lingered. "Is it not wonderful, ma'am, the pride there is in this poor
world?" she said. The reflection seemed to me a very just one, as I
too looked at the old man lying there in his mitre, with the sacred
wafer ostentatiously held in one hand, and his crosier in the other;
every inch of him, and of the great bronze slab on which he lay,
wrought as exquisitely as the finest etching.
At twelve o'clock every day a crowd gathers in this church to see a
procession of little figures come out of the huge clock; the Lubeck
people, it seems, never tire of this small miracle. It must be
acknowledged that it is a droll sight: but one would think, seeing
that there are only forty thousand people in the town, that there
would now and then be a day without a crowd; yet the sacristan said,
that, rain or shine, every day, the little chapel was full at the
striking of the first stroke of twelve. The show is on the back of the
clock, which detracts very much from its effect. At the instant of
twelve a tiny white statue lifted its arm, struck a hammer on the bell
twelve times; at the first stroke a door opened, and out came a
procession of eight figures, called the Emperor and the Electors; each
glided around the circle, paused in the middle, made a jerky bow to
the figure of Christ in the centre, and then disappeared in a door in
the other side, which closed after them. The figures seemed only a few
inches tall at that great height; and the whole thing like part of a
Punch and Judy show, and quite in keeping with the rococo ornaments on
the pillars. But the crowd gazed as devoutly as if it had been the
elevation of the Host itself; and I hurried away, fearing that they
might resent the irreverent look on my countenance.
There are some carved brass tablets which are superb, and a curious
old altar-piece, with doors opening after doors, like a succession of
wardrobes, one inside the other, the first doors painted on the
inside, the second also painted, and disclosing, on being opened, a
series of wonderful wood carvings of Scriptural scenes, these opening
out again and showing still others; a fine canopy of wrought wood
above them, as delicate as filigree. These are disfigured, as so many
of the exquisite wood carvings of this time are, by being painted in
grotesque colors; but the carving is marvellous. The thing that
interested me most in this church was a tiny little stone mouse carved
at the base of one of the pillars. You might go all your life to that
church and never see it. I searched for it long before I found it. It
is a tiny black mouse gnawing at the root of an oak; and some old
stone-worker put it in there six hundred years ago, because it was the
ancient emblem of the city. There was also a line of old saints and
apostles carved on the ends of the pews, that were fine; a Saint
Christopher with the child on his shoulder that I would have liked to
filch and carry away.
In the Jacobi Kirche--a church not quite so old--is a remarkable old
altar, which a rich burgomaster hit on the device of bestowing on the
church and immortalizing his own family in it at the same time. To
make it all right for the church, he had the scene of the crucifixion
carved in stone for the centre; then on the doors, which must be
thrown back to show this stone carving, he had himself and his family
painted. And I venture to say that the event justifies his
expectations; for one looks ten minutes at the burgomaster's sons and
daughters and wife for one at the stone carving inside. It is a family
group not to be forgotten,--the burgomaster and his five sons behind
him on one door, and his wife with her five daughters in front of her
on the other door. They are all kneeling, so as to seem to be adoring
the central figures,--all but the burgomaster's wife, who stands tall
and stately, stiff in gold brocade, with a missal in one hand and a
long feather in the other; a high cap of the same brocade, flying
sleeves at the shoulder, and a long bodice in front complete the
dame's array. Three of the daughters wear high foolscaps of white;
white robes trimmed with ermine, falling from the back of the neck,
thrown open to show fine scarlet gowns, with bodices laced over white,
and coming down nearly to their knees in front. Two little things in
long-sleeved dark-green gowns--"not out" yet, I suppose--kneel
modestly in front; and a nun and a saint or a Virgin Mary are thrown
into the group to make it holy. The burgomaster is in a black
fur-trimmed robe, kneeling with a book open before him,--the very
model of a Pharisee at family prayers,--his five sons kneeling behind
him in scarlet robes trimmed with dark fur.
