Visit in London.—Exhibition of Relics.—The Lessons of
Travel.—Historical Association.—London to Ostend.—The Cathedral
at Aix-la-Chapelle.—The Great Cathedral at Cologne.—Voyage up
the Rhine.—Longfellow’s “Hyperion.”—Visit to Frankfort.—Kind
Friends.—Reaches Heidelberg.—Climbing the Mountains.
London is a world in itself, as has often been written and, to such an
impressible mind as that of Bayard, was a place, replete with pleasure
and instruction. London instructs by two methods; one by agreeable, and
the other by disagreeable examples. Bayard was equally taught by both.
There was Westminster Abbey, with its numberless tombs of the talented
and noble; and there was the Tower of London, with its dungeons and
beheading blocks. There were the palatial residences of the West End,
and there the hovels and holes of the Wych Street district. There were
the great mercantile houses of Holborn and Regent Street, and there were
the gambling dens of Drury Lane. There were the magnificent galleries of
art, at the Museum, at the Palaces, at Westminster, and at Kensington;
and there were the dirty, slimy exhibitions of marred humanity along the
wharves of the Thames. There were the zoölogical wonders of the parks,
and there were the dog-shows, and cock-pits of the St. Giles Rookery.
There was the palace of the Queen, and there the Old Bailey. There was
the office of the “Thunderer” (Daily Times), and there were the attics
from whence flowed the vilest trash that man ever printed. There were
Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, St. James Park, and the broad squares; and
there were the filthy alleys and narrow lanes about London Bridge. There
were the Rothschilds, and there the poor Micawbers and deserted Nicholas
Nicklebys. The richest, the poorest, the best, the worst; the most
cultivated, and the most ignorant; the most powerful monarch, and the
most degraded fishmongers. Extremes! Extremes that meet in everything
there. They all instruct by teaching the beholder what he ought to be,
and what he ought not to be. One sees much in London that ought not
to have been; and, strange to relate, many of the relics connected
with such things, are exhibited with great pride. If there is any one
thing above all others, for which the American should be thankful, it
is for the fact that the dungeon, the rack, the wheel, the thumbscrew,
the guillotine, the gibbet, the headsman’s block, the deadly hates of
royalty, the cruelty of kings, and the jealousy of queens, have no
place in the history of the Republic of the West. Yet there, somehow,
the officials and guides who open to the public the records of the past
and show visitors their institutions, give the most prominent places to
deeds of horrid cruelty and shameless murders, as if they took pride
in such fearful annals. It would seem as if, had our rulers butchered
in cold blood their sons and daughters; had they cruelly starved their
friends and relatives, we in America would be ashamed of it. It would be
regarded as very natural here, if an ancestor was hung and quartered and
his head carried about on a pole, to speak of it as seldom as possible.
It would appear consistent if, had our national government oppressed the
weak, degraded the poor, killed inoffensive captives, and, for selfish
ambition, laid waste the cities and fields of an innocent people, we
should attempt to bury the remembrance of those deeds so deep as to
make a resurrection impossible. But there, in Europe, they appear to
revel in the hideous doings of their ancestors, and will show you where
human heads or bands were exhibited, and where noble men and women were
persecuted to martyrdom, with the air of the circus manager who announces
the clown. Who can hear the guide on London Bridge, “Here was posted the
bleeding head of Sir William Wallace, the Scotch warrior and patriot,
while the quarters of his body were at Stirling, Berwick, Perth, and
Newcastle,” and not curse, with the deepest feeling, the people who
murdered one of the greatest and best of men?
[Illustration: TOWER OF LONDON.]
It is clear that these things made a strong impression upon Bayard, for
we find him more frequently and more decidedly praising his own land, as
he saw more and more of Europe. He saw, also, many of the advantages
which European nations enjoy in art, literature, and commerce, and
failed not to suggest them to his readers. But, unlike those shallow
tourists, who would ape European manners, and think all European
institutions should be at once imported here, his patriotic regard for
the institutions and people of his own land, increased with the desire
to benefit them. How reverently he speaks of George Washington; how
touchingly does he speak with the European peasants who accost him, of
the home of the free beyond the great ocean.
