” a plate for each and a tall wax candle for each; and he spent the night at table, the only living guest and banqueter!
It is to be hoped the long line of unsubstantial shadows of the house of Wittelsbach were able to appreciate the honor conferred on them. In personal appearance, he has been an extraordinarily handsome man; tall, a head and shoulders above most men; symmetrical, of superb, real kingly bearing; with a finely shaped head, rich masses of brown hair, and splendid, large, dark, expressive eyes. I have seen fine portraits of him at different periods from seventeen or eighteen years of age till now. In all, he is a strikingly handsome man. He was here the first of November, after an absence of six months; remained two weeks. I saw him twice in his carriage. He is growing exceedingly stout—too much so for my taste—but still shows what he has been. What sharp-tongued Frenchman was it who said, “un homme d’esprit meurt, mais n’engraisse pas?” How much more applicable to looks than wit!
Oh! I must not forget to tell you that this puzzling king is a poet and a man of varied and most exquisite taste. I have the promise of seeing a little volume of his poems, a very few copies of which have found their way into the hands of the officers of his household, friends of these German friends with whom I am domiciled. They are said to be full of a melancholy sweetness and pathos. His taste is shown in the furnishing as well as in the architecture of his palaces. Everything from the draperies to the tiniest bit of bric-a-brac in every apartment, in all these palaces, he has built or is building, is from his own designs. Those who have been fortunate enough to see them rave over their rare and wonderful beauty and richness. Will you begin to think, “Isn’t that all; can there be anything more?” I have not told the best! This strange, shrewd, “mad” Bavarian king has a spotless reputation. With so much that is admirable, might it not be hoped that in the course of time, the eccentricities will disappear and the “fittest survive?” The prominent feature in summing up these Bavarian kings is their unselfishness. Mere selfish gratification seems to have had no place in their lives. All their faculties, energies, time, revenues and efforts were devoted to a beneficent development and improvement of their realm. Such men should rule whether “born to the purple or not.”
So endeth my letter on the kings. Sometime I may take you with me to their palaces. We can go whenever we wish; so can the humblest subject in their kingdom. I saw on last Saturday one, thin and old, and poorly clad, standing before a picture in one of the royal corridors leading from the Cologne suite to the state apartments. She seemed to be enjoying it quite as much as I was. She had her market basket on her arm and was on her way home: it was full. All she had to do was to make choice of her church, or her king’s palace, or she may have gone to both; each was alike open to her. How much the graciousness of such custom is to be commended!
L. G. C.
Munich, January 2, 1883.
MUNICH.
ERE is your first letter in the new year. I have been giving you a rest. I did a little sum in arithmetic myself, and that addition of letters looked so formidable it drove me into sandwiching this interval. Has the experiment been satisfactory, do you ask? Only in proving to myself that I can be unselfish. I had a friend in Philadelphia once who had the scathingest tongue. He used to say: “All women like and seek more or less martyrdom.” Maybe and maybe. I know I said to myself: “He has to answer all those. Think of such a tax! Because you are away from home and yearn so for news, you have been thoughtless. He has many correspondents; he has much to do. Think of how you may be interfering! Perhaps he sits up o’ nights, or heralds the dawn to get you in. If—but never mind how. Your conscience has been stirred; you’ll be good; you are penitent; you’ll bring forth works meet for repentance; you’ll give him a rest!”
I have been good. I’ve done my penance beautifully. I know I have, for I feel like—an archangel. But—look out for the next three weeks! It will be anomalous perfection of conduct if I do not, like the most exemplary, “reformed drunkard,” give this self-imposed restraint a treat a day! Best be looking around for a bookkeeper—graduate of Bryant Commercial College—to help foot up the columns then! And what a quick transit you will make into the beauties of multiplication—how the twenties will multiply! Oh! I can tell you, if you are going “to keep count” on me, I’ll see to it you’ll have enough to do. Now, aren’t you scared? Your letter is beautiful—a prose poem! I know one when I come across it. Did you ever read “Prue and I?” One passage, that about your Spanish castle, recalls “My Chateaux.” I kept that for years where I could turn to it and read it over and over again. A little less, and your letter might have slipped alongside. If you had only not been as poetical over that Thanksgiving turkey and pudding! How could you substitute them for “nectar and ambrosia?” Yes, I may submit gracefully to the “durance vile” of your Spanish castle; may lean from its windows, meeting more than half-way the smell of the poppies—to be steeped in blissful forgetfulness by it! but not shackles of adamant; not
“The wind-blown breath of the tossing flower;”
or,
“the scent of the sweet tuberose,
The sweetest thing for scent that blows;”
or,
“Nord and cassia’s balmy smells.”
