Pilgrims were we recently, making a day's journey, not to gaze upon
bones, rusty relics, and mouldy garments, but to see something fresh,
fair, and altogether adorable,--the cherry-trees of the Lenninger Thal
in full blossom. From Stuttgart we went by rail to Kirchheim unter Teck,
a railway terminus, where we were shown the palace occupied by Franciska
von Hohenheim after the death of Herzog Carl, and a Denkmal erected to
Conrad Widerhold, that brave and very obstinate German hero who held the
famous Hohentwiel fortress against the enemy, when even his own duke,
Eberhard III., had ordered him to surrender it. Widerhold and his wife
stand side by side, and you must look twice before you can tell which is
the warrior. Kirchheim lies prettily in the Lauter Thal among the
mountains. From there in an open carriage we drove on into the charming
Lenninger Valley, one of the most beautiful in the Alb, with the whole
landscape smiling benignly beneath a wonderful sky, and air deliciously
pure and soft; past little brooks where the young, tender willows were
beginning to leave out, through the little village of Dettingen, on and
on over the broad _chaussee_, until we were fairly among the
cherry-orchards. Bordering the road, running far back on the
hill-slopes, shadowy, feathery, exquisite, the snowy blossoms lay before
our eyes, with the range of the Suabian Alb beyond, and many a peak and
ruin old in story. This was the fresh morning of a perfect spring day,
where the peace and loveliness of the scene--the fields of pure
whiteness reaching out on both sides of us, with now and then a dash of
pink from the rosy apple-blossoms--made us feel that a special blessing
had fallen upon us as devotees at the shrine of Ceres. At evening,
returning by another route, with the varying lights and golden bars and
heavy, piled-up purple cloud-masses in the western sky, it was lovely
with yet another loveliness. The same mountains showed us other outlines
and assumed new expressions, and bold, proud Teck rose from the foam of
blossoms at its feet, like a stern rock towering above surging waters.
One of our experiences that day was becoming acquainted with Owen. Owen
is not a man, as you may imagine, but only a very little village with
crooked streets and queer old women, and that curious aspect to all its
belongings which never grows less curious to some of us, though we ought
to have become unmindful of it long ago. Owen is picturesque and dirty.
"Ours at home aren't half so dirty or half so nice," we endeavor to
explain to our German friends.
At the inn where we drew up we were received by an admiring group of
children,--three yellow heads rising above three great armfuls of wood,
of the weight of which the little things seemed utterly unconscious in
the excitement of seeing us. They stood, one above the other, on the
dilapidated, crazy stone steps, while a bushy dog, whose hair looked as
yellow and sun-faded as the children's, also made "great eyes" at us
from the lowest stone. Out came mine host, and cleared away children and
dog and woodpiles in a twinkling. This flattering reception occurred at
the Krone. A large gilt crown adorned with what small boys at home call
"chiney alleys" makes a fine appearance above these same tumble-down
steps; and directly beside them is a great barn-door, so near that you
might easily mistake one entrance for the other and wander in among the
beasties; and benign Mistress Cow was serenely chewing her cud in her
boudoir under the front stairs, we observed as we entered the house.
Let no one faint when I say we ate our dinner here. Indeed, we have
eaten in much worse places, and the dinner was far better than we
thought could be evolved from a house with so many idiosyncrasies, so
very prominent barn-door qualities, such mooings and lowings in
undreamed-of corners and at unexpected moments. However, we experienced
an immense lightening of the spirits when trout were served, for it
seemed as if we knew what this dish at least was made of. They were
pretty silvery things with red spots, and had just been gleaming in the
brook near by, beneath elms and birches and baby willows, and now they
were butchered to make our holiday.
The little restored Gothic church at Owen is more than a thousand years
old, and its walled Kirchhof recalls the times when the villagers with
their wives and children sought refuge here from the descent of robber
knights. The dukes of Teck are buried within the church, and their arms
and those of other old families, with quaint inscriptions about noble
and virtuous dames, are interesting to decipher. The prettiest thing in
the church was a spray of ivy which had crept through a hole in the high
small-paned window, completely ivy-covered without, and came seeking
something within the still stone walls, reaching out with all its
tendrils, and seemed like the little, adventurous bird that flutters in
through a church window on a hot summer afternoon, and makes a sleepy
congregation open its heavy eyes.
The altar-pictures are edifying works of art. Behind the little group in
the "Descent from the Cross" rise a range of hills that look
astonishingly like the Suabian Alb, with a genuine old German fortress
perching on a prominent peak. Saint Lucia is also an agreeable object of
contemplation, with a sword piercing her throat up to the hilt, the
blade coming through finely on the other side, while her mildly folded
hands, smirking of superior virtue and perfect complacency, make her as
winning as a saint of her kind can be.
