Saunterings in Europe

Front matter

o _

V^

0'

CHAPTER I. Crossing the Sea, i

CHAPTER H.

First Impressions, lo

CHAPTER HI.

A Sunday in London, • i?

CHAPTER IV.

From London to Paris, 26

CHAPTER V.

A Sunday in Paris, 35

CHAPTER VI.

A Half-hour in Paris with Mr. Gladstone, . . 46

CHAPTER VII.

Into Switzerland, 5'

CHAPTER Vlll.

From Vevey to Interlaken, 63

CHAPTER IX.

From Interlaken to the Rhone Glacier, ... 74

(xi)

xii Contents.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

The Rigi and Heidelberg, 98

CHAPTER XH.

A Day in Heidelberg, no

CHAPTER Xni.

A Sunday in Heidelberg, 119

CHAPTER XIV.

Worms, Frankfort, Wiesbaden, and Mayence, . 128

CHAPTER XV.

Down the Rhine, . . 137

CHAPTER XVI.

From Cologne to Eisenach, 149

CHAPTER XVII.

A Glimpse of Weimar, Leipsic, and Wittenberg, . 158

CHAPTER XVIII.

Berlin, 169

CHAPTER XIX.

A Sunday in Berlin, 180

CHAPTER XX.

Contents. xiii

CHAPTER XXI.

From Berlin to Moscow, 199

CHAPTER XXH.

Moscow, 210

CHAPTER XXni.

St. Petersburg, 219

CHAPTER XXIV.

The Stables, and Churches of St. Petersburg, . 227

CHAPTER XXV.

The Ice-hills of St. Petersburg, 234

CHAPTER XXVI.

From Berlin to Prague, 239

CHAPTER XXVII.

South German Cities, 251

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Fro.m Stuttgart to Antwerp, 260

CHAPTER XXIX.

Antwerp and Holland, 269

CHAPTER XXX.

London Again, 277

CHAPTER XXXI.

xiv Contents.

CHAPTER XXXII.

Thomas Hughes, O.C, 293

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Two English Towns, 299

CHAPTER XXXIV.

The Isle of Wight, and Brighton, .... 306

CHAPTER XXXV.

A Day in Oxford, . 312

CHAPTER XXXVI.

Edinburgh, 320

CHAPTER XXXVII.

St. Andrews, Perth, and Aberdeen, .... 327

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Through Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine, . . 333

CHAPTER XXXIX.

Some Scotch Homes, 339

CHAPTER I.

CROSSING THE SEA.

A Man Overboard — A Ground-swell — English Sailors — 77/6' Britannic — Peculiar People.

A MAN overboard ! A score of frightened passengers repeated the words which a sailor shouted on Sunday night, as we all sat on deck watching the moonlight. There was a rush to the stern. The engine was stopped ; quick orders came from the bridge. Something dropped into the water and shot up into flame — a marvelous phosphorous light. A boat was lowered, and for half an hour a hundred eyes peered over the gunwale into the glistening waves. They saw nothing but foam and the great round shoulders of dark billows. In the afternoon, cutting the water only a few hundred yards behind us, we had noticed the black fin of a shark. We could not help thinking that perhaps his greedy teeth had already closed over the body of the poor sailor ; or it might be that he never rose after the first plunge, for the boat came back without him. Very few on board had ever heard that startling cry before. It was novel and thrilling to all of us. But to one crossing the ocean for the first time, everything on shipboard is as strange and interesting as the city to a country lad. Our steamer, which looked gigantic as she lay alongside the dock in New York, but which seems small enough out here in the " Forties," is to us a storehouse of wonders. The hour for the start had come and passed by two or three minutes, when a little silver whistle sent out a narrow thread of peculiar notes, and something moved. We thought half New York was backing out into the bay. The crowd on the dock gave a shout. We rushed up and down the deck in a semi-dazed condition, trying to see everything. In a moment our bow swung around, there was a commotion in the water behind us, and our trip of 3,000 miles had begun. Every fort and island we passed was the signal for a perfect volley of questions, to be shot by those who knew nothing at those who looked as if they knew something. The officers suffered badly at first, but a few snubs did the work, and they were left unmolested. As we passed out through the Narrows, we saw the ocean lying before us, calm and smooth as a lake, but every ripple as it went by seemed to say, " Just wait till to-morrow." We had misunderstood the threat by only two days. Every one was proud Sunday and Monday. A mill-pond could not have been less terrible; but Tuesday! some will never forget that day. There had been a storm somewhere around the Banks, and about noon on Tuesday we ran into the results. The waves were not very high ; not one wore the accustomed white cap, but there was a long, heavy, and fearfully effectual ground-swell. The deck was cleared as if grape and canister had shot across it. State-rooms and berths filled rapidly, but I am proud to say no one from our city did anything worse than to look pale and unhappy. The night before I had heard a number expressing the wish that it took months to cross the Atlantic. The captain had no glass strong enough to discover those people on Tuesday night.

