Read Ebook: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. 20 August 1877 by Various

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LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

AUGUST, 1877.

DOWN THE RHINE.

CONCLUDING PAPER.

The Mosel has but few tributary streams of importance: its own course is as winding, as wild and as romantic as that of the Rhine itself. The most interesting part of the very varied scenery of this river is not the castles, the antique towns, the dense woods or the teeming vineyards lining rocks where a chamois could hardly stand--all this it has in common with the Rhine--but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in ancient craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes strewn with dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are like the Iceland gorges, the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary rusticity, not to say coarseness, of the inhabitants. This grotesque, interesting country--unique, I believe, on the continent of Europe--lies in a small triangle between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier and the Schiefer hills of the Lower Rhine: it goes by the names of the High Eifel, with the High Acht, the Kellberg and the N?rburg; the Upper Eifel, with Gerolstein, a ruined castle, and Daun, a pretty village; and the Snow-Eifel , contracted by the speech of the country into Schneifel. The last is the most curious, the most dreary, the least visited. Walls of sharp rock rise up over eight hundred feet high round some of its sunken lakes--one is called the Powder Lake--and the level above this abyss stretches out in moors and desolate downs, peopled with herds of lean sheep, and marked here and there by sepulchral, gibbet-looking signposts, shaped like a rough and set in a heap of loose stones. It is a great contrast to turn aside from this landscape and look on the smiling villages and pretty wooded scenery of the valley of the Mosel proper; the long lines of handsome, healthy women washing their linen on the banks; the old ferryboats crossing by the help of antique chain-and-rope contrivances; the groves of old trees, with broken walls and rude shrines, reminding one of Southern Italy and her olives and ilexes; and the picturesque houses in Kochem, in Daun, in Trarbach, in Bernkastel, which, however untiring one may be as a sightseer, hardly warrant one as a writer to describe and re-describe their beauties. Kl?sserath, however, we must mention, because its straggling figure has given rise to a local proverb--"As long as Kl?sserath;" and Neumagen, because of the legend of Constantine, who is said to have seen the cross of victory in the heavens at this place, as well as at Sinzig on the Rhine, and, as the more famous legend tells us, at the Pons Milvium over the Tiber.

The Mosel wine-industry has much the same features as that of the Rhine, but there is a great difference between the French wines, which are mostly red, and the German, which are mostly white. Among the latter hundreds of spurious, horrible concoctions for the foreign market usurp the name of Mosel wine. It is hardly necessary even to mention the pretty names by which the real wines are known, and which may be found on any wine-card at the good, unpretending inns that make Mosel travelling a special delight. The Saar wines are included among the Mosel, and the difference is not very perceptible.

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

The Rhine itself is becoming so uninteresting that it is hardly worth while lingering on its banks, and as we get near thrifty Holland the river seems to give itself up wholly to business, for between Cologne and Aachen are miles upon miles of manufactories, workshops and mills; warehouses connected with coal-mines; dirty barges blackening the water; iron-works and carpet-mills; cloth and paper-mills and glass-works--a busy region, the modern translation of the myth of gnomes making gold out of dross in the bowels of the earth.

Aachen has a double life also, like many Rhine towns: it is the old imperial coronation city, the city of Charlemagne, with a corona of legends about it; and it is also the modern spa, the basket of tempting figs with a concealed asp somewhere within, a centre of fashion, gossip and gambling. How is it that people who profess to fly from the great capitals for the sake of a "little Nature" are so unable to take Nature at her word and confess her delights to be enough for them? They want a change, they say; yet where is the change? The table is the same, high-priced, choice and varied; the society is the same, the gossip is the same, the amusements are the same, the intrigues the same; the costume equally elaborate and expensive; the restless idleness as great and as hungry for excitement: all the artificiality of life is transported bodily into another place, and the only difference lies in the frame of the picture. Exquisites from the capital bring their own world with them, and their humbler imitators scrape together their hard winter's earnings and spend them in making an attempt cavalierly to equal for a short time the tired-out "man of the world" and "woman of fashion." Some come to find matches for sons and daughters; others to put in the thin end of the wedge that is to open a way for them "into society;" others come to flirt; others to increase their business relations; others to out-dress and out-drive social rivals; others to while away the time which it is unfashionable to spend cheaply in the city; others for--shall we say higher? because--political causes: few indeed for health, fewer still for rest. You see the same old wheel go round year after year, with the same faces growing more and more tired and more and more hopeless.

