On the Rhine, and other sketches of European travel

Front matter

^A V^

ON THE RH I NE,

AND OTHER SKETCHES OF

Part I. «x

' t*t\c merchants' exchange at CONSTANCE, WHERE THE COUNCIL MET.

LIKE a certain old, eternally-young, and dearly-monotonous subject, the Rhine has been an inexhaustible theme for song, legend and romance. Old as is its place in literature, familiar as are its shores not only to the traveler in Europe, but to the least well-read of the stay-at-homes, there is always something new to be said about it, or at least it can be viewed in a new aspect. Its early

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stages are certainly less well known than its middle portion — the Rhine of poetry and legend — but they are equally beautiful, and especially characterized by natural scenery of the most picturesque kind. Historical memories are not lacking either, even within fifty miles of its rise in the glaciers of the Alps, while its early beauty as a mountain - torrent, dashing over the rocks of the Via Mala, has for some a greater charm than even its broad lake-like waters fringed with cathedrals, abbeys, and stately guildhalls, or its windings among "castled crags."

One branch of the river bursts from under a tumbled mass of ice and rock — one of those marvelous "seas" of ice which are the chief peculiarity of the Alps, and which sometimes, as in the case of the glacier of the Rheinwald, present among other features that of an immense frozen waterfall. Passing through the village of Hinterrhein, whose inhabitants are the descendants of a colony planted there by Barbarossa to guard the old military road over the Alps, and which boasts of a Roman temple and other less well-defined remains of human dwellings of the same period, the Rhine enters the grand gorge of the Via Mala, between Andeer and Rongella, on the road below the Splugen Pass and village. Every such pass has its Devil's Bridge or its "Hell" or its " Bottomless Pit," and tradition tells of demons who pelted each other with the riven masses of rock, or giants who in malice split the rocks and dug the chasms across which men dared no longer pass. But it needs no such figures of speech to make a mountain-gorge one of the sublimest scenes in Nature, one which thrills the beholder with simple admiration and delight. The Via Mala is one of the most splendid of these scenes. A sheer descent of two thousand feet of rock, with clinging shrubs, and at the bottom the trunks of pines and firs that have lost their hold and grown into mossy columns stretched across the stream and often broken by its force ; a winding, dizzy road leading over singlearched bridges and half viaducts built into the black rock ; a foam-white stream below ; a succession of miniature waterfalls, rapids and whirlpools ; spray and rainbow poised over the stream at intervals, and here and there the narrowing rocks bending their ledges together and wellnigh shutting out the sun ; the " Lost Hole," where tall firs, with their roots seemingly in space, stand up like a forest of lances, and the very formation of the rocks reminds one of gigantic needles closely-wedged together, — such are the features of the gorge through which the Rhine here forces its way.

Then comes Zillis, a regular Swiss village, at the entrance of the valley of Thusis, which is a broad green meadow dotted with chalets, a picturesque, domestic, rural landscape, a bit of time set in the frame of eternity, and holding in its village chronicles memories to which distance lends enchantment, but which, in view of the scenes we have just described, seem wonderfully bare of dignity. Here is the castle of Ortenstein, the warrior-abbey of Katsis, the Roman Realta, the castle of Rhaziinz, the bridge of Juvalta, and many castles on the heights overlooking the valley, which at the time of the "Black League" of the nobles against the " Gray Confederation " of the citizens (which gave its name to this canton, the Grisons) were so many rallying - points and dens of murder. There is romance in the legends of these castles, but one seldom stops to think of the robbery and lawlessness hidden by this romance. For these knights of the strong hand were no "Arthur's knights," defenders of the weak, champions of the widow and the orphan, gentle, brave and generous, but mostly oppressors, Bedo»ins of the Middle Ages, ready to pounce on the merchandise of traveling and unarmed burghers and defy the weak laws of an empire which could not afford to do without their support, and consequently winked at their offences.

