And all is hushed and still;
O’er ruined wall and rafter
I clamber as I will.
GOETHE’S “Castle on the Mountain.”
When the sun has gone down behind the Blue Alsatian Mountains and the
last stain of color has faded from the skies of the Rhenish plain, when
clock tower has answered clock tower and evening bell responded to
evening bell from the mountain streams and mill wheels of the Odenwald
to the busy squares of Mannheim, then the quiet and gentle valley of
the Neckar takes on a peculiar peace and glory that is exquisite and
marvelous, and Heidelberg and its lordly ruins seem set in a veritable
fairy-ring of delicate charm and beauty. So tranquil and lovely is
this region in the early evening that even the latest comer soon feels
a comforting sense of having turned aside from out of the rush and
fever of life into a singularly placid and protected corner of earth,
a hushed and happy Vale of Tempe. This sense of rest and seclusion is
one of Heidelberg’s strongest appeals—and her appeals, though few, are
all emphatic. For there are no “sights” here, the castle excepted. The
quaint old town is friendly and genial, though not more so than many
others of this comfortable German father-land; nor is the serene Neckar
so exceptional as to occasion pilgrimage.
Heidelberg’s appeals are to the mind, the heart, and the senses: the
mind is inspired by her impressive achievements in learning; the heart
is touched by her tragic history; and the senses are spellbound by the
exceptional charm of her natural beauty. She is never so fair as in the
early evening. With the soft fall of night each blemish fades away, and
what remains to see and feel is altogether rare and lovely.
[Illustration: HEIDELBERG, FROM THE CASTLE TERRACE]
When the valley clocks are booming nine with muffled strokes it is
delightful to be up in the castle’s ruins, lounging on the Great
Balcony of the crumbling Friedrich Palace, with a broad coping for a
seat and the rustling ivy of the hollow walls for a pillow. Behind
and about one is the vast, ruddy wreckage of the knightly halls and
towers of this far-famed “Alhambra of Germany,” and fluttering plains
of tree-tops are billowing upward on every hand to the dark heights of
the Königsstuhl. On the opposite side of the valley, across the river,
dense forests of oak and chestnut glitter in the moonlight, sweeping
aloft to the summit of the storied Saints’ Mountain. Just below our
balcony the clustered spires and steep roofs of the huddled old town
house their fifty thousand happy people between the wooded hillsides
and the shimmering Neckar that bands the middle distance, on its
placid Rhine journey, like a silver ribbon on a velvet cloak. In its
bright waters hills and trees are luminously mirrored, along with the
inky, motionless shadows of its bridges and the sober reflections of
shuttered house-fronts along its verge.
In the dewy coolness and still of evening the guardian oaks breathe a
recurrent lullaby—now softly agitated, now as hushed and ghostly and
motionless as the hills in which they are rooted; and one understands
how such a soothing environment could have softened even the impetuous,
fiery, war-loving young Körner to indite so gentle a benediction as his
beautiful “Good Night”:—
“Good night!
To each weary, toilworn wight,
Now the day so sweetly closes,
Every aching brow reposes
Peacefully till morning light.
Good night.
“Home to rest!
Close the eye and calm the breast;
Stillness through the streets is stealing,
And the watchman’s horn is pealing,
And the Night calls softly ‘Haste!
Home to rest!’”
Up in the castle ruins one is seldom alone before midnight, and not
even then if the melancholy spectre of Rupert’s Tower is disposed
to walk abroad. In the early evening the good people of Heidelberg,
kindliest and most contented of Germans, stroll with vast delight under
the lindens of the castle gardens, and groups of careless students
loiter merrily along the terraces, adding bright touches of color with
their peaked caps and broad corps ribbons. Bits of song and bursts of
laughter give a homely suggestion of habitation to these staring walls;
one could fancy the dead-and-gone old nobles at wassail again, with
minstrels in the banquet hall, and Perkeo, the jester, whispering jokes
in the ear of the Count Palatine.
“Under the tree-tops,” sang Goethe, “is quiet now.” There is a low
sad sound of night breeze in the ivy; a swallow darts through a
paneless window; a bat zig-zags among the echoing arches of a tower.