Beyond Owen is the Wielandstein, or a Wielandstein I should perhaps say,
for Wielandsteins are as common in Germany as lovers' leaps in America;
and the story is always how the cruel king murdered the wife and
children of Wieland the smith and took him captive, granting him his
life merely because of his skill in fashioning wonderful things from
metals, but imprisoning him and maiming his feet that he might never
escape. Wieland lived some time at court, and grew in favor with the
king on account of his deft hands and clever designs. At length the
king's young sons were missing and could not be found, though they were
searched for many days, and the king was anxious and sorrowful. Then
Wieland presented him with two beautiful golden cups, at the sight of
which the king was so pleased that he gave a feast; and as he was
drinking from the golden bowls and feasting with his nobles, Wieland
flew away by means of two great golden wings he had for a long time been
secretly fashioning, and, poising himself in mid-air, cried to the
horrified king that he was drinking from the skulls of his sons, whom
he, Wieland, had murdered out of revenge. The people shot many arrows
after him, but he soared away unharmed, his golden wings gleaming in the
sunlight until he disappeared behind the hills.
The ruin of the old Teck castle is in this neighborhood, and the
_Sybillen Loch_, a grotto where a celebrated witch used to dwell, who
differed from her species in general, inasmuch as she was a _good_
witch. The old chronicles say she was an exemplary person, always
delighting in good deeds. Her sons, however, were bad, quarrelled, stole
from the world and one another, and even, upon one occasion, from her,
and then ran away. Sybilla in her fiery chariot went in pursuit, and to
this day a fair, bright stripe over orchard, field, and vineyard, always
fresher and greener than the surrounding country, marks her course. How
a fiery chariot could produce this beautifying effect is not to be
questioned by an humble individual whose home is in a land where ruined
castles and legend upon legend _do not_ rise from every hill-top.
Another story is that the fertile stripe was made by Sybilla's
chariot-wheels, as she left forever the family to which she had always
belonged. The last duke of Teck lay after a battle resting under a tree,
and saw her passing with averted face, his arms lying at her feet, while
she extended a stranger's in her hands, which signified ruin to his
house; and the prophecy was fulfilled, for the duke outlived his twelve
sons, and his arms and title were adopted by the counts of Wuertemberg,
who then became dukes of Wuertemberg and Teck. All these interesting
things are visible to the naked eye. The fresh green stripe is
unmistakable; and the point in the air where Wieland hovered on his
golden wings above the cliff can easily be discerned with a very little
imagination.
A visit to a typical Suabian pastor, in another little village on this
road, was a pleasant episode. A hale, handsome old gentleman of seventy,
with a small black cap on his silvery locks and an inveterate habit of
quoting Greek, looking at us with a simple, childlike air, as if we too
were learned. His house has stone floors, low square rooms, severely
simple in their appointments. The arms of a bishop of some remote
century are on the inner wall by the front entrance, and a little
farther on is an aperture, through which the cow of the olden time was
wont to placidly gaze out upon hurrying retainers. The cow of that
period seems to have had comfortable apartments in the middle of the
house. The Suabian cow of the present time earns her hay by the sweat of
her brow, toiling in the fields.
The good old pastor has a love amounting to adoration for his garden,
every inch of which he has worked over and beautified, till it seems to
be the expression of all the poetry and romance which the outward
conditions of his frugal, rigid life repress. Full of nooks and arbors,
comfortable low chairs and benches, where the blue forget-me-nots look
as if they bloom indeed for happy lovers; trees whose great drooping
branches close around retreats which can only be designed for tender
_tete-a-tetes_; irregular little paths, wandering up and down and about,
always ending in something delightful, always beckoning, inviting,
smiling, amid flowers and foliage so fresh and luxuriant, you feel that
every petal and leaf is known and loved by the white-haired old man. His
favorite seat is at the end of a narrow, winding way at the foot of a
magnificent elm. There he sits and looks, over the brook that sings to
his sweet roses and pansies, upon broad meadow-lands and fields of grain
extending to the Suabian hills, with their wealth of beauty and meaning
and tradition. He sleeps and rests and thinks there after dinner, he
tells us, and perhaps that is all; but I believe, when the old man is
gone, a volume of manuscript poems will be discovered hidden away among
his sermons and Greek tomes,--a volume of love poems, sonnets, dreamings
of all that his life crowds out into his garden, and that only in his
garden he has been able to express,--all the unspoken sweetness, all the
unsung songs.