A Garden by the water's edge,--a garden where clematis and woodbine and
grape-vines run all over their trellises and up the graceful young
locust-trees and down over the stone-wall to meet the water plashing
pleasantly below, and reach out everywhere that vine-audacity can
suggest in an utter abandonment of luxuriance!--a garden where superb
blood-red roses are weighed down by a sense of their own sweetness, and
pure white ones look tall and stately and cool and abstracted by their
side. At the right a point of land extends into the lake, so thickly
covered with trees that from here it looks like a little forest, and the
houses are almost concealed in the fresh green; and the trees look
taller than anything except a funny old building that was once a
cloister, and is now the royal castle, and has two queer, tall towers
that rise far above the tree-tops at the extremity of the point. At the
left, faint and shadowy in the distance, rise the Alps, and the
mountains of Tyrol. There are bath-houses along the shore. Small boys
who think they "would be mermen bold" are prancing about gayly in the
water. On a rocky beach, peasant-women in bright-colored dresses are
standing by tubs, dipping garments in the lake and wringing them dry.
Some of them are kneeling. The sun is warm, and beats down on their
uncovered heads, and the work is hard, and I don't suppose they have any
idea they are making a picture of themselves, on the rocky shore with
the background of trees. But everybody is a picture this morning. There
is a young man standing in a row-boat, which an old fisherman lazily
propels here and there before my eyes. The youth is really statuesque,
balancing himself easily in the dancing boat, strong, supple, graceful,
his arm extending the long fishing-rod. A rosebud of a girl in a white
morning-suit and jaunty sailor-hat leans over the railing of a pavilion
built out into the lake from the garden, and also patiently holds a
fishing-rod, looking like a "London Society" illustration, as she gazes
intently with drooping eyelashes into the water.
There are people reading, sketching, studying their Baedeckers, drinking
their coffee or beer, in comfortable nooks through the pretty garden.
All is quiet and restful, with only the rippling of the water and the
shouts of the merry mermen to break the stillness. Now doesn't it seem
as if one ought to write an exceptionally pleasant letter from so
pleasant a spot? But, alas! there is not much to say about it when once
you have tried to tell how it looks,--that it is a calm, peaceful,
pretty place, where you could stay a whole summer and lose all feverish
desires to explore and climb and see sights. To sit here in the garden,
leaning on the wall among the vines, is happiness enough. In the morning
early, the lake smiles at you and talks to you, and you see far away
great masses of rose-color and pearl-gray, with snowy summits gleaming
in the sunshine, and your eyes are blessed with their first view of the
Alps. The outline of the opposite shore is misty and many-colored, and
has also its noble heights. At sunset, too, is the garden a dreamy,
blissful spot, as the little boats float about in the golden lights, and
the water and the mountains assume all possible lovely hues, then sink
away in a deep violet, and the stars come out and German love-songs go
up to meet them.
Yes, it is a satisfying spot. If there's a serpent here, he keeps
himself wonderfully well concealed. We haven't caught a glimpse of him,
and we are wise enough not to search for him. It's an admirable place to
be lazy, but it isn't very good for letters. Things hinder so, you know.
You listen to the water, and your pencil forgets to go. You get lost in
contemplation of the flapping of the ducks' feet, and make profound
studies of their mechanism, and enviously wish you had something of the
sort at your command, so that you could sail about in the cool, clear
water as unconcerned as they, and with no more effort. Funniest of ducks
that they are!--so pampered by the attention and bread-crumbs of summer
guests that their complacency exceeds even ordinary duck
self-satisfaction, and they act as if they thought they were all swans.
It occurs to me somebody may feel a faint curiosity to know where it all
is. On the Lake of Constance, or the Bodensee, which, if you want useful
information, is forty-two miles long, eight miles wide, is fed
principally by the Rhine, and whose banks belong to five different
States,--Bavaria, Wuertemberg, Baden, Switzerland, and Austria; a sheet
of water whose shores are green and thickly wooded, where gay little
steamers run, constantly displaying the flags of their several
countries, between the principal places on the lake, and wherever you go
you have beautiful mountain scenery. You see the Alps, the mountains of
Bavaria, the Baden hills, the Tyrol, and you don't always know which is
which; but they pile themselves up grandly among the clouds, one range
behind the other, in a way that to the unaccustomed vision does not
exactly admit of labelling, and you don't care what their names are. You
are content to feel their beauty, to wonder and be silent.
This particular place on the lake is Friedrichshafen. It is really a new
place and a commercial place,--and these adjectives are certainly not
attractive,--but then the newness is not conspicuous, and the commerce,
so far as we summer birds of passage are concerned, almost invisible.
The king and queen of Wuertemberg come here every summer, and are here
at present. The Emperor of Germany and the Grand Duke of Baden are on
the Island of Mainau.
It may be a busy place, but it does not seem so. Content and rest
pervade the atmosphere. Serenity is written on every face. It may be
many people would weary of its roses and the ripple of the water; of its
gardens, that look as if they were growing directly out of the lake; of
the blue, hazy, changing mountains far away; of its perfect quiet: but
there are others who would love it well, and who would not tire of it in
many a long summer day.