Like phantom sentinels the stone statues of the old electors stand
white and impressive in niches on the palace fronts. Fragrance of
flowers drifts in from the castle gardens and the delicate plash of
falling water comes from a terrace fountain. The lamps of the city
rim the river below, and villas beyond the farther bank are marked
by tiny dots of lights in the purple of the groves behind Neuenheim.
Across the Neckar-cut gulf of shadow the chestnut-crowned summit of
the Heiligenberg stares down solemnly at us, and not all the songs of
its blithest nightingales can banish thoughts of its ancient Roman
sacrifices nor divert the credulous from vigils over the blue grave
lights around the Benedictine cloister where they buried the sainted
Abbot of Hirschau. Up through the dark billows of this tree-top ocean
rises a strain of Wagner’s music from some cheery, hidden woodland
inn—and under the magic spell of the night one could fancy the
golden-haired Siegfried approaching on a new Rhine Journey, following
the winding Neckar up the broad Rhenish plain; the Tarnhelm is at his
belt, the World-Warder Ring on his finger, and the moonlight flashes
dreadfully from the glittering blade of “Nothung” as the hero’s horn
winds note of arrival under the walls of our stout castle!
It is especially at such an hour as this that one realizes how easy
it is for the man who thoroughly knows Heidelberg to acknowledge a
delightful and lifelong bondage. A large number of the most eminent
literati of the world have agreed in this. Goethe ascribed to her
“ideal beauty.” Macaulay pronounced her environment “one of the fairest
regions of Europe.” The father of German poetry, Martin Opitz, loved
her dearly in his student days here, three centuries ago, and wrote
affectionately of her all the rest of his life. The prolific Tieck
found time between novels to lament the destruction of a few of her
oaks. Alois Schreiber turned from his poetry and history to grieve
over the loss of a lime-tree. Von Scheffel praised her in prose and
verse and hailed her in seven songs of his “Gaudeamus.” La Fontaine
could not conceive of more ideal surroundings in which to reunite his
“Clara du Plessis” and her devoted “Clairant.” G. P. R. James, in his
favorite romance “Heidelberg,” wrought prodigies of sentimentality here
with the heroic “Algernon Grey” and the emotional “Agnes.” Matthisson
immortalized himself by his “Elegie” in these ruins. All who have read
Alexandre Dumas’s dramatic “Crimes Célèbres” will recall the young
fanatic, Karl Ludwig Sand, and his assassination of the poet, Kotzebue,
in our neighboring city of Mannheim, but they may not have heard of
how Kotzebue once said: “If an unhappy individual were to ask me what
spot to live in to get rid of the cares and sorrows which pursue him,
I should say Heidelberg; and a happy one asks me what spot he would
choose to adorn with fresh wreaths the joys of his life, I should still
say Heidelberg.”
Goethe loved the Neckar, and scarcely less its famous old bridge. In
an interpretative mood he once observed, “The bridge shows itself
in such beauty as is perhaps not to be equaled by any other in the
world.” And, indeed, it is an easy thing to divide enthusiasm between
bridge and river. Nothing is jollier than loafing against the broad
balustrades of this solid old veteran, as the students love to do, and
lazily take note of the river’s tinted reflections, the ripple and eddy
about the piers, the mirroring of the arches in perfect reverse, and
watch the deep green shadows of the hills creep out and steal across.
Great rafts come downstream laden with the output of the Odenwald and
Black Forest, and swift steamers hurry under the massive arches bound
upstream for the mountain towns or downward to Mannheim. Ferries ply
beside it, fishermen drift beneath it, and throngs of townspeople
and countrymen stroll along it, with now and then a be-petticoated
peasant girl from the Odenwald whose fair hair is hidden under a huge
black coif. How redolent it is of Rhenish life! One lingers beside
the great statue of its builder, the old Elector, and gazes with
unwearying satisfaction on the strange mediæval gateway, loopholed and
portcullised, and wonders where two other such queer round towers can
be found with such odd bell-shaped capitals and such slender little
spires. Terrible and tragic experiences have befallen this sturdy old
hero, and its antique towers are pitted from the riddling of French
and Swedish and German bullets. Fire has swept it, cannon shaken it,
floods grappled with it, and blood drenched it from shore to shore.