After we passed the Banks we ran out of fogs and ground-swells, and gradually these wishers for a long trip have come out again, though they are still very far from numerous. The wind had been almost dead ahead till last night, then it blew more favorably, and they put up the sails — one of the most interesting sights we have yet had. Not that the raising of a few hundred yards of dirty canvas is calculated to produce much excitement, but the men themselves and the way they work, the trimmings, so to speak^ of sail-hoisting, are very unique. A dozen or more of brawny Englishmen seize a rope, plant their feet firmly, lift up their heads toward the stars, and then begin, not to pull, oh no, but to sing. While all stood perfectly motionless, a boatswain with a fine bass voice sang as a recitative, with much expression,

Ranzo was no sailor — Chorus (very hearty) Ranso, Ranzo.

He shipped with Captain Taylor, Ranzo, Ranzo.

He could not do his duties, Ranzo, Ranzo.

They took him to the guard-house, Ranzo, Ranzo.

He ate up all the codfish, Ranzo, Ranzo.

They took him to the gangway, Ranzo, Ranzo.

They gave him six and tharty, Ranzo, Ranzo.

As they rolled out the first Ranzo of the chorus every muscle was stiffened, and like one man they gave a pull which made the dirty canvas shake, and at each Ranzo the sail crawled a little way further up the mast. Tliis may seem to a nervous American not a very energetic way of working, but if something like it could be introduced into all our shops and offices, many of our good doctors might find, like Othello, " their occupation gone." Such a practice, should it become general among draymen, hack drivers, and car conductors, and clerks and lawyers — yes, and even reporters and editors — would soon make any city the best known on the continent.

But the sails of a steamer, after they are up, do but little more than steady the ship and add a few knots a day to her speed. The real power that pushed us yesterday 339 miles nearer the dock at Liverpool is out of the sight of all but the curious. Two of the latter made yesterday a very thorough tour through the vitals of the Brita7inic. They saw sights there but little less hideous than Dante sings of in the " Inferno." We went first to the engine-room. It was hot, hotter than any church ever dreamed of being, even on a Sunday night in July. Then we walked through a narrow tunnel in which the screw shaft, lOO feet long, makes its ceaseless revolutions amid constant baths of oil and water. This is our reliance. Let that give way and we might not see Queenstown for a month. Down, at least fifty feet it seemed, we twisted our way from the engine-room, over a staircase not quite red-hot, yet it would have done nicely as an entrance to the torture-chamber of the Inquisition. When we were once down and looked around, we saw an iron footway leading between two rows of thirty-two red-hot furnaces. Something like a man, but more like the gnomes of which one reads in fairy stories, beckoned us to follow him. We went a little way, just a little way, and then without a halt even for breath, we turned and rushed for the deck with every desire for "a life on the ocean wave" burned out.

I am quite sure if ever I complain of the heat again, the thought of the stokers of the Britannic will send cold shudders all up and down my back. It was while working by these furnaces that the man who was lost Sunday night became so exhausted that they were obliged to carry him on deck. He was a green hand, working his way over. He sat for a moment, so the sailors say, with his head on his hands, and then, without any warning, jumped upon the railing, and plunged into the sea.