It is so strange to come upon a purely modern town in this neighborhood that Exefeld strikes us as an anachronism. It is wholly a business place, created by the "dry-goods" manufactures that have grown up there, and are worth twenty million thalers a year to the enterprising owners, who rival French designs and have made a market for their wares in England and America. This is a great foil to old Roman Neuss, with its massive gates, its tower attributed to Drusus--after whom so many bridges and towers on the Rhine are named--and even to D?sseldorf, which, notwithstanding its modern part, twice as large as its old river front, has some beautiful antique pictures to show us, both in the costumes of its market-women, who wear red petticoats with white aprons and flapping caps, and stand laughing and scolding in a high key by their dog-drawn carts, and in its council-house, an early Renaissance building with square, high-roofed turrets overlooking the market-place. In that little house, in a narrow street leading to the market, Heine was born; in that wretched little architectural abortion, the theatre, a critical audience listened to Immermann's works; and in the Kurzenstrasse was born Peter von Cornelius, the restorer of German art. Schadow succeeded him at the head of the Academy, and a new school of painting was firmly established in the old city, which had energy enough left in it to mark out another successful path for itself in trade. The new town is handsome, monotonous, rich and populous, but the galleries and museums somewhat make up for the lack of taste in private architecture. One of the most beautiful of the town's possessions is the old Jacobi house and garden, rescued from sale and disturbance by the patriotic artist-guild, who bought it and gave the garden to the public, while the house where Goethe visited his friend Jacobi became a museum of pictures, panelling, tapestry, native and foreign art-relics, etc., all open to the public. The gardens, with their hidden pools and marble statues, their water-lilies and overarching trees, their glades and lawns, have an Italian look, like some parts of the Villa Borghese near Rome, whose groves of ilexes are famous; but these northern trees are less monumental and more feathery, though the marble gods and goddesses seem quite as much at home among them as among the laurel and the olive.

LADY BLANCHE MURPHY.

VERONA

It was a matter of debate in our party whether we should stop at Verona. The ayes had it, and twenty-four hours afterward the noes indignantly denied that there had been any opposition, so completely had the dignity and attraction of the place driven away the very recollection of their contumacy. Yet if they had had their way when we left Milan we should have gone straight through to Venice, as the great majority of travellers do. We could not remember that any of our friends had ever told us to go thither or had gone themselves. At the hotel, the Due Torri, there were but two parties besides our own--both, like ours, composed of but two members. We had gone to this inn on Murray's emphatic recommendation. "Very comfortable, excellent in every respect," said that red liar: we found it wretched, and the charges exceeded those at the H?tel Cavour in Milan, which we had just left--one of the finest houses in Europe. There is only one other in the place, which has the forbidding name of the Tower of London; so, in view of our discomfort and the small public, we agreed that we had come to the wrong house. On the day when we went away, however, we fell in with some old acquaintance, fellow-country folk, at the railway station, who had been at the Torre di Londra, and they too thought they had gone to the wrong house. They said it was almost empty; which confirmed us in the belief that the greater proportion of the people who fill the trains and crowd the hotels within a day's journey in every direction pass by this incomparable city. Yet as we paced the broad marble slabs of its pavement, looking right and left, we asked each other, "Why does not everybody talk and write about Verona, rush to it, rave about it?"

The view from the railway, unlike that of many beautiful Italian cities, is striking enough to make any traveller change his route, jump from the train and forego all his plans. The situation is singularly fine. The town sits in state, backed by the outposts of the Alps, fronting the Apennines and looking over the plains of Lombardy spread out between: the rushing Adige curves deeply inward, forming the city's western boundary, and then, doubling on itself, flows through the heart and south-eastward to the Adriatic. The surrounding hills are seamed and crested with fortifications of every age, beginning with those of the Romans of the Later Empire, followed by those of Theodoric the Goth, of Charlemagne the Frank, of the mediaeval Scaligeri, lords of Verona, of the Venetians in the sixteenth century, and of the Austrians of our own day, when Verona was a point of the once famous Quadrilateral. Within the walls are monuments of all these dynasties. The housewives and tradesfolk pass on their daily errands along the streets spanned by two noble arches which date from the days of the emperor Galienus. Almost in the centre of the town is the grand Roman amphitheatre; the petty, prosaic, middle-class life of an Italian provincial town creeps, noisy yet sluggish, to its base; modern houses abut against all that is left of its outer wall, which was thrown down by an earthquake in 1184; small shops are kept in some of the lower cells. On that side it has none of the silent emphasis of its greater contemporary, the Coliseum. We found afterward that we might have approached from another direction across an open space, the Piazza Br?, but I think the contrast and effect would have been less. The surprise is more overwhelming to emerge from the narrow street into the arena, and see the seats which sustained the amusement of fifty thousand people rising tier above tier in perfect preservation, forty-three vast ellipses, to the very top. It is only two-thirds as large as the Coliseum, but when one has clambered to the upper-most row and looks down from a height of sixty or seventy feet upon an area of nearly a quarter of a mile, the mind takes no cognizance of anything but the actual immensity before the eyes. Looking outward, we beheld a splendid panorama: first, the irregular surface of the city, broken by steep roofs, arcaded galleries on the housetops, battlemented towers square or slim, lofty belfries, black conical skyward cypresses; then the blue hills--blue as cobalt, although so near--striped in zigzags with the ruddy bands of the serrate feudal fortifications, marked at intervals by curious three- and five-sided bastions, which the architect Sanmicheli put up for the conquering Venetian republic; farther off more peaceful slopes, on which white villas cluster and bask like pigeons on a gable; more distant still, sublimer peaks of pale azure brushed with snow; on the other side, the olive-dun plain irregularly mapped out by the windings of the two rivers, the Adige and Po, yellow as gravel-walks, sprinkled thick with towns and villages like tufts of daisies, and hedged by the purple Apennines.