The sacristan said something in German to Brita, which she instantly
translated to me as "Oh, ma'am, to think of it! They're all buried
here under our very feet, ma'am,--the whole family! And they'd to
leave all that finery behind them, didn't they, ma'am?" The thought of
their actual dust being under our feet at that moment seemed to make
the family portraits much more real. I dare say that burgomaster never
did anything worthy of being remembered in all his life; but he has
hit on a device which will secure him and his race a place in the
knowledge of men for centuries to come.
In the Rathhaus--which is one of the quaintest buildings in
Lubeck--there is an odd old chimney-piece. It is downstairs, in what
one would call vaults, except that they are used for the rooms of a
restaurant. It has been for centuries a Lubeck custom that when a
couple have been married in the Church of Saint Mary (which adjoins
the Rathhaus), they should come into this room to drink their first
winecup together; and, by way of giving a pleasant turn to things for
the bridegroom, the satirical old wood-carvers wrought a chimney-piece
for this room with a cock on one side, a hen on the other, the
Israelitish spies bearing the huge bunch of the over-rated grapes of
Eshcol between them, and in the centre below it this motto: "Many a
man sings loudly when they bring him his bride. If he knew what they
brought him, he might well weep." It is an odd thing how universally,
when this sort of slur upon marriage is aimed at, it is the man's
disappointment which is set forth or predicted, and not the woman's.
It is a very poor rule, no doubt; but it may at least be said to "work
both ways." There used to be an underground passage-way by which they
came from the church into this room, but it is shut up now. While we
sat waiting in the outer hall upstairs for the janitor to come and
show us this room, a bridal couple came down and passed out to their
carriage,--plain people of the working class. She wore a black alpaca
gown, and had no bridal sign or symptom about her, except the green
myrtle wreath on her head. But few brides look happier than she did.
The Rathhaus makes one side of the Market-place, which was, like all
market-places, picturesque at eleven in the morning, dirty and dismal
at four in the afternoon. I drove through it several times in the
course of the forenoon; and at last the women came to know me, and
nodded and smiled as we passed. Their hats were wonderful to
see,--cocked up on top of a neat white cap, with its frill all at the
back and none in front; the hats shaped--well, nobody could say how
they were shaped--like _half_ a washbowl bent up, with the little
round centre rim left in behind! I wonder if that gives an idea to
anybody who has not seen the hat. The real wonder, however, was not in
the shape, but in the material. They are made of wood,--actually of
wood,--split up into the finest threads, and sewed like straw; and the
women make them themselves. All the vegetable women had theirs bound
with bright green, with long green loops hanging down behind; but the
fishwomen had theirs bound with narrow black binding round the edge,
lined with purple calico, and with black ribbon at the back. Finally,
after staring a dozen of the good souls out of countenance looking at
their heads, I bought one of the bonnets outright! It was the cleanest
creature ever seen that sold it to me. She pulled it off her head, and
sold it as readily as she would have sold me a dozen eels out of her
basket; and I carried it on my arm all the way from Lubeck to Cassel,
and from Cassel to Munich, to the great bewilderment of many railway
officials and travellers. Before I had concluded my bargain there was
a crowd ten deep all around the carriage. Everybody--men, women,
children--left their baskets and stalls, and came to look on. I
believe I could have bought the entire wardrobe of the whole crowd, if
I had so wished,--so eager and pleased did they look, talking volubly
with each other, and looking at me. It was a great occasion for Brita,
who harangued them all by instalments from the front seat, and
explained to them that the bonnet was going all the way to America,
and that her "lady" had a great liking for all "national" things,
which touched one old lady's patriotism so deeply that she pulled off
her white cap and offered it to me, making signs that my wooden bonnet
was incomplete without the cap, as it certainly was. On Brita's
delicately calling her attention to the fact that her cap was far
from clean, she said she would go home and wash it and flute it
afresh, if the lady would only buy it; and three hours later she
actually appeared with it most exquisitely done up, and not at all
dear for the half-dollar she asked for it. After buying this bonnet I
drove back to the hotel with it, ate my lunch in the oleander-shaded
porch, and then set off again to see the cathedral. This proved to me
a far more interesting church than Saint Mary's, though the
guide-books say that Saint Mary's is far the finer church of the two.