We have on board some of the most peculiar people that ever walked a deck ; at least that I ever saw walking a deck. Of course the characteristic American, male or female, is here in the usual abundance. He smokes and drinks, and talks loud, and tells how the war might have been finished in six months. She talks, oh, yes, very long and very loud, puts her hands in her ulster pockets, laughs perpetually, and says : " Oh, why didn't you tell me, so that I could laugJi too?" The Englishman is here, and if these specimens do not belie him, he can be defined very simply " as the man who bets" ; for bet he does, and will, on everything. He bets on each day's run, and then bets a sovereign that he will win. He is in the smoking-room from morning till night, betting always ; for though he sometimes, generally every evening, plays cards for money, he takes bets on every game. *' Bet you a sovereign I'll win " ;

" bet you a sovereign I'll lose." It is his second nature. He bets automatically. I have no doubt when the doctor tells him, " My friend, you have heart disease, you can not live twenty-four hours," he'll say, " Bet you a sovereign I haven't got it, and another that I'll live thirty." The other night this betting man won twenty pounds from a very innocent-looking Englishman, whose ■■^Dwife, English too, has a good deal of American common-sense. It was distressing to see the poor creature, as she sat on deck knowing that her husband was throwing away enough to have given them both many a pleasant day in England or Switzerland. If men wxre not the most selfish creatures in the world gambling would soon become one of the lost arts.

Besides Americans and English, almost every nation has sent some representative to fill out our passenger list. Among them are some Cubans who have attracted attention by their soft language and expressive gestures, and by the contrast they present to those who ordinarily come into the States from that Spanish island. They neither drink nor gamble, and when they use English they don't swear. One of them told me the other day,

. much to my surprise, that while he did not believe in the Church of Rome, he did believe in the Bible and in Jesus Christ as the Saviour. " When I was about to be married," he said, " I told the lady she might go to her

. church as much as she wished, and I would go too, but she must choose between the confessor and me." He smiled with a sense of great satisfaction, as he added, '*' She took me." If what many Englishmen say of the increase of ritualistic practices in their own Church is true, English bridegrooms may some day need to make similar conditions.

We have among the passengers a lady of whom I must say a word. From what State she comes is not known. I am sure no cities will ever wrangle over her, as the famous seven did over the Grecian bard. She was talking the other night, so they say, of Scotland. " Oh, yes," she said, " I went to a pretty place there, an author's house." Some one suggested " Abbotsford." " I think that was it," she said. '' Who lived there ? " " Why, Sir Walter Scott." '' Oh, yes, I think that sounds like the name." She was asked : '^ Have you ever read the ' Lady of the Lake ' ? " '' No, I don't think I have, but I have heard of it ; it's a book just out, isn't it?" After seeing two or three such Americans, what must foreigners think of our public schools ?

But an item of encouragement. By common consent, the most disagreeable man on board is a young fellow about twenty-five. He is coarse, profane, drunken, and attempts to be witty ; is fond of childish practical jokes, over which he laughs immoderately. I felt sure he was an American, but to-day, much to my joy, I heard he was born and brought up in Yorkshire.

A New York lawyer said to me yesterday, as we leaned over the railing and looked down at the sea rushing past us, ''There is nothing which to my mind shows so perfectly the power of the human intellect as a steamship like this." For a moment I thought the remark an exaggeration, but when I tried to mention other more wonderful inventions, I concluded he was right. A little village is floating here on the Atlantic, and being

8 Saunterings in EuROrE.

pushed steadily every day against wind and current and storm, three-fourths the distance between New York and Buffalo. I should have said a little city, for we have almost every luxury known to the dwellers in our modern towns. We sit down to a table — which we do as regularly as the striking of the ship's bells, and about four times a day — that compares favorably with that of any hotel in New York. Yet, with all this, it is a very different thing to think and talk about the ocean when you are on land, and to feel something of its power, even in a great steamship.