No; not anything of all the sweetest and strangest lures and fetters you know can ever get me into your Paradise, with its Thanksgiving turkey every day. Goodness! what a material creature is your being of two hundred avoirdupois! How different your Paradise is from mine, which is
“a fairy vision
Of those gay creatures of the elements
That in the colors of the rainbow live
And play i’ the plighted clouds,”
and who share the feasts of humming-birds, butterflies, and gold fishes. Ah! you have never split honeysuckle bells for those dainty drops of honey in their depths! You have never hovered over the spiced fumes of pinks! If you wish for an apotheosis, to be caught up into a more etherial sphere, get a vase of gold fishes and watch how they live on air, and learn “how much too much” the lord of creation eats. I have one—here in a vase set in a thicket of tropical plants—the prettiest creature! I call him my “Flash of Gold.” He goes for a week at a time on just “air, thin air,” filtered through the pellucid element in which he sports or that element itself. His health, activity, grace and symmetry are simply perfect. Thank you for the little gem, “Summer Love.” I have done your bidding, read it and read it again. It is worth it “for passionate remembrance’ sake.” I made acquaintance with your friend “a many years agone” through another little poem, which is still in the portfolio I left behind. It was a vade mecum, and as sacred as if it had been written for only me. I miss it now occasionally and wonder how I overlooked it. I never have seen him—the author, “who builded better than he knew”—I hope he has not killed his boys with such weight of names. To bear them, they should have stuff to send them “a pitch beyond the flight” of common men. I wish you had gone to A—— P——’s wedding; then you could have told me all about it, and, besides, given me all the old town’s gossip. When you choose, do you know, you can furnish forth “a capital dish of that cate!” And who doesn’t like it? Even Carlyle gives us leave: “Gossip springing free and cheery from the human heart is infinitely better than inane, grey haze.” I am quite satisfied about “the other side of the river” since your last. Remember, it came after my letter of the 12th was gone. Mrs. M——, my cousin A——, is indeed a divine musician and one of the most brilliantly-gifted women I have ever known. I am glad you met her, and sorry you did not meet oftener. I had a letter from Miss B—— the same day I received your last, the first for a long time. Useless to enjoin me to “write often” under such circumstances. I am not like the stars that scintillate in the vast silence and darkness; I must have response. The dear woman has, however, had more sufficient cause for the prolonged interval. Such trials of sickness, nursing, and death—one of those heart-crushing experiences that every life must know at some period or other. I am so glad I had written several days before her letter came. I can say nothing because there is no escape from her present life; the claims are those of blood, and duty, and love, and “though ‘the way leads over the burning marl,’ her feet must tread therein.” I pray, however, it may not last much longer. If she were stronger, I should feel less solicitude. Do you please write to her as often as you can. Your words will do her great good; they will give her momentary forgetfulness of that wearing round of duty—some refreshing “surcease of care.” I wish she had been well enough to stay with me; but she was not. I was terrified at times thinking “if she should die.” You know she would not have come except on my account. When she seemed breaking down, the sense of responsibility was beyond words. My disappointment in the whole plan has been one of the most bitter in my life. Had all gone as we thought it would, ours would have been as I said, “an ideal trip.”