There is enough ugliness in both of them, for that matter, to sink
them. But in the cathedral there are some superb bronzes and brasses,
and a twisted iron railing around the pulpit, which is so marvellous
in its knottings and twistings that a legend has arisen that the devil
made it.
"How very much they seem to have made of the devil in the olden time,
ma'am, do they not?" remarked Brita, entirely unconscious of the fact
that she was philosophizing; "wherever we have been, there have been
so many things named in his honor!"
The clock in this church has not been deemed worthy of mention in the
guide-books; but it seemed to me far more wonderful than the one at
Saint Mary's. I shall never forget it as long as I live; in fact, I
fear I shall live to wish I could. The centre of the dial plate is a
huge face of gilt, with gilt rays streaming out from it; two enormous
eyes in this turn from side to side as the clock ticks, right, left,
right, left, so far each time that it is a squint,--a horrible,
malignant, diabolical squint. It seems almost irreverent even to tell
you that this is to symbolize the never-closing eye of God. The
uncanny fascination of these rolling eyes cannot be described. It is
too hideous to look at, yet you cannot look away. I sat spellbound in
a pew under it for a long time. On the right hand of the clock stands
a figure representing the "Genius of Time." This figure holds a gold
hammer in its hand, and strikes the quarter-hours. On the other side
stands Death,--a naked skeleton,--with an hour-glass. At each hour he
turns his hour-glass, shakes his head, and with a hammer in his right
hand strikes the hour. I heard him strike "three," and I confess a
superstitious horror affected me. The thought of a congregation of
people sitting Sunday after Sunday looking at those rolling eyes, and
seeing that skeleton strike the hour and turn his hour-glass, is
monstrous. Surely there was an epidemic in those middle ages of
hideous and fantastic inventions. I am not at all sure that it has not
stamped its impress on the physiognomy of the German nation. I never
see a crowd of Germans at a railway station without seeing in dozens
of faces resemblance to ugly gargoyles. And why should it not have
told on them? The women of old Greece brought forth beautiful sons and
daughters, it is said, because they looked always on beautiful statues
and pictures. The German women have been for a thousand years looking
at grotesque and leering or coarse and malignant gargoyles carved
everywhere,--on the gateways of their cities, in their churches, on
the very lintels of their houses. Why should not the German face have
been slowly moulded by these prenatal influences?
Above this malevolent clock was a huge scaffold beam, crossing the
entire width of the church, and supporting four huge figures, carved
with some skill; the most immodest Adam and Eve I ever beheld; a
bishop and a Saint John and a Mary,--these latter kneeling in
adoration of a crucifixion above. The whole combination--the guilty
Adam and Eve, the pompous bishop, the repulsive crucifixion, the
puppet clock with its restless eyes and skeleton, and the loud
tick-tock, tick-tock, of the pendulum,--all made up a scene of
grotesqueness and irreverence mingled with superstition and devotion,
such as could not be found anywhere except in a German church of the
twelfth century. It was a relief to turn from it and go into the
little chapel, where stands the altar-piece made sacred as well as
famous by the hands of that tender spiritual painter, Memling. These
altar-pieces look at first sight so much like decorated wardrobes that
it is jarring. I wish they had fashioned them otherwise. In this one,
for instance, it is almost a pain to see on the outside doors of what
apparently is a cupboard one of Memling's angels (the Gabriel) and the
Mary listening to his message. Throwing these doors back, you see
life-size figures of four saints,--John, Jerome, Blasius, and Ægidius.
The latter is a grand dark figure, with a head and face to haunt one.