A legend of this part of the Rhine, less well known than those of the Loreley, Drachenfels or Bishop Hatto's Tower, belongs to Rhaziinz. After the feud had lasted long years between the nobles and the citizens, the young lord of this castle was captured in battle by the Gray Confederates, and the people's tribunal

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condemned him to death. The executioner stood ready, when an old retainer of the prisoner's family asked to be heard, and reminded the people that although the youth's hot blood had betrayed him into many a fray, yet some of his forefathers had been mild and genial men,

JUVALTA,

not unwilling to drink a friendly glass with their humbler neighbors. For old associations' sake let this custom be renewed at least once before the execution of this last of the race of Rhaziinz : it was the first and last favor the youth, in his dying moments, requested of them.

Stone drinking-vessels were brought : a regular carousal followed, and good-humor and good fellowship began to soften the feelings of the aggrieved citizens. Then the faithful old servant began to speak again, and said it would be a pity to kill the young man, a good swordsman too, who, if they would spare his life, would join the Gray Confederacy and fight for instead of against the people — be their champion, in a word, in all their quarrels, instead of their foe and their oppressor.

He prevailed, and the youth, it is said, religiously kept the promise made for him.

Passing the Toma Lake, a small mountain - tarn, whence rises one of the feeders of the Vorder- Rhein, and Dissentis, whose churches are crowned with Greek-looking cupolas set upon high square towers, and whose history goes back to the ravages of Attila's barbarian hordes and the establishment of the Benedictine monastery that grew and flourished for upward of a thousand years, and was at last destroyed by fire by the soldiers of the first French republic, we follow the course of the increasing river to where the smaller and shorter Middle Rhine falls into the main branch at Reichenau. The Vorder-Rhein has almost as sublime a cradle as the other branch. Colossal rocks and a yet deeper silence and solitude hem it in, for no road follows or bridges it, and it comes rolling through the wildest canton of Switzerland, where eagles still nest undisturbed and bears still abound, and where the eternal snows and glaciers of Erispalt, Badus and Furka are still unseen save by native hunt-

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CITY GATE AT ILANZ.

ers and herdsmen whose homes are far away. Here is the great Alpine watershed, dividing the basin of the North Sea from that of the Mediterranean. But at Reichenau the Rhine absorbs the individuahty of each of these mountaintorrents, and here we meet with memories of the mediaeval and the modern world curiously mingled in the history of the castle, which has been an episcopal fortress of the bishops of Chur, its founders, a lay domain when the lords of Planta owned it, and an academy or high school when Monsieur Chabaud, the director, gave fourteen hundred francs a year salary to a young teacher of history, geography, mathematics and French who was afterward the citizen-king, Louis Philippe. Here is Martinsloch, where Suwarrow shamed his mutinous Cossacks who refused to attempt the passage of the Alps, by ordering a grave to be dug for him, throwing off his clothes and calling to his men to cast him in and cover him, "since you are no longer my children and I no longer your father."

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TAMINA. SPRING.

Ilanz is the first town on the Rhine, and has all the picturesqueness one could desire in the way of quaint architecture, bulbous cupolas, steep roofs with windows like pigeon-holes, covered gateways, and a queer mixture of wood and stone which gives a wonderfully old look to every house.

Chur — or Coire, as it is more commonly called out of Germany and Switzerland — is of much the same character, an old episcopal stronghold, for its bishops were temporal lords of high renown and still higher power. Then the Rhine winds on to another place, whose present aspect, that of a fashionable watering-place, hardly brings its history as a mediaeval

I spa to the mind. The healing springs at Ragatz were discovered by a hunter of the thirteenth century on the land belonging to the great and wealthy Benedictine abbey. For centuries the spring, whose waters come from Pfaffers and Tamina, and are brought half a mile to Ragatz through iron pipes, was surrounded by

I mean little huts, the only homes of the local health-seekers, except of such — and they were the majority — as were the guests of the abbey ; but when crowds increased and times changed, the abbey built a large

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II guest-house at the springs. Now the place has passed into the hands of a brotherhood no less well known the world over, and who certainly, however well they serve us, give no room for romance in their dealings with us. The promenade and hotels of the place rival Baden and Homburg, but the old spring of Tamina, in its wild beauty, still remains the same as when the mediaeval sportsman stumbled upon it, no doubt full of awe and trembling at the dark, damp walls of rock around him, where visitors now admire and sketch on the guarded path. The only other interest of Ragatz, except its scenery, is Schelling's grave and monument put up by Maximilian II. of Bavaria, his scholar and friend.