Vieni a veder Montecchi e Capelletti.

The buildings which enclose the square are of the utmost diversity of style and period--rich palaces of the Late Renaissance, cumbered with ornament; modern houses of light-colored stucco, with striped awnings and Venetian shutters; solemn old bits of architecture of sterner times; frescoed fa?ades, arcades, balconies. And what balconies! Not the poor railing to which we give that name, but projecting parapets of stone, pierced into trefoils, quatrefoils, rosaces, cusps, brackets, balustrades--sometimes running across the whole house-front, more often guarding a single window, itself lofty, arched, mullioned and rich with tracery. It is here that, for the traveller coming from the North, Venetian architecture begins--not Byzantine of course, but the purest, noblest Cisalpine Gothic. It imparts a highly patrician air to the streets with their long lines of deserted palaces, which keep their caste through every change of fortune. Verona has not the fallen look of some old Italian capitals, nor the forsaken air of others, but suggests the idea that once her aristocracy closed their houses and withdrew to some retreat where they maintain their traditions, waiting for better times to return to their former homes. Many of the vaulted carriage-ways frame a glimpse of the rushing river which washes the massive foundations of the courtyards, the blue hills and lines of forked battlement.

In Verona one first sees Venetian painting too, on canvases which are to Titian and Tintoretto as the colors of dawn are to those of sunrise, but the glory is in them. The radiant pencil of Paul Veronese was early lost by his birthplace and given to Venice, in illustration of the parable, but even without her most glorious son native art makes a fair show in the picture-gallery and churches. The picture which struck me most was a fresco by Brusasorci in San Stefano, whither I had been drawn by the report of its antiquity, which is said to be greater than that of any other church in the town, going back to the seventh century. As on many other occasions, I found that a building may be too old, the pristine venerableness having been overbuilt by subsequent ages; but I was consoled for my disappointment by this beautiful fresco--Saint Stephen surrounded by the Holy Innocents. In the church calendar Saint Stephen is the first martyr, and the Innocents are commemorated two days later: in the picture the youthful deacon looks down with an air of paternal pride and affection upon the lovely babes trooping before him with palms in their little hands as he presents them to our Saviour, above in glory. There is a tenderness in the expression of the martyr's face and attitude, as well as in the conception of the group, which appeals to the simplest human feeling. The juxtaposition of the protomartyr and the children is a perfect instance of true ecclesiastical sentiment: it was not until long afterward that I knew it to be a fine work of art.

San Stefano is on the left bank of the river, in the smaller and less-frequented part of the town, and it was in further exploring the same quarter that I wandered into a curious church which had somehow the look of a cast-off garment, owing perhaps to the frequent patching it had evidently undergone, and its appearance of being owned by nobody. It stood open, empty of worshippers, with not even a beggar on the steps in receipt of charitable custom--alone on a little island. It is the church of San Tomaso Cantuariense, otherwise Thomas ? Becket, whom it was odd to meet so far from home: he was revered all over Europe for a long time after his canonization, as this church proves, since he was adopted as its patron in 1316, nearly a hundred and fifty years after his so-called martyrdom; but to judge by its desertion he must be pretty well forgotten now. It is hereabouts that, on emerging from a cat's-cradle of little narrow cross streets, a very fine view of Sta. Anastasia from the rear breaks upon one, the pentagonal apse, the chapels, transepts, nave, and towers rising one above another, a beautiful specimen of early Italian Gothic, still strongly impressed with the Lombard spirit.

Where the awe of worship mingles with the throbbing of delight.