Opening these doors again, you come to the last,--a landscape with the
crucifixion in the foreground, and other scenes from the Passion of
the Saviour. This is less distinctively Memling-like; in fact, the
only ones of them all which one would be willing to say positively no
man's hand but Memling's had touched, are the two tender angels in
white on the outside shutters.
We left Lubeck very early in the morning. As we drove to the station,
the milkmen and milkwomen were coming in, in their pretty carts, full
of white wooden firkins, brass bound, with queer long spouts out on
one side; brass measures of different sizes, and brass dippers, all
shining as if they had been fresh scoured that very morning, made the
carts a pretty spectacle. And the last thing of all which I stopped to
look at in Lubeck was the best of all,--an old house with a turreted
bay-window on the corner, and this inscription on the front between
the first and second stories of the house:--
"North and south, the world is wide:
East and west, home is best."
It was in Platt Deutsch; and oddly enough, the servant of the house,
who was at the door, did not know what it meant; and the first two men
we asked did not know what it meant,--stared at it stupidly, shrugged
their shoulders, and shook their heads. It was a lovely motto for a
house, but not a good one for wanderers away from home to look at. It
brought a sudden sense of homesickness, like an odor of a flower or a
bar of music which has an indissoluble link with home.
It took a whole day to go from Lubeck to Cassel, but the day did not
seem long. It was a series of pictures, and poor Brita's raptures over
it all were at once amusing and pathetic. As soon as we began to see
elevated ground, she became excited. "Oh, oh, ma'am," she exclaimed,
"talk about scenery in Denmark! It is too flat. I am so used to the
flat country, the least hill is beautiful." "Do you not call this
grand?" she would say, at the sight of a hill a hundred or two feet
high. It was a good lesson of the meaning of the word _relative_.
After all, one can hardly conceive what it must be to live sixty-four
years on a dead level of flatness. A genuine mountain would probably
be a terror to a person who had led such a life. Brita's face, when I
told her that I lived at the foot of mountains more than twelve times
as high as any she had seen, was a study for incredulity and wonder. I
think she thought I was lying. It was the hay harvest. All the way
from Lubeck to Cassel were men and women, all hard at work in the
fields; the women swung their scythes as well as the men, but looked
more graceful while raking. Some wore scarlet handkerchiefs over their
heads, some white; all had bare legs well in sight. At noon we saw
them in groups on the ground, and towards night walking swiftly along
the roads, with their rakes over their shoulders. I do not understand
why travellers make such a to-do always about the way women work in
the fields in Germany. I am sure they are far less to be pitied than
the women who work in narrow, dark, foul streets of cities; and they
look a thousand times healthier. Our road lay for many hours through a
beautiful farm country: red brick houses and barns with high thatched
roofs, three quarters of the whole building being thatched roof; great
sweeps of meadow, tracts of soft pines, kingdoms of beeches,--the
whole forest looking like a rich yellow brown moss in the distance,
and their mottled trunks fairly shining out in the cross sunbeams, as
if painted; wide stretches of brown opens, with worn paths leading off
across them; hedges everywhere, and never a fence or a wall;
mountain-ash trees, scarlet full; horse-chestnuts by orchards; towns
every few minutes, and our train halting at them all long enough for
the whole town to make up their minds whether they could go or not,
pack their bags, and come on board; bits of marsh, with labyrinths of
blue water in and out in it, so like tongues of the sea that,
forgetting where I was, I said, "I wonder if that is fresh water." "It
must be, ma'am," replied the observant Brita, "inasmuch as the white
lilies are floating beautiful and large in it."
"Oh," she suddenly ejaculated, "how strange it was! Napoleon III. he
thought he would get a good bit of this beautiful Germany for a
birthday present, and be in Berlin on his birthday; and instead of
that the Prussians were in Berlin on his birthday."