Wan processions of famine-stricken people have dragged themselves
across its paving-stones, and its gateways have reëchoed with groans
and prayers and curses. To-night we see it as defiant as ever,
battle-scarred and unshaken, with “head bloody but unbowed,” striding
its river with broad and shapely arches—as real a part of Heidelberg
as the very hills above it.
One looks down from the castle on the twinkling lights of the cramped
old town, and notes how it has ambitiously spread its suburbs even
beyond the opposite bank and that its villa-lamps sprinkle their way
in the distance toward that little hamlet with the great mouthful of
a name,—Handschuhsheim,—in the hills. It is there, could we see it,
that the tumbledown hut stands that sheltered Luther when he escaped
from the “Tile-Devils” of Worms; at a sight of it one wonders if he
did not exclaim here as he did at the Diet: “Here I take my stand. I
can do no otherwise. _God help me!_” In Heidelberg itself, the shops
of that one long street, Hauptstrasse, send up a wavering, crooked
path of softened light, but the more elegant _Anlage_ is discreetly
reserved with all its hotels and imposing homes. One distinguishes
little at this hour of the peaked tile roofs and faded shutters of the
venerable town—the little awninged shops, sombre cafés, _Stuben_, and
restaurants; or the excited appearance of an occasional side street
that starts with all enthusiasm at the river, loses heart in a block or
two, and comes suddenly to a discouraged end in a tangle of trees and
forest paths. We only know that Emperor William I canters his bronze
steed with its capacious girth along the middle of Ludwigs-Platz right
up to the university building where the celebrated professors have
their “readings” before their frisky young “Meine Herren”; and that
the market-place is probably as shabby and gloomy as usual, and the
Kornmarkt subsided again to its customary listlessness since the last
of the evening crowds have taken the mountain railroads there for cool
trips to the Königsstuhl or the Molkenkur or for a trout dinner at the
distant Wolfsbrunnen.
Out of this cramped nest of roofs the shadowy Gothic tower of St.
Peter’s Church rises boldly, challenging beholders to forget—if
they can—how Jerome of Prague once nailed his theses on its doors
and defended them before excited multitudes; calling, besides, on
the distant and indifferent to sometimes have a thought of the
famous university scholars who lie under the weeping-willows of
its churchyard. A neighboring bidder for consideration, the famous
Heilig-Geistkirche, thrusts a lofty spire skyward above the dark
tree-tops until its weather vane is almost on a level with our feet.
There is little need for this ecclesiastic to feel any apprehension
on the score of being forgotten, so renowned has it been for half
a thousand years as once the foremost cathedral of the Palatinate,
celebrated for richness of endowment, extent of revenues, the beauty of
its art treasures, and the learning of its prebendaries. As it appeals
to us to-night it is as one fallen far from its former high estate,
and yet the very eagles that soar over Heidelberg must have enough
knowledge of religious controversy to recall its past amusing dilemmas
of divided orthodoxy. The stranger in the castle ruins will smile
as he thinks of what he has read of the days when both Protestants
and Catholics worshiped there at one and the same time, through the
effective device of a partition wall thrown up to separate choir from
nave. The elaborate Catholic ceremonials of the altar necessitated
the reservation of the choir for them, while the Protestants got
along very nicely with a pulpit built in the end of the nave. What
unusual entertainment might have been contrived by neutrals to the
controversy had a brick or two been removed from the partition wall
and an ear applied alternately to either service! On one side, _Ave
Marias_ and _Pater Nosters_—on the other, hymns of the Lutherans;
here, the wailing _Confiteor_ and the penitential breast-beating of
_mea culpa_—there, grim scorn of all ritual and ceremony; in the
choir, the intoning of versicle and response, reiterations of “_Dominus
Vobiscum_” and “_Et cum Spiritu tuo_,” the solemn _Tantum Ergo_, the
passionate _Agnus Dei_, and the triple sound of the acolyte’s bell as
the Host is elevated above the kneeling, praying throngs—in the nave,
a rapt absorption in the new significance of old truths, and lengthy
discourses by stern and ascetic expounders; for one congregation,
a glittering altar, sacred images, flaming candles, and a jeweled
monstrance—stiff pews and a painted pulpit, for the other; for the
Catholics, flocks of priests and choir boys, deacons and subdeacons,
sumptuously vested in alb and stole and gorgeous chasuble—for the
Protestants, one solemn man in black. Neutrals at the dividing wall
could have rendered both congregations a service by loosening a
brick or two and letting a little incense and beauty pass to the
Dissenters’ side, and some word of wisdom concerning a release from
dogma get through to the Catholics. Had America’s new policy of church
unity existed then, it would have advocated doing away with the wall
altogether and finding some compromise for approaching a common God
in a common way. Time, the great umpire, has settled the contest as a
draw; for the partition wall has come out and the rival camps with it:
the present occupants are “Old Catholics”—a sect with which either
side has little sympathy and less patience.