But there is a gayer side to Verona than any which we have yet recalled. It was here that we first made acquaintance with many lively humors of Italian street-life which we had not met with in the more northern cities. Here we first noticed the eternal cooking in the open air, the roasting, frying, frizzling which are for ever going on, the people stopping at every few yards to eat macaroni, chestnuts, and Goodness knows what other nameless messes, until we began to wonder whether anything were cooked and eaten at home. Here too I saw the drollest and most charming bit of harlequinade between a rascal boy and an old woman carrying a heavy vessel of water. He popped out from under an archway and struck her a light tap on the shoulder with a bit of hollow cane: she turned round, but he had flown through an open window. On she trudged, and out he came as lightly as he had gone, and following her on tiptoe tickled the back of her neck with his wand: round she turned again, but he was gone too quickly for my eyes this time. She set down her ewer and stared in every direction, muttering curses: he came running swiftly down an alley, seized the ewer, and with every respectful demonstration of relieving her of the burden darted off with it in another direction. She hobbled after him, raining maledictions: back he came with a pantomime of courteous surprise--What! she did not wish to be assisted?--and set the vessel on a high ledge, whence she had much ado to lift it down. As she did so, splash! half the water was spilled: then her tormentor went through a dumb show of sympathy and sorrow until the crone seemed like to burst with fury. At last he broke into a fit of shrill laughter, the first sound he had uttered, made a macaronic gesture, and capered off with the airiest gambols and antics, like a very devil's kid. A street-urchin teasing an old woman is no new sight, but the nimbleness, spirit, grace and gentleness of this young Pickle, the impossibility of guessing what he would do or where he would be next, and the fine dramatic rage of the beldame, who looked like one of Michael Angelo's Fates, kept us standing and staring at the two until the fun was over as if we had been at a play.

In one respect we must have seen Verona under a disadvantage: there was no sunshine during our short stay. The beautiful, lordly gardens of the Palazzo Giusti on the declivity of a hillside on the left bank of the Adige were dank and dripping; there was no temptation to linger near their chilly statues and gloomy cypresses; even the view from their noble terraces, formed partly by the wall of the town, was cold and colorless under the November sky. Out-of-door life is so large a part of the pleasure of being in Italy, fine weather adds so indescribably there to the beauty of even the most glorious works of man, that to have seen them only under a dull sky is like having seen a human countenance without its smile. Perhaps at another season we should not have thought the streets so melancholy: perhaps even in our admiration we did not pay full justice to

L'eccelsa, graziosa, alma Verona.

SARAH B. WISTER.

The lofty, gracious, kindly Verona.

A LAW UNTO HERSELF.

The captain, pacing up and down the garden-alleys that night, thinking of the blow which would fall on his daughter in Laidley's threatened disposal of his property, was not altogether unheroic. There was nothing mean in the big gaunt figure with its uncertain strides, or in the high-featured, mild-eyed face: neither was there anything mean in his wrath. It was all directed against himself. His Swedish blood had infused a gentle laziness into his temper, and he had forgiven Laidley long ago for his lifelong swindle, as no American with English grandfathers would have done.

He raised his right arm, and the empty sleeve fell back from the stump, which burned and throbbed impotently. There was will enough in it to conquer the whole world for her. There was that aching love which mothers feel in his breast for her, as though his heart were physically wrenched.

But at breakfast the next morning, while quite as ready to die for her, he nagged and scolded incessantly, and threw the blame of their ill-luck on her, his voice sounding like the clatter of a brass kettle: "Omelette? No--no omelette for me. I am quite content to breakfast on dry bread and coffee. It is time we practiced economy. I'll make out a system for you, Jane. A system, and I desire you to follow it."

Jane laughed and helped him to cherries, and then devoted herself in earnest to her own breakfast. She never argued with anybody, and had that impregnable good-humor which so often passes for lack of feeling. Little griefs, either her own or those of other people, dwindled out of notice in the atmosphere about her, like mosquitoes buzzing in a large sun-lighted room.

"We certainly must practice economy. God knows where to-morrow's meals may come from!"

"Jane's hens are in good laying condition, and there are the cherries on the tree," said Miss Fleming tartly. She did not like Jane nor any other woman, but she usually fought for her sex against men in a mannish way--for the pleasure of fighting for the weaker party.

"Hens? Yes, and but for the whim of renting this tumble-down house with its great gardens out on the suburb, we could have had snug rooms in some business street, where I could have earned our bread and butter."

"It was your whim, captain. Why, she has kept up the table out of the garden, and you know it. Don't interfere with the child. She can turn a penny to the best advantage. Her ability is of the most practical kind."