Everywhere, as the Rhine flows on, the tourist notices its wonderful coloring, a light, clear green, which characterizes it at least as far as the Lake of Constance, iij whose neighborhood the vines first begin to bloom and become an important item in the prosperity of the country. Here too the river first becomes navigable, and the heavy square punt that ferries you over at Riithi, and the pictures of the old market-ships that preceded the first American steamer of 1824, and carried the vine produce to other and dryer places (for in Constance the land lay so low that cellars could not be kept dry, and the surplus of the vintage was at once exchanged for corn and fruit, etc.), are the first signs of that stirring commercial life which is henceforth inseparably connected with the great German stream.

Five different governments crowd around and claim each a portion of the shores of the "great lake " of Germany. Yet it is not much more than forty miles long, with a breadth at its widest part of nine. In old Roman times its shores were far more beautiful and worthy of admiration than now. Then it was fringed by forests of birch, fir and oak, and its islands were covered with dense groves. The chief beauty of lowland is in its forests : when they are gone the bareness of the landscape is complete. Rocky mountains can afford to be treeless, but to an artist's eye there is little beauty in treeless plains, and all the boasting of German enthusiasts about this lake cannot hide the fact that its shores are singularly low and bare. But if the landscape is tame, the historical recollections of the Lake of Constance are rich and interesting. The oldest town on its shores is Bregenz, the Brigantium mentioned by Pliny and Strabo, and Christianized by Saint Gall and Saint Columbanus, the Irish missionaries whose wanderings over Europe produced so many world-famous monasteries. The great abbey of St. Gall was not far from the lake, and Columbanus established his last monastery at Bobbio in Italy. Lindau ("the field of linden-trees"), almost as old a city as Bregenz, built on an island and connected with the mainland by a long bridge over which the railway runs, was founded by the Germans, and some of the earliest Christian converts built its churches and convents, while later on its commerce grew to be one of the most important in Germany,

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and raised the status of the city to the level of the members of the Hanseatic

League ; but all this was lost in the Thirty Years' War, when it was devastated and partly burnt : now it ranks as a third-rate Bavarian town. But it is impossible to string together all the remembrances that distinguish these laketowns, many of them now refuges for Englishmen in narrow circumstances, their commerce dwindled, their museums the thing best worth seeing in them. We pass Arbon ; Friedrichshafen, the summer palace of the kings of Wiirtemberg, a sturdy, warring city in the Carlovingian times ; Meersburg, now a fishing-centre, once a stronghold of its martial bishops, and famous in later times as the residence of the baron of Lassberg, a modern savant and virtuoso of whom Germany is justly proud; and lastly Constance, the city of the Roman emperor Constantius, still beautiful and stately in its buildings.

Charlemagne tarried here on his way to Rome on the occasion of his coronation, and many German kings spent Christmas or Easter within its walls.

Here, in the large but low hall of the Kaufhaus, or Merchants' Exchange, the council of 1414 met, and never did the Greek councils of the primitive Church present more varied and turbulent scenes. The walls are paneled and frescoed by Philip Schworen, an artist of Munich, and Frederick Pecht, a native of Constance, with representations of these scenes, but it was rather a rough place in those days, and

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tapestries and dais, weapons and costly hangings, concealed the unfinished state of walls, floor and roof. The old city has other buildings as intimately connected with the council as this hall — the convents of the Dominican and Franciscan friars, each successively the prison of John Huss, the first containing a dungeon below the water-level and foul in the extreme, the second a better and airier cell for prison-

HANS HOLBEIN.

ers, as well as a great hall in which several sessions of the council took place, and where Huss was examined and condemned ; the house where Huss first lodged with a good and obscure widow ; and three miles from the town the castle of Gottlieben, also a prison of the Reformer, and for a short time of the deposed pope, John XXIII. Little more than a century later the Reformation had grown powerful in Constance, and Charles V. besieged and, notwithstanding the desperate resistance of the burghers, took the town, but not before a rnost murderous defence had been made on the Rhine bridge, the picture of which, after the unsuccessful fight, reminds one of the heroic defence of the dyke at Antwerp against the Spaniards, and even of that other memorable event in Spanish history, the Noche Triste of Mexico.