The evening lounger in the old castle will doubtless have more than one
thought of the famous seat of learning that has, for five and a quarter
centuries, invested the name of Heidelberg with so much lustre and
glory. He will, of course, have heard it called the “cradle of Germanic
science,” and will have been told that of all Germanic universities
only those at Prague and Vienna are older than this. He can form some
conclusion as to its rich contributions to human knowledge by merely
recalling the names of its famous scholars,—Reuchlin, Melanchthon,
Ursinus, Voss, Helmholtz, Bunsen, Kuno Fischer, and the rest,—and
will gauge its present standing by the acknowledged eminence of
its faculties in medicine, law, and philosophy. One thinks of its
long eras of philosophic speculation, always deeply earnest if not
invariably profitable, and applauds the force of Longfellow’s simile
in “Hyperion” when he compared them to roads in our Western forests
that are broad and pleasant at first, but eventually dwindle to a
squirrel-track and run up a tree. If the loiterer be a Presbyterian,
he will want to acknowledge indebtedness to old Ursinus for that
celebrated “Heidelberg Catechism” of three hundred and fifty years
ago that supplied the Westminster Assembly with a model for the
“Shorter Catechism” in use to-day. That the university has survived the
destructive rigors of so many fierce wars is perhaps sufficient proof
of its vitality and the estimate men have set on its usefulness. Tilly
carried off its library and presented it to the Pope, when he conquered
Heidelberg in the Thirty Years’ War, but although only a small portion
of it has ever been returned it has to-day a half-million volumes
and documents, among which are original writings of Martin Luther
and manuscripts of the Minnesingers. The pleasant summer semester
attracts students here,—being allowed, under the “Freiheit” system, to
exchange _alma maters_,—and then one may count up perhaps two thousand
scholastic transients in Heidelberg. To many visitors the equipment
will appear meagre, for, excepting the main building in Ludwigs-Platz,
the library building, medical institution, and botanical gardens,
there is little in sight to remind one of its existence. In witness of
which there is the popular joke about a new arrival who inquired of a
passer-by where the university might be: “Don’t know,” was the reply:
“I’m a student myself.”
The presence of the jovial student, however, is too much in evidence at
this time of the evening, through distant shouts and songs, to leave
any one in doubt about the university being somewhere hereabouts.