The captain did not like her tone. He glanced uneasily at Jane, who ate her cherries in calm unconsciousness.

"I might as well stick pins in the divine cow Audhumbla!" Miss Fleming said to herself every day. This child, as she called her, irritated her, just as a machine did, or an animal, or any other creature whose motive-power she could by no means comprehend. She was herself a mass of vitalized nerves, all of which centred in that secret I, Cornelia Fleming, over whose hopes, nature and chances she brooded night and day. This other woman, who simply grew in her place, concerning herself no more about her own mind, body or future than the larch yonder did about its roots or leaves, and who took praise and blame as indifferently as the tree, the sun or rain, roused in her a feeling of active dislike. She called Jane stolid to other people, but she was by no means satisfied that she was stolid. She was often sorry that she had brought herself measurably under the protection of Captain Swendon and his daughter by renting two of the rooms in their house, though she had planned and manoeuvred a long time to accomplish that end. When Miss Fleming came up to town to join the art-class at the Academy, she was exceedingly careful not to join also the emancipated lonely sisterhood, who set social laws at defiance. She might live alone, but it must be under the roof of conventionally correct people. She abjured the whole tribe of literary and artistic adventurers who haunted the studios and lecture-halls. She wrote home to her old mother that the Swendons, descended from the leaders of the first Swedish settlers, that family of Svens from whom Penn bought the land for his village of Philadelphia, had possessed culture and social rank, if no money, for centuries. Miss Fleming found for herself a lodging-place under their roof, with very much the motive of the low-born blackbird burrowing in the high, bare nest of the osprey.

She was on her way to the Academy now, and touched her hat jauntily and shook loose her flowing-sleeve as she said good-bye with a lingering look at the captain, to which he did not reply.

The cold ague of despair was on him: he combed his grizzled beard with his fingers, stared at the carpet and saw nobody. "Yes, I ought to have rented two small rooms up town, and found work that would pay. I'll do it now," he grumbled.

Jane had uncovered a long table heaped with tools, glue-pots, drawing-materials, models in wood, in paper, in clay, with others finely draughted on large sheets of Bristol board. The captain preserved his failures as sacredly as a Chinese the dead bodies of his ancestors. She took up one of these models and studied it thoughtfully: "Very well, father. I could go on with the business, I suppose."

The captain burst into a laugh: "Absurd! Though," relapsing into anxiety, "this is, as you say, really my business. But I could easily find a place as professor of Latin and Greek in some Western college which would support us."

"Now, I don't quite understand the action of this screw, A, B," meditatively. "It interferes with the force of the piston, in my judgment."

"Impossible!" hurrying over to the table. "I'll explain that in a moment, Jane. Why, that screw is the finest idea in the machine. It's the meaning, in fact. It all hinges on that."

In five minutes his smoking-cap was pushed back, his spectacles on his hooked nose, and he was lost in the depths of valves, gauges and levers.

Jane took the place of a dozen lost hands. She made the models, she draughted them, she worked with carpenter's tools, needles, pencils, clay, by turns, and was both swift and skillful. She had been at this daily work, indeed, since the time her father had lost his arm. Now and then, being really nothing but a child in years, she clasped her hands over her head and yawned when he was not looking, or, when she was sent to the fire for the glue, sat down on the floor and began a rough-and-tumble romp with the dog, or while she was at work, sang scraps of songs into which the captain threw a fine rolling bass.

The morning was warm: the fire had burned down low in the grate, and both windows were wide open. The wind which entered, though raw, had a breath of spring in it. The scraggy plum trees outside were covered with deep pink blossoms, yellow dandelions blazed up out of the grass, and even in the muddy walks: a half-frozen bee buzzed among them feebly for a while, and then lost his way into the room and fell with a thump on the table.

Jane dropped her tools, and put out her finger for him to crawl upon. "Now you are too early afoot: you're greedy, you fellow," she said. "You are in too great a hurry to be rich. Haven't you a comfortable house? And plenty of honey?" She carried him to the window and set him in the sun on the sill. "He'll fall in some puddle and be frozen to death; and serve him right! I hate your early birds and ants and bees, always at work."

"It is work you hate, Jenny. Now tack this strip in place, child, and then paste on the muslin. We must finish this before night, and there is more than a day's work on it."

Jane tacked and measured diligently a while, and then dropped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her palms. Her face was just in front of her father's. "I was thinking--"

"Yes."

"I mean that I saw in the paper this morning that there was a school of black-fish on the coast, the largest for years. I suppose the Lantrims will be out for them?"

"No doubt. The old captain wrote to me that he had bought Sutphen's Tuckerton skiff."

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