As we leave the lake two islands come in sight, Mainau and Reichenau, the latter having a legend attached to it connected with the foundation of its abbey which is the counterpart of that of Saint

Patrick and the snakes and vermin of Ireland. The "water was darkened by the multitude of serpents swimming to the mainland, and for the space of three days this exodus continued," whereupon Saint Firmin founded the abbey, which grew to such wealth and power, both as a religious house, a school for the nobility and a possessor of broad feudal domains, that the abbots used to boast in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that they could sleep on their own land all the way to Rome. The Rhine issues from the lake at Stein, a picturesque little town of Merovingian times, which has seen as many " tempests in a tea-cup " as any of its grander and more progressive rivals ; and not far off is the castle of Hohentwiel, built into a towering rock, once the home of the beautiful and learned Hedwige, duchess of Swabia. We need not dwell on Schaff hausen, one of the bestknown points of the river, an ancient town overgrown with modern excrescences in the way of fashionable hotels and Parisian dwellings. One of the features of

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these river -towns, when they are not "improved," is the crowding of houses and garden-walls sheer into the stream, leaving in many places no pathway on the banks, which are generally reached by steep, mossy steps leading from old streets or through private yards.

We are nearing the four " forest towns " of the Habsburgs, at the first of which, Waldshut — where stood in Roman times a single fort to command the wilderness, much as the pioneers' outposts used to stand on the edge of the Western forests peopled with hostile Indians — the Aar, the Rhine's first tributary of any consequence, joins the great stream. Lauffenburg, Sackingen and Rheinfelden, the three other forest towns, each deserve a page of description, both for their scenery and their history, their past architectural beauties, and their present sleepy, museum-like existence ; but rather than do them injustice we will pass on to Bale — or Basel, as it should be written, for the French pronunciation robs the name of its Greek and royal etymology from Basileia. Basel was never lagging in the race of intellectual progress : her burghers were proud and independent, not to say violent ; her university was eager for novelties ; her merchants spent their wealth in helping and furthering art and literature. The Rathhaus or guildhall is a gauge of the extent of the burgher supremacy : all over Germany and the Low Countries these civic buildings rival the churches in beauty and take the place of the private palaces that are so specially the boast of Italian cities. Among the great men of Basel are Holbein and the scarcely less worthy, though less well-known artist, Matthew Merian, the engraver. Of the former's designs many monuments remain, though injured by the weather — a fountain with a fresco of the dance of the peasants, and some houses with mural decorations ascribed to him. Basel has its own modern excitements — races and balls and banquets — although the private life of its citizens is characterized by great simplicity. The profession of teaching is in such repute there that many rich men devote themselves to it, and among the millionaires of the old city may be found not a ^&\n schoolmasters. As in Geneva, learning and a useful life are the only things on which the old families pride themselves.

From Basel, whose every reminiscence is German, and whose Swiss nationality dates only from the epoch of the Reformation, the Rhine flows through the "storied" Black Forest, peopled with nixies and gnomes, the abode of the spectre woodcutter, who had sold all power of feeling human joys for the sake of gold, and who spent every night cutting down with incredible swiftness and ease the largest fir trees, that snapped like reeds under his axe. Old Breisach, with its cathedral of St. Stephen, and its toppling, huddled houses clustering around the church, is the most interesting town before we reach Freiburg. The tendency of mediaeval towns to crowd and heighten their houses contrasts sharply with the tendency of our modern ones to spread and broaden theirs. Defence and safety were the keynote of the old architecture, while display is that of ours, but with it has come monotony, a thing unknown to the builders of the Middle Ages. Houses of each century, or each period of art, have, it is true, a family likeness, but, like the forms of Venetian glass, a pair or a set have minute differences of ornamentation which redeem the objects from any sameness. So it was with all mediaeval art, including that of building the commonest dwellinghouses : there was congruity, but never slavish uniformity.