At Lüneburg we came into the heather. I thought I knew heather, but I was
to discover my mistake. All the heather of my life heretofore--English,
Scotch, Norwegian--had been no more than a single sprig by the side
of this. "The dreary Lüneburg Heath," the discriminating Baedeker
calls it. The man who wrote that phrase must have been not only
color-blind, he must have been color-dead! If a mountain is "dreary"
when it turns purple pink or pink purple five minutes before the
rising sun is going to flash full on its eastern front, then the
Lüneburg Heath is "dreary." Acres of heather, miles of heather; miles
after miles, hour after hour, of swift railroad riding, and still
heather! The purple and the pink and the browns into which the purple
and pink blended and melted, shifted every second, and deepened and
paled in the light and the shadow, as if the earth itself were gently
undulating. Two or three times, down vistas among the low birches, I
saw men up to their knees in the purple, apparently reaping it with a
sickle. A German lady in the car explained that they cut it to strew
in the sheep-stalls for the sheep to sleep on, and that the sheep ate
it: bed, bed-blanket, and breakfast all in one! Who would not be a
sheep? Here and there were little pine groves in this heath; the pine
and the birch being the only trees which can keep any footing against
heather when it sets out to usurp a territory, and even they cannot
grow large or freely. Three storks rose from these downs as we passed,
and flew slowly away, their great yellow feet shining as if they had
on gold slippers.
"The country people reckon it a great blessing, ma'am, if a stork will
build its nest on their roof," said Brita. "I dare say it is thought
so in America the same." "No, Brita, we have no storks in America," I
said. "I dare say some other bird, then, you hold the same," she
replied, in a tone so taking it for granted that no nation of people
could be without its sacred domestic bird that I was fain to fall back
on the marten as our nearest approach to such a bird; and I said
boastfully that we built houses for them in our yards, that they never
built on roofs.
At Celle, when she caught sight of the castle where poor Caroline
Matilda died, she exclaimed, "Oh, ma'am, that is where our poor queen
died. It was the nasty Queen Dowager did it; it was, indeed, ma'am.
And the king had opened the ball with her that very night that he
signed the order to send her away. They took her in her ball-dress,
just as she was. If they had waited till morning the Danes would have
torn her out of the wagon, for they worshipped her. She screamed for
her baby, and they just tossed it to her in the wagon; and she was
only twenty."
Pages of guide-book could not have so emphasized the tragedy of that
old gray castle as did Brita's words and her tearful eyes, and "nasty
old Queen Dowager." I suppose the truth will never be known about that
poor young queen; history whiffles round so from century to century
that it seems hardly worth while to mind about it. At any rate, it
can't matter much to either Caroline or Struensee, her lover, now.
Cassel at nine o'clock. Friendly faces and voices and hands, and the
very air of America in every room. It was like a dream; and like a
dream vanished, after twenty-four hours of almost unceasing talk and
reminiscence and interchange. "Blessings brighten," even more than
"when they take their flight," when they pause in their flight long
enough for us to come up with them and take another look at them.
Cassel is the healthiest town in all Germany; and when you see it you
do not wonder. High and dry and clear, and several hundred feet up
above the plain, it has off-looks to wide horizons in all directions.
To the east and south are beautiful curves of high hills, called
mountains here; thickly wooded, so that they make solid spaces of
color, dark green or purple or blue, according to the time calendar of
colors of mountains at a distance. (They have their time-tables as
fixed as railway trains, and much more to be depended on.) There is no
town in Germany which can compare with Cassel as a home for people
wishing to educate children cheaply and well, and not wishing to live
in the fashions and ways and close air of cities. It has a
picture-gallery second to only one in Germany; it has admirable
museums of all sorts; it has a first-rate theatre; good masters in all
branches of study are to be had at low rates; living is cheap and
comfortable (for Germany). The water is good; the climate also (for
Germany); and last, not least, the surrounding country is full of
picturesque scenery,--woods, high hills, streams; just such a region
as a lover of Nature finds most repaying and enjoyable. In the matter
of society, also, Cassel is especially favored, having taken its tone
from the days of the Electors, and keeping still much of the old fine
breeding of culture and courtesy.