UP THE RHINE AND OVER THE ALPS.
The Cologne Cathedral is the finest Gothic structure in the world.
We had a perfect view of the majestic exterior from the windows of
our hotel, but, of course, devoted most of our time to the still more
impressive interior. It is no part of my purpose to descant upon
these things which are described in all the books of travel. The city
possesses other objects of interest besides its matchless cathedral,
and some of them we visited, in spite of the weather. It was cold and
wet, and we did not prolong our stay. But no conditions of weather
could have deterred us from taking the steamer for our trip up the
Rhine, rather than the railroad. It was late in the season. The summer
tourists had long since returned to their homes in England and America.
We had the boat pretty much to ourselves. We could hardly have fallen
upon a worse day for the first half of our trip. It was not only cold,
but foggy, and we could get only tantalizing glimpses of the shores now
and then when the mist thinned a little. So it continued nearly all
the way to Coblentz, where we landed and spent the night. We comforted
ourselves, however, with the reflection that the finest scenery was
farther up, and with the hope that we should have a better day for that
part of the trip. And we had. The mist was rolling away rapidly when we
rose next morning, and it soon disappeared, leaving us a fine autumn
day. After listening to the exhilarating music of a military band which
was serenading a young general near our hotel and after taking a look
at the noble statue of William I., and at the massive fortifications
of Ehrenbreitstein, the German Gibraltar, on the other side of the
river, we took the boat in better spirits, addressed ourselves with
more zest than before to the volume of _Legends of the Rhine_, and thus
began a delightful and memorable day.
The chief advantage of making this celebrated trip at this season is
that one thus gets the opportunity to see the vintage of the Rhine
Valley as it can be seen at no other season.
"Purple and red, to left, to right,
For miles the gorgeous vintage blazed."
Though, as a matter of fact, I believe that most of the Rhine grapes
that we saw were white. The steep slopes of the hills among which the
great river winds are covered with vineyards, the vines in rows as
regular as ranks of Indian corn, and laden with millions of luscious
bunches. The vintagers, men, women and children, in picturesque
costumes and with huge baskets on their backs, were busy everywhere
stripping the fruit from the yellow vines. The soil is kept in place by
stone terraces. Above the line of the vineyards jut out the huge rocks
of the mountains, their gray bastions alternating with forests robed in
green, brown, red and yellow, and standing out boldly against the pure
blue sky.
It is only by strong self-restraint that I can pass without special
notice such a rock as Rhinestein, such a town as Bingen, and such a
monument as that to "Germania" on the Niederwald, but it must be done.
_November 15, 1902._
[Sidenote: Wiesbaden and the German Woods.]
Wiesbaden, the most charming of German watering-places, is a clean and
handsome city, with broad and well paved streets, many attractive
shops and pleasant residences, excellent hotels, extensive and lovely
parks, a sumptuous opera house, a less costly but very spacious
music hall (where, by the way, we had the pleasure of hearing Frau
Shuman-Heink sing), and a few large and costly churches, but with no
adequate arrangements, so far as I could see, for the churching of
its large population. The place owes its importance primarily to the
Boiling Salt Springs, which here gush from the earth, and which have
made this the great resort for rheumatics and the victims of various
other ailments. It is also the home of one of the most celebrated
oculists in Europe, whose patients come to him from every part of the
world. The chief attraction for those who are fond of outdoor life is
the glorious forests which stretch from Wiesbaden back through the
valleys and over the Taunus Mountains. One of our young people has
just been writing to the folks at home about an eighteen-mile walk
through these woods, guided only by the blazed trees, and speaks with
pardonable enthusiasm of "the blue-gray trunks outlined against the
terra cotta carpet of fallen leaves, the sunlight glancing through the
trees, and the gently waving branches against the azure sky. There is
no undergrowth as in our forests at home, but there are here and there
gray rocks, large and small, covered with fresh green moss, or with
gray, pink and yellow lichen. There were rustic benches all along, but
the forest was quite deserted except for an occasional woodman with
a fire and piles of neatly chopped wood, or some little boys drawing
carts filled with bundles of sticks for winter use."
_November 20, 1902._
[Sidenote: Worms, Heidelberg and Strasburg.]
We spent three weeks at wholesome Wiesbaden, counting a day that we
gave to Mayence, on the other side of the Rhine, for the purpose of
seeing the memorials of Gutenberg, the inventor of printing. Then we
took the train for Worms. The chief "lion" here is, of course, the
magnificent Luther monument, a thing which no visitor to this part
of the world should fail to see. Recrossing the Rhine, we ran up to
Heidelberg, and devoted a day to the fine old castle and the famous
university--a stinging cold day it was, too. Nor did winter relax
his grip at Strasburg, for there we had snow. One of the youngsters
celebrated his birthday there by watching the noon performances of
the world-renowned clock in the old Cathedral, our whole party going
with him, the adults watching the wonderful mechanism with scarcely
less interest than the children. The striking of that clock and the
movements of its various figures and fixtures at twelve o'clock every
day invariably draws a large crowd of people. We saw the storks' nests
on the chimneys, too, but of course the storks themselves were down in
the warm sunshine of Africa at that season.
_November 23, 1902._
[Sidenote: Switzerland in Winter-time.]