These few days since we left the bay, have brought us into very close sympathy with Christopher Colombo. We had studied about him in ink-stained geographies, but to be on the very ocean he crossed, to put your foot down just as he probably did, to find it on another plank from the one you were looking at, to see nothing around you but waves and clouds and Mother Cary's chickens ; ah ! this gives me a feeling of fellowship with the good old Spanish sailor. But to think of what we have that he had not ! In fact, we know of nothing that he did have, except a mutinous crew and one egg, and that must have been anything but a treasure, for he had no ice-box like that in which the Britannic keeps her stores of luxuries, and from which her stewards bring you milk on the tenth day as fresh as that which you had on your own table this morning. ''The sad, sad sea," '' the melancholy sea," so men have called it ; but what is there on land or water that does not receive its lights or shadows from the brightness or gloom which rests upon the heart of him who looks upon it 1 The waves will seem to laugh in scorn or gladness, as the ear and heart interpret the sounds. Nature is never sad to the joyous, never glad to the heavy-hearted. As I have stood, not on, but under, " the bridge at midnight," "one thought has come to me o'er and o'er" — the immensity of the ocean, its symbolization of eternity. To go on this way, not for a week, but forever — that is eternity. To be surrounded by all that is best ; to feel no pain, or sickness ; no regret, no remorse ; to go on forever, always satisfied — that is heaven.

Chapter II. First Impressions

An English N'ezvspapcr — Enterhtg London — London ' ' Lions "— The Tower— St. Paul 's— The Abbey.

ON Sunday night, at eleven o'clock, eight days from the time we left Sandy Hook, we saw two lights on the Irish coast. It was the first evidence we had had for a week that the world, the solid part of it, was still swinging on in the old way. With the full moon streaming down upon the ocean, the ship, and the land, at two o'clock Monday morning we were exchanging salutes of many-colored rockets, with the Government houses at Fastnet, and we knew that friends in the States would read, among the telegrams in that morning's paper — for our time was six hours ahead of yours — of the arrival of the Britannic. Great white gulls came sweeping out from the channel, as if to bring us a welcome. They followed us within a hundred feet of the ship's stern, in easy, graceful flight, nearly the whole day. Little huts in the midst of green fields with hawthorn hedges ; now and then a hoary castle or broken tower; here and there a quaint vilLige — such are the outlines of the picture

which old Ireland spread before our eager eyes this (lo)

First Impressions. ii

beautiful morning. A tug came out about eight o'clock from Queenstown, to take off some of our passengers ; and bringing also, a fact in which we were more interested, the London papers. It was a pleasant thing to hold a newspaper in the hand once more ; but it was an unpleasant thing to find only the briefest telegrams from America, and those statistics of the spread of the yellow fever in the South. The London press pays but little attention to local news, and even the foreign telegraphic columns are much less satisfactory than those of the New York dailies. Englishmen rely largely for their news on long letters from everywhere, written by everybody."^ They cling, with a tremendous grip, to all the old ways. There are not more than a half dozen hotels in London where tallow candles are not still in constant use. From Liverpool to London by either of the two railway lines, is a novel and most interesting ride for an American who has never before been out of his own country. The cars are different from anything he has ever seen ; so are the engines, or rather they are very like the pictures which hang on so many American walls of that first and original locomotive which startled our ancestors to the verge of fright, as it rushed madly over the rails at the rate of ten miles an hour. Not that the modern English engines are lacking in speed ; they make as good, or better time perhaps, than our own, but there is no covering for engineer and fireman : they must stand unprotected and take the weather just as it comes, and in England it comes in as large quantities, and in as

* This is a " first impression," later ones have changed my opinion.