The first sight of Freiburg — we include it among Rhenish towns, though it is not on the Rhine — presents a very German picture. Old dormer windows pierce the high-pitched roofs ; balconies and garden trellises hang in mid-air where you least expect them ; the traditionary storks, the beloved of Hans Andersen, are realities even here on the tall city chimneys ; and no matter where you look, your eye cannot help falling on the marvelously high and attenuated spire of one of the finest cathedrals in the world. Artistically speaking, this church has the unique interest of being the only completed work of ecclesiastical architecture that Ger-

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INTKKTOR OF FREIBURG CATHKORAI..

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many possesses. The height of the spire and its position immediately above the great gateway produce here the same illusion and disappointment as to the size of the church which is proverbial as regards St. Peter's at Rome. This impression soon disappears, and every step reveals new beauties. Each cluster of simple tall gray columns, supporting massive fourteenth-century arches, is adorned with one carved niche and its delicate little spire sheltering the stone statue of an apostle or evangelist ; the chancel is filled with the canons' stalls, each a masterpiece of wood-carving ; and at the eastern end, beneath the three higher windows and separated from the wall, stands the mediaeval high altar with its three carved spires surmounting the reredos, and just below this a " triptych " of enormous size, a pictured altar-piece with folding-doors, the latter being painted both inside and out with scriptural subjects as quaintly interpreted by the devout painters of the early German school. But not only the nave, with its carved pulpit and canopy, its old dark benches, not renewed since the seventeenth century at least, and its crowds of worshipers, is interesting to the sight-seer, but each side chapel, rich with what in our times would be thought ample decoration for a large church, is enough to take up one's day. In these and in the aisles lie buried the patrons, founders, defenders and endowers of the cathedral, while in the chapel of the university are laid the masters and doctors whose fame reached over the learned and civilized world of the Middle Ages, and whose labors Holbein no doubt flatteringly hinted at when he chose for the subject of his great altarpiece in this chapel the visit of the Wise Men of the East to the infant Saviour.

In each of these chapels are wood-carvings of great beauty and variety, and stained glass w^indows whose colors are as vivid as they were four hundred years ago ; and in one is still preserved a heavy Byzantine cross of chased silver, the gift (or trophy) of a crusading knight, for Freiburg too "took the cross " under the enthusiastic direction of that great man, Bernard of Clairvaux. It is not often that such a building as this cathedral has such a worthy neighbor and companion as the beautiful exchange, or Kaufhaus, that stands opposite on the "platz." This, though of later date and less pure architecture, is one of the most beautiful buildings of its kind in Germany. The lower part reminds one of the doges' palace at Venice — a succession of four round arches on plain, strong, Saxon-looking pillars ; at each corner an oriel window with three equal sides and a little steep-pointed roof of its own shooting up to the height of the main roof. The great hall on the same level has a plain balcony the whole length of the building, and five immense windows of rather nondescript form and muUioned like Elizabethan windows, between each of which is a statue under a carved canopy ; and these are what give the characteristic touch to the house. They represent the emperor Maximilian, lovingly called " the last knight," Charles v., " on whose dominions the sun never set," Philip I. and King Ferdinand. The color of the material of which this exchange is built (red sandstone) increases the effect of this beautiful relic of the Middle Ages. But, though we should be glad to linger here and admire it at our leisure, there are other houses in the city that claim our attention as showing, in their less elaborate but perfectly tasteful decoration, the artistic instincts of those burghers of old. And the fountains too ! Not the bald, allegorical, monotonous and rarely-found (and when found only useless and ornamental) fountains of our new cities, but the lavishly-carved, artistic creations of an art-imbued age — the water free to all and flowing for use as well as for show, and the statues of civic patron-saints and occasionally men of local renown ; as, for instance, the single statue of a meditative monk, his left hand supporting his chin, and a closed book in his right hand, Berthold Schwarz, the inventor of gunpowder.