Switzerland caps the climax of scenic interest in Europe--lakes,
waterfalls, mountains, glaciers--language and pictures are alike
unavailing to convey an adequate impression of this sublime scenery.
My first views of it were in midsummer. On the 31st of July, 1896, at
the top of the Wengern Alp, seven thousand feet above the sea, reached
by rail all the way, my travelling companions and I had coasted on
sleds over the snow like boys, wearing our heavy overcoats the while.
Above us rose the Jungfrau, six thousand feet higher, piercing the
clouds. As we watched, the clouds parted, and the white Jungfrau,
wearing the dazzling Silberhorn on her bosom, burst upon our view.
Never shall we see anything more beautiful till our eyes rest upon
the pinnacles of the celestial city. We were standing at the time on
the Eiger Glacier, an immense mass of pale green ice covered with a
snowy crust. Longfellow somewhere (in "Hyperion," I think) likens the
shape of one of the glaciers to a glove, lying with the palm downwards.
"It is a gauntlet of ice, which centuries ago Winter, the king of
these mountains, threw down in defiance to the Sun, and year by year
the Sun strives in vain to lift it from the ground on the point of
his glittering spear." Aye, in vain. Winter is king. But the Sun now
and then wrenches somewhat from his grasp. And even while we gazed
speechless at the unearthly splendor of the Jungfrau and the Silberhorn
we heard an avalanche fall with a crash like the end of the world. That
night we sat before a roaring fire and wrote home about it.
[Illustration: THE LION OF LUCERNE.]
That was my experience in midsummer. Now we were to see not only the
great mountain tops, but the whole country, in the undisputed grasp
of Winter. When we reached Lucerne, not only the high Alps, but all
the mountains and hills, far as the eye could reach, were covered
with snow. When we visited Thorwaldsen's celebrated Lion of Lucerne
we found workmen with scaffolding and ladders against the cliff,
carefully boxing it in with boards to prevent it from being injured by
the freezing of water trickling down upon it during the winter now at
hand. But we were in time, just in time, to see it, and we all agreed
that few monuments in Europe are so impressive. The great figure,
twenty-eight feet in length, I believe, carved in the living rock,
represents the king of beasts lying slain, pierced by an arrow, with
broken spear and shield beneath, and over that shield, which bears the
lilies of France, the huge paws are thrown, as if guarding it still
in death. It commemorates the devotion of the Swiss guard who, in
1792, were appointed to keep the palace at Versailles, and receiving
no orders to retire, preferred to die at their post rather than betray
their trust. The glacier gardens near by, with their ingenious and
realistic illustration of the action of the falling water in grinding
the boulders in the glacier pots, interested us greatly. We paid some
attention to the shops also, and the old cathedral, and the quaint old
bridges. But we did not tarry long at Lucerne. It was too cold. We
took the steamer down the lake, though, cold as it was, for we had no
idea of missing entirely the magnificent scenery which gives this body
of water easy preëminence among the Swiss lakes. We spent the night,
bitter cold, at Fluelen, then took the fastest train we could get for
Milan, only to meet there another disappointment in the matter of the
weather.
_November 26, 1902._
[Sidenote: Italy Gives us Little Relief.]
We had seen the ice floating in great blocks down the Neckar at
Heidelberg, and had felt the stinging winds on the hills above the old
castle; we had stamped our feet on the stone floors of the cathedral
at Strasburg to renew the circulation in our benumbed extremities
while waiting for the crowing of the rooster and the marching of the
puppets, and the striking of the bells on the famous clock; we had
seen vast fields of snow covering the Alps in every direction as we
passed through Switzerland, and had shivered in the searching cold
as we steamed down Lake Lucerne, unable to tear ourselves from the
glorious beauty that lay open to our view on every hand from the
steamer's decks; we had caught the wintry glitter of gigantic icicles
against the cliffs on either side as our train climbed the wild St.
Gothard pass--and, in short, we had had a surfeit of cold weather,
and for days and weeks we had been sighing for Sunny Italy. Imagine
our disappointment, then, when we emerged from the Alps and entered
the land of balmy climate and blue skies (as most of us had always
ignorantly thought it to be even in winter) to find the whole world
still white around us, to run along the side of Lake Lugano and Lake
Como in a whirling snow-storm, and to arrive at Milan in a fog so
thick that it looked like it could be cut into blocks, so opaque that
at times we could not see the mighty Cathedral from our hotel, though
but little more than a block away, and so persistent that it did not
lift during the whole of our stay. Add to these conditions the slush
in the streets and the penetrating quality of the damp, cold air,
and our desire to push on at once to the farther south in search of
more genial skies will not seem unnatural. And we might have done so,
notwithstanding the attraction of the Cathedral and of Leonardo's
picture of the "Last Supper" (which, however, we expected to see on
our return to Northern Italy in the spring), had it not been for our
anxiety to get a sight of the Iron Crown of Lombardy at Monza, a few
miles north of Milan. And see it we did, in spite of the weather, as I
shall tell you more fully in a later letter. We ate our Thanksgiving
dinner at Milan, visited again and again the white marble Cathedral,
whose delicate stone lace work was touched into marvellous and weird
beauty by the snow clinging to its pinnacles and projections and
statues, saw Leonardo's picture, and the other principal sights, and
then took the train for Venice.