many varieties, as in any place I know of. If English cars and English locomotives are surpassed by American, the fields that lie alongside the track need have no such fear. Americans know that grass is green, and that grain, ripe for the harvest, is yellow, but English grass is greenness, and English grain is yellowness. We were too late to see the hawthorn hedges in bloom — England owes not a little of her picturesqueness to these hedges — but we were just in time to see the great hundred-acre fields filled with harvesters. More than one hundred, sometimes more than two hundred men, women, and children were busy raking and binding and gleaning on these immense estates. Every autumn a grand harvest festival is held in St. Paul's Cathedral, and the day of its celebration, I am told, is not very different from our own Thanksgiving. Coming by the railroad you steal so quietly on the " metropolis of the world " that you are in it before you know it. A feeling of surprise, and a feeling, I know not what to call an emotion so indescribable, came to us as the guard unlocked the door and shouted ''London!" London! the city ot the Romans and Normans ; London, the old-time home of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton and Johnson ; the home of Carlyle. London, over whose streets have ridden the mightiest kings and captains of the world. In whose churches have gathered the very men and women whose names are scattered all over the pages of our histories. To look upon London for the first time is to form for yourself an ever memorable epoch.

We found hotel life just about what we had been told it was. The waiters are very solemn, and funereal, and

First Impressions. 13

slow. English minutes, like English shillings, are twice the size of ours. They know nothing in English hotels of '' lumping things " as we do in America. An ordinary bill for a week would have in it almost as many headings and items as the catalogue of a society of natural science. The memory of the hotel clerk is prodigious. He never forgets, apparently, to charge anything. If you have had ice in your water you will find it out when you read your bill. English editors and reporters are not for a moment to be compared in their attention to details with EngHsh landlords. We stopped in London only five days, but that is long enough to see an immense amount. For, though London is a city of great distances, yet the most interesting part of it, the part every square yard of which is packed with historical associations, lies between Westminster Abbey and the Tower, a distance not as great as from the Battery to Forty-second Street. However short the time may be, every one who goes to London visits the Tower. They are wise. Many of them might say, without exaggeration, that the two hours thus spent were among the most interesting of their lives. You may look on the very armor worn by famous crusaders. You handle— if the " beef-eater " does not see you — the very sword and lance which were once held in that iron glove. Out from the barred openings of helmets the Hght from the eyes of living knights seems to flash upon you. The age of chivalry, the tales of troubadours and wandering story-tellers become real. You sit in the chapel of St. John, where William the Conqueror and his Norman soldiers used to gather for worship. You stand in the rooms where Raleigh and Lady Jane Grey were imprisoned. You look up at the carved roof of the banqueting hall, where Henry VIII. gave great feasts to his wives ; you are within a few steps of the place where he beheaded them. You gaze one moment through thick glass, upon $20,000,000 worth of crown jewels, and the next, you look upon the block where heads v/orthy to wear a crown were laid, and where blood of priceless preciousness was shed. The guide — called by the name which we usually apply to all Englishmen, " beef-eater" — tries to tell you everything, answers questions with great patience, and yet has time, as our party found out, to make up his mind as to what you are and where you came from.

Americans live in the delusion that they can talk English, and that by the aid of a high hat and a silk ^ umbrella, they can pass unnoticed in any crowd. One or two hours in London are sufficient to convince any reasonable-minded American that he is mistaken. Our way of talking is so entirely different from the English, that high hats and umbrellas are found to be of no use whatever in concealing our identity. The "beef-eater" knew us for Americans, but for that matter so did every C one else. If in America there is an American who is ashamed of being known as such, there is but one thing for him to do — stay home.

From the Tower we went out through the gate, under whose arches so many coronation processions have passed to the Abbey. What sights there have been along that triumphal route which winds through Cheapside and the Strand ! What hopes have throbbed in royal hearts as the cortege swept on toward the Abbey and the

First Impressions. 15

crown. What fears have filled the hearts of the condemned as they have been hurried through these streets toward the Tower, and the block. We went from the Tower toward the Abbey. On the way we passed our first cathedral, grand old St. Paul's. It loomed up through the smoke, beautiful, majestic, sublime. The noblest works of art approach the works of nature. They produce an impression not dissimilar. The moment when one first looks upon a great cathedral is not unlike the moment when one first looks upon a great mountain or cataract. The antiquarians of London have been much excited by the discovery which some workmen made in digging around St. Paul's of old pillars and arches, supposed to be the ruins of a cathedral built by the Normans nearly on the same ground as the present one. Almost everywhere in England you stumble against buildings or ruins of buildings which saw their days of glory long before Columbus saw America.

