Gratz—Vienna.
We had followed stream after stream through a succession of delicious
valleys for a hundred miles. Descending from a slight eminence, we came
upon the broad and rapid Muhr, and soon after caught sight of a distant
citadel upon a rock. As we approached, it struck me as one of the most
singular freaks of nature I had ever seen. A pyramid, perhaps three
hundred feet in height, and precipitous on every side, rose abruptly in
the midst of a broad and level plain, and around it in a girdle of
architecture, lay the capital of Styria. The fortress on the summit hung
like an eagle’s nest over the town, and from its towers, a pistol-shot
would reach the outermost point of the wall.
Wearied with travelling near three hundred miles without sleep, I
dropped upon a bed at the hotel, with an order to be called in two
hours. It was noon, and we were to remain at Gratz till the next
morning. My friend, the Hungarian, had promised, as he threw himself on
the opposite bed, to wake and accompany me in a walk through the town,
but the shake of a stout German chambermaid at the appointed time had no
effect upon him, and I descended to my dinner alone. I had lost my
interpreter. The _carte_ was in German, of which I did not know even the
letters. After appealing in vain in French and Italian to the persons
eating near me, I fixed my finger at hazard upon a word, and the waiter
disappeared. The result was a huge dish of cabbage cooked in some filthy
oil and graced with a piece of beef. I was hesitating whether to dine on
bread or make another attempt, when a gentlemanly man of some fifty
years came in and took the vacant seat at my table. He addressed me
immediately in French, and smiling at my difficulties, undertook to
order a dinner for me something less national. We improved our
acquaintance with a bottle of Johannesburgh, and after dinner he kindly
offered to accompany me in my walk through the city.
Gratz is about the size of Boston, a plain German city, with little or
no pretensions to style. The military band was playing a difficult waltz
very beautifully in the public square, but no one was listening except a
group of young men dressed in the worst taste of dandyism. We mounted by
a zigzag path to the fortress. On a shelf of the precipice, half way up,
hangs a small casino, used as a beer-shop. The view from the summit was
a feast to the eye. The wide and lengthening valley of the Muhr lay
asleep beneath its loads of grain, its villas and farm-houses, the
picture of “waste and mellow fruitfulness,” the rise to the mountains
around the head of the valley was clustered with princely dwellings,
thick forests with glades between them, and churches with white slender
spires shooting from the bosom of elms, and right at our feet, circling
around the precipitous rock for protection, lay the city enfolded in its
rampart, and sending up to our ears the sound of every wheel that rolled
through her streets. Among the striking buildings below, my friend
pointed out to me a palace which he said had been lately purchased by
Joseph Bonaparte, who was coming here to reside. The people were
beginning to turn out for their evening walk upon the ramparts which are
planted with trees and laid out for a promenade, and we descended to
mingle in the crowd.
My old friend had a great many acquaintances. He presented me to several
of the best dressed people we met, all of whom invited me to supper. I
had been in Italy almost a year and a half, and such a thing had never
happened to me. We walked about until six, and as I preferred going to
the play, which opened at that early hour, we took tickets for “Der
Schlimme Leisel,” and were seated presently in one of the simplest and
prettiest theatres I have ever seen.
“Der Schlimme Leisel” was an old maid who kept house for an old bachelor
brother, proposing, at the time the play opens, to marry. Her dislike to
the match, from the dread of losing her authority over his household,
formed the humour of the piece, and was admirably represented. After
various unsuccessful attempts to prevent the nuptials, the lady is
brought to the house, and the old maid enters in a towering passion,
throws down her keys, and flirts out of the room with a threat that she
“_will go to America!_” Fortunately she is not driven to that extremity.