But when are they _not_ in evidence? At any hour of the day and
night you come across them in the cafés, on the streets, loafing on
the bridge or up in the castle, or returning or departing on their
favorite recreation of walking-trips through the hills. Their smart
peaked caps and broad corps ribbons are scenic features of the
neighborhood. You wonder when they study, and how much time they ever
spend in the private rooms they call their _Wohnungen_. In spite of
the appearance of extreme _hauteur_ conveyed by their invariable and
ceremonious punctilio these ruddy-faced boys are highly sociable,
and take a prodigious delight in smoking, drinking, and singing
together. A _Kaffeeconcert_ is entirely to their liking, and even more
a jolly _Kegelbahn_ supper in some forest restaurant at the end of a
long tramp. Most of all, which is amazing, they relish their stupid
_Kneipen_ where every friendly draft of their weak beer is preceded
by a challenge to drink, and where the only redeeming feature is the
fine singing. Still, at _Commerces_, one hears the time-honored Fox
Chorus, “What comes there from the hill.” Even the pet vice of dueling
might be mildly defended on the ground that German students have no
such athletic contests as their brothers of America and England and
that each looks to the sword, in consequence, as an arbiter of courage
and prowess—from the _Füchse_ (who are freshmen) to the _Bürschen_
(who are seniors). Granted that the occasional sabre duel is really
dangerous, still injuries are trifling in the ordinary encounters
_Auf der Mensur_, fought with the thin, basket-hilted Schläger, and
preferably on the _Paukboden_ of the famous Hirschgasse tavern up the
little valley across the river. Blood apart, it is rather amusing
than otherwise to watch the contestants in their pads and goggles,
the seconds straddling between them with drawn words, and the callous
umpire keeping merry count of the wounds. Few topers and bullies here,
but vigorous, wholesome youth.
The outlook from the Grand Balcony is upon a sea of foliage so vast
as completely to surround castle, gardens, and terraces and convert
them into just such an enchanted island as springs so naturally out
of the pages of the “Arabian Nights.” Evidences of sorcery and magic
multiply as we make the rounds of our fortress, for voices and music
come up out of the tremulous green depths, and companion isles emerge
in the moonlit distance, but lifted far above us and set on prodigious
wave-shoulders of steadily increasing height. The loftiest of these
rocks we know to be famous Königsstuhl, a name they have vainly been
trying to change to Kaisersstuhl since the visit of Emperor Francis
of Austria, a hundred years ago, and Emperor Alexander of Russia.
From this eyrie perch one looks abroad by day on a very considerable
portion of the wide, wide world, and the distance covered is only
limited by the imagination of the observer. Then the Neckar valley is
at one’s feet, and a little farther off is the Rhine, and away yonder
are the Haardt Mountains and the sombre edges of the Black Forest. The
faint blur on the southwestern horizon is said to be Speyer, where the
followers of the Reformation were first called “Protestants,” and the
lofty pinnacle of the cathedral, rising above the tombs of its imperial
dead, quickens thoughts of that “mellifluous doctor” whose writings
were “a river of Paradise,” the crusade preacher, St. Bernard, to whom
the Madonna is credited with having revealed herself in that very
church. Our mortal eyes may confirm the identity of this much from the
Königsstuhl’s observation tower, but we can only envy the miraculous
vision of those who see the spire of the Strassburg Cathedral, sixty
miles away. Doubtless they could distinguish the identical tree of the
famous Odenwald rhyme:—
“There stands a tree in the Odenwald,
With many a bough so green,
’Neath which my own true love and I
A thousand joys have seen.”
Another of the companion isles of this moonlit, tree-top ocean is
the popular Molkenkur, a modern “whey-cure,” that flourishes on the
princely site of the earliest stronghold of this whole region. To
those who are strolling its broad terrace and reflecting, perhaps,
upon the tragic history of the place, seven centuries roll back and
Barbarossa’s brother, the savage Conrad of Hohenstaufen, climbs the
forest trail with archers and spearmen, returning to his mountain
retreat from a robber raid along the Rhine. And perhaps the visitor
fancies he even hears the roar of that historic explosion that rained
the wreckage of old Conrad’s fortress on town and river, or sees the
blinding lightning stroke that crumbled this dread stronghold into a
stalking-ground for the shuddering phantoms of winter fireside legends.
Reflections that penetrate still farther back into the gloaming of
local tradition will precede Conrad’s fortress with the temple of
the enchantress Jetta; and could we distinguish in the distance the
rock where the cozy inn of the Wolfsbrunnen perches and serves its
rare dinners of mountain trout, we should see the very spot where the
wolf slew Jetta in judgment of the Goddess Hertha, who was properly
indignant that her priestess should have fallen in love with a mortal.