Westminster Abbey is a more familiar name to most of us than St. Paul's. It has associations which are lacking to the great temple. The gray old walls of the Abbey sweep your thoughts backward more than a thousand years. Four centuries before the Norman ships crossed the channel the Saxon Sebert had laid the foundations of the Abbey. Nine hundred years ago King Edgar replaced the sacred stones which the lawless Danish hands had thrown down and scattered. You enter that richly carved oaken door and the phantom-like forms which have so often started up from the pages of English literature, stand before you hewn in stone. Shakespeare and Milton are there. Scott and Campbell and Southey and Wordsworth are remembered in costly monument or eulogic epitaph. There, side by side, lie the two, who as boys came up to London 150 years ago, from the same town. Jealous as they sometimes were of each other's success, Johnson and Garrick loved each other, and not unfittingly they sleep together in this honored place. Here are the two Pitts, William, Earl of Chatham, and his not less famous son. Here are the two Macaulays, Zachary, the philanthropist, and the more celebrated son whose gifts as essayist, statesman, and historian have made his name more lasting than this deeply-hewn inscription on the marble.

Hours fly by like moments as you walk under that arched roof, and recall the stories of the lives of the mighty dead who there lie buried. You forget the time in which you live, so vivid are the thoughts of the centuries when these men, whose ashes are beneath your feet, ruled as kings in State or Church, in literature 01 art.

Chapter III. A Sunday In London

The Tej?iple CJnirch — A Service in St. PaitVs—A Sermon in the Abbey — Canon Farrar.

DR. JOHNSON said to Boswell more than a century ago, '' The full tide of life in London flows by Charing Cross." A hundred years have made great changes in the mighty city, but Johnson's words are as true to-day as when they were spoken. We were wakened on our first Sunday morning in the English metropolis by the chimes of St. Martin's church at Charing Cross, once called appropriately '' St. Martin's in the Fields." The old name still remains, but " The Field " is covered with massive granite buildings.

Only a few pleasure-seekers were in the Strand as we walked toward the great Cathedral of St. Paul's. There were many London preachers whom I was anxious to hear, but the times were unpropitious. Newman Hall and Joseph Parker were out of the city, and Mr. Spurgeon was ill. With but very few exceptions London shops are closed on Sunday, and the business streets deserted. I have never seen a city where the change ^ from Saturday to Sunday was so marked.

As we passed on toward the Cathedral, we felt that every step of the way was historic ground, consecrated by the hves of Milton and Goldsmith and Johnson and Reynolds. Many a time had they trodden this same street ; looked upon these same warehouses and shops and churches. Here just before us is where the famous Temple Bar stood so long. English kings and queens have dismounted before it, to ask of the Lord Mayor a formal permission to enter " the city." Upon its graceful arch the heads of traitors and enemies to the crown were uplifted with huge pikes, as a warning to any evildoers who might pass that way in the surging crowds. But the increase of traffic was not to be impeded by even so historic a gate as this. Only a few signs now remain to mark the place where it once stood. There, to the right, a few yards away, is the old Temple Church built by a patriarch of Jerusalem seven hundred years ago. Over these stones, on high-mettled steeds, with armor and battle-axe, swept in those olden days scores of Knights Templar to the doors of this church which had been built for them. It must have been a wondrous sight, when these mailed warriors were kneeling in prayer within those thick walls, while before the windows stood richly-dressed pages, holding the bridles and shields of their masters, and through the open doors came the sounds of jingling armor, the champing of bits, and the dashing of horses' hoofs on the pavement. In the church the memory of some of these Templars has been preserved in effigies of bronze. Outside, near one of the windows, is a simple inscription to the memory of one whose life, like that of so many men of genius, was unhappy, but whose brain and heart were large, the Immortal author of the " Vicar of Wakefield," Oliver Goldsmith.