The lady has been already married secretly to a poorer lover, and the
old bachelor, after the first shock of the discovery, settles a fortune
on them, and returns to his celibacy and his old maid sister, to the
satisfaction of all parties. Certainly the German is the most unmusical
language of Babel. If my good old friend had not translated it for me
word for word, I should scarce have believed the play to be more than a
gibbering pantomime. I shall think differently when I have learned it,
no doubt, but a strange language strikes upon one’s ear so oddly! I was
quite too tired when the play was over (which, by the way, was at the
sober hour of nine,) to accept any of the kind invitations of which my
companion reminded me. We supped _tête-à-tête_, instead, at the hotel. I
was delighted with my new acquaintance. He was an old citizen of the
world. He had left Gratz at twenty, and after thirty years wandering
from one part of the globe to the other, had returned to end his days in
his birthplace. His relations were all dead, and speaking all the
languages of Europe, he preferred living at a hotel for the society of
strangers. With a great deal of wisdom he had preserved his good humour
toward the world; and I think I have rarely seen a kinder, and never a
happier man. I parted from him with regret, and the next morning at
daylight, had resumed my seat at the _eil-wagon_.
Imagine the Hudson, at the highlands, reduced to a sparkling little
river a bowshot across, and a rich valley thridded by a road
accompanying the remaining space between the mountains, and you have the
scenery for the first thirty miles beyond Gratz. There is one more
difference. On the edge of one of the most towering precipices, clear up
against the clouds, hang the ruins of a noble castle. The rents in the
wall, and the embrasures in the projecting turrets, seem set into the
sky. Trees and vines grow within and about it, and the lacings of the
twisted roots seem all that keep it together. It is a perfect “castle in
the air.”
A long day’s journey and another long night (during which we passed
Neustadt, on the confines of Hungary) brought us within sight of Baden,
but an hour or two from Vienna. It was just sunrise, and market-carts
and pedestrians and suburban vehicles of all descriptions notified us of
our approach to a great capital. A few miles farther we were stopped in
the midst of an extensive plain by a crowd of carriages. A criminal was
about being guillotined. What was that to one who saw Vienna for the
first time? A few steps farther the postillion was suddenly stopped. A
gentleman alighted from a carriage in which were two ladies, and opened
the door of the diligence. It was the bride of the soldier-apothecary
come to meet him with her mother and brother. He was buried in dust,
just waked out of sleep, a three days’ beard upon his face, and, at the
best, not a very lover-like person. He ran to the carriage door, jumped
in, and there was an immediate cry for water. The bride had fainted! We
left her in his arms and drove on. The courier had no bowels for love.
There is a small Gothic pillar before us, on the rise of a slight
elevation. Thence we shall see Vienna. “Stop, thou tasteless
postillion!” Was ever such a scene revealed to mortal sight! It is like
Paris from the Barrière de l’Etoile—it seems to cover the world. Oh,
beautiful Vienna! What is that broad water on which the rising sun
glances so brightly? _The Danube!_ What is that unparalleled Gothic
structure piercing the sky? What columns are these? What spires?
Beautiful, beautiful city!
* * * * *
VIENNA.—It must be a fine city that impresses one with its splendour
before breakfast, after driving all night in a mail-coach. It was six
o’clock in the morning when I left the post-office, in Vienna, to walk
to a hotel. The shops were still shut, the milkwomen were beating at the
gates, and the short, quick ring upon the church bells summoned all
early risers to mass. A sudden turn brought me upon a square. In its
centre stood the most beautiful fabric that has ever yet filled my eye.
It looked like the structure of a giant, encrusted with fairies—a
majestically proportioned mass, and a spire tapering to the clouds, but
a surface so curiously beautiful, so traced and fretted, so full of
exquisite ornament, that it seemed rather some curious cabinet gem, seen
through a magnifier, than a building in the open air. In these foreign
countries, the labourer goes in with his load to pray, and I did not
hesitate to enter the splendid Church of St. Etienne, though a man
followed me with a portmanteau on his back. What a wilderness of arches!
Pulpits, chapels, altars, ciboriums, confessionals, choirs, all in the
exquisite slenderness of Gothic tracery, and all of one venerable and
time-worn dye, as if the incense of a myriad censers had steeped them in
their spicy odours. The mass was chanting, and hundreds were on their
knees about me, and not one without some trace that he had come in on
his way to his daily toil. It was the hour of the _poor man’s prayer_.
The rich were asleep in their beds. The glorious roof over their heads,
the costly and elaborated pillars against which they pressed their
foreheads, the music and the priestly service, were, for that hour,
theirs alone.