From this inland side-trip we go back to the now broadening river, the part of the Rhine where the "watch" has been so often kept as well as sung — that part, too, where Roman forts were thickly strewn, and where the Merovingian and

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THE " DREI EXEN.'

Carlovingian emperors fought and disputed about the partition of their inheritances. But everywhere in this land of

Upper Alsace 1870 has effaced older memories, and modern ruins have been added to the older and more romantic i8 ones. No foreigner can impartially decide on the great question of the day — /'. (?., whether German or French sentiment predominates — while the interested parties themselves each loudly ignore the no doubt real claims of the other. As a simple matter of fact, Alsace is German by blood and by language, but race-differences are so often merged in other feelings, the product of kind treatment and domestic ties, that the sympathies of nations may be materially changed in less than a century. We certainly come across a good deal that is very French in the villages between New Breisach and Colmar : the blouse is the costume of the men ; the houses are painted in light colors, in contrast to their steep gray roofs ; the women bring refreshments out to the wagoners, and stop for a coquettish gossip in a light-hearted, pleasant, vivacious way not seen in other places, whose matrons seem graver and more domestic. But Colmar, in its streets, the names over the shops, the old corner-windows, is as German and antique, as good a "specimen " city, as Nuremberg or Augsburg. Here is the artist's delight and the antiquary's mine. Colmar, contemptuously styled " a hole" by the great Napoleon, was living enough at the time of the emperor Frederick II., and was one of the prosperous, haughty, freedom - loving burgher cities to which the sovereigns so gratefully gave the name and privileges of an " imperial " town.

This city of ancient Germany is now one of the most stagnant among modern towns, just " advanced " enough to possess corner "loafers," and, we hope, to be ashamed of having publicly burnt the works of Bayle in the market-place ; but its architectural beauties are such and so many that if you are on your way to Strassburg you had better deny yourself the pleasure of stopping here. Balconies and galleries strike the eye at every turn ; irregular houses, their beams often visible ; doorways of wonderful beauty; and a population nearly as antique, the women carrying loads on their heads and wearing short dark stuff gowns, thick blue worsted stockings and wooden shoes. Of course the cathedral is the pride of the town, and it has some rather rare characteristics distinguishing it from the rest of the churches of this neighborhood, chiefly its simplicity of decoration. The impression of a noble simplicity is specially borne in upon us by the aspect of the dark, broad chancel with its carved stalls, and little else in the way of ornament : the sculptured door leading to the sacristy unfortunately hides a remarkable work of early German art, the Virgin of the Rose-hedge, by Martin Schon. The tower of the cathedral has above it only a small building with a steep, irregular, tapering roof, and here sits the watchman whistling on his cobbler's stool in a place that would be the envy of many a scholar pestered in his lower dwelling by inconsiderate visitors ; as, for instance, that perfect type of scholars, Isaac Casaubon, whose journal bears witness tc his yearning after more time and fewer admiring, consulting and tormenting friends. Not far from Colmar is a castleruin with three towers, the "Drei Exen," illustrating an old Alsatian proverb, the translation of which is, in substance,

Three castles on one hill ; Three churches in one churchyard ; Three cities in one valley, — Such is Alsace everywhere.

Other castles crown the heights above the villages of Kaisersberg and Rappoltsweiler, but we are getting tired of castles, and this region is abundant in old houses, the; shell of the old home-life which has changed so little in the country. What difi'erence is there between this ruddy, blue-eyed girl, with thick plaits of fair hair and utter innocence of expression, the mother of a future generation as healthy and sturdy and innocent as herself, and her own grandmother at the same age three generations back ? Neither the village interests nor the village manners have changed : placidly the life flows on, like that of the Rhine water itself, in these broad, level, fruitful plains between the Black Forest and the Vosges. And so we seem, in these various houses with wide gables turned to the street, cross-beams and galleries and unexpected windows, outside stairs of ston« or wood climbing up their sides, wide lovi