You did not say a word about Christmas. Have you erased it from your calendar? Seems to me you might have said to me at least, “A pleasant Christmas; a good New Year.” Why didn’t you? I had such a unique and beautiful time, I want to tell you something about it. Have I mentioned that I am in a German family? The mother, three daughters and a young son of sixteen constitute the little circle. We three are the only outsiders. My friend and myself were taken possession of to help decorate the Christmas tree that reached to the ceiling. This was Sunday after-dinner work. We helped with a will. At five it was “a thing of beauty,” of dazzling beauty, if it did owe its sheen and glitter to tinsel and icicles of glass. Then we were dismissed. At seven, we sat down to our usual supper. The frau-mutter was invisible and the doors of the saal (salon) closed and locked on the inside. We were not allowed to quit the table till 8:30 o’clock, when the locked doors were thrown wide open, the portiéres thrust aside, and we were invited to enter. We rushed! Every kind of light and color made such a blaze we could not see for a moment. Five tables of presents, mine being one, and full of such pretty things. Maybe I’ll show them to you when I come home. Among them “The Niebelungenlied,” in German! After admiring everything to the full, a pretty and tempting table appeared as if by magic, and we sat down to a delicious collation. We lingered over it till eleven, then we went to church to see a specially-fine and solemn service. Never did I witness anything so strange, spectral, and weird. It lasted an hour. At the conclusion, we made the circuit of the altars to see their decorations. One had the Christmas child (a beauty of a wax doll) in a cradle of roses. Men, women, and children were dropping on their knees to it. It seemed to do them a world of good. We came home to find another table awaiting us with beer and coffee in addition to the other good things. How long we sat over that I cannot say, but Christmas wishes were exchanged long before we broke up. I don’t mind acknowledging it looks as if we “made a night of it.” The ensuing week was too full to even touch on, so I skip to New Year’s Eve, when we had another characteristic time. There was a German New Year’s Eve banquet, dishes never served at any other time. One was a salad, a kind of Salmagundi compounded of every known edible and condiment—at least I can’t think of anything that was left out! After several courses of such came all kinds of—oh! goodies and goodies—cakes, nuts, candies, fruits—oh! everything, and a great, magnificent punch-bowl was borne in in a kind of state procession. But didn’t I hope it was eggnogg! It wasn’t, though; it was a “Burgundy punch.” Well, we ate, nibbled cakes, crunched candies, cracked nuts and jokes, and drank toasts standing, and clinking glasses till we rang out the Old and in the New Year. I wasn’t a success in the drinking, “‘pon honor,” but you ought to have seen how soon I caught the trick of clinking. Our hostess taught us. You see that was poetry, rythm, the sweetest, softest music like Swiss bell ringing! The punch, I take it was an innocuous drink. Nobody’s head was lost if everybody’s tongue was found! These kindly German people, these pleasant, social customs, “this golden, fair enchanted life in the valley of Bohemia”—how I shall miss them when I go! Alas! I am beginning to flutter my wings. Paris or Vienna next en route to Italy. So sorry to leave, but I want to see them too. Now, if you were only in Italy, what a pair of tramps we would be!
I am waiting to hear what you think of “the counterfeit presentment.” It does not show the faded roses and the false teeth (I kept my mouth shut), but the frosted locks and the crow’s feet wouldn’t be left out. Remember to send it back if it does not suit.
No. 21 or 22. Pshaw! don’t let’s keep count—“The fair penitent.”
L. G. C.
MUNICH.
THINK I have written to you from this city before. Do you remember? Well, no need for alarm. I have no intention of treating you to a second dish of my raptures.
Yours of September 8th came to hand some days ago. My promptness in reply is meant to point no moral. If people prefer being laggards, I have no objection; only I am not of that ilk, and must be taken in kind. You know I can’t tell a lie. I tried my best to fix up an innocent one—the kind that cheats oneself into thinking it not a lie at all. The ingenious sophism would not work. Yet I have done it many a time. What is the matter with me? My heart is troubled. I am afraid of myself; afraid for myself; afraid I am getting too good for this world. I hope you are not praying over me as a dear little girl I knew over her baby brother, that all the world was praising. “Why do you pray so for Arthur to be one of the good little children, Sprite?” “Oh! because all the good little
children die and go to heaven; and then he’ll be out of my way.”