A whole week those young men searched the great city for valuable
information. They slept and ate in the rudest of taverns, and tramped the
city with the workmen and the beggars, but they were gathering the forces
for a useful life. Bayard was filled with the sublimity of the mighty
human torrent that, like a tide, rolls into London in the morning, dashes
about the highways during the day, and surges outward at night. He felt
the grandeur of St. Paul’s, the conflicting and exciting associations
of Westminster, the marvellous feat of tunnelling under the Thames, the
enormous wealth of churches, monuments, halls, and galleries, and carried
away with him to the Continent a very complete idea of the institutions
and the queer customs of the great metropolis.
From London, the party proceeded to Dover, and from thence to Ostend
and Bruges. They travelled in the cheapest manner, walking wherever
practicable, and going from Bruges to Ghent in a canal-boat, thence by
railroad across the border to Aix-la-Chapelle. Here was another treat.
The description which he gave in his letters of his visit to the old
Cathedral, where rest the remains of Charlemagne, was one of the most
vivid recitals to be found in the annals of travel. For some reason, he
so abridged it in his book, as to take away the finest and most original
delineations. Every reader of his first narration, who may never have
visited Aix-la-Chapelle, can in imagination see the old Cathedral, with
its shrines, its antique windows, and the shadows of saints on the
floor, and hear the sweet undulations of the organ’s solemn peal. While
to the traveller who follows him through those aisles, and under those
magnificent arches, his words give life and language to the pillars,
altars, and luminous decorations. To the least poetic or sentimental
of travellers, it is a solemn place; and if so to them, how deep and
impressive must it have been to a soul so full of emotion as that of
Bayard! There he wrote his well-known poem, “The Tomb of Charlemagne.”
This grand old pile was succeeded next day by the great Gothic Cathedral,
at Cologne, which was not then finished, is not now completed, and will
never see the end of the mason’s labors, because the time taken in the
construction is so long that the very stone decays, and must be replaced
at the base by the time the delicate tracery of the towers is set on
those skyward heights. The structure must be constantly in process
of reconstruction, from the bottom, upwards. When Bayard looked upon
this wonderful building, which since 1248 had been in an uncompleted
state, two hundred and fifty years having been spent in active labor,
he said it impressed him most deeply, by way of comparison. Two hundred
and forty years before America was discovered, the foundations of that
church were laid, and here they are working on it still! By such lessons
is an American made to know his place in the history of the world. Had
the history of these old lands been less barbarous and cruel, we should
feel humble indeed. But in view of what the old folks have done, we may
be thankful that we are young, and have our record yet to write. But
the fact that we are not so old, so great, so artistic, or so cultured
as we have flattered ourselves, is wholesome information, and as taught
by these old Cathedrals of Europe, is very necessary to the success of
our young men. How deeply these things moved Bayard, is seen by the very
frequent mention we find in his writings, of aisle, or arch, or dome, or
spire.
But one of the most attractive spots to that young voyager, in all his
wanderings in Europe, he saw while going up the Rhine, from Cologne to
Mayence. He viewed with satisfaction the vineyards and villages along
the banks; he was charmed with the crags and crumbling towers of the
innumerable old castles which ornament the tops of all the most prominent
hills and mountains. The walled cities, the legendary caves and grottos,
the most exquisite fables that account for the miraculous construction of
cliff, and convent, and crusaders’ halls, all came upon him as he glided
by them on the muddy river, as dreams come to the drinker of hashish. But
beyond all these in interest to our young wanderer, was the little walled
town of Boppart, whose feudal history is nearly lost, but whose romantic
connection with Longfellow’s “Hyperion,” has given it a fresh lease of
life. Bayard there recalled his life at home, and his days of anxious
waiting; for, had not this same “Hyperion,” with entrancing interest,
spurred on his hope to one day travel along the Rhine? Had not this same
“Hyperion” given the impulse that started his cousin on such a great
journey to the university at Heidelberg? And were not those houses in the
town of Boppart, and was not that cottage the very Inn of the “Star,” and
might not that woman, near the shore, be “Paul Flemming’s” boatwoman? Oh!
grand and revered Longfellow! when we note how many a life, like these,
has turned upon the reading of your inspired words, one feels as if to
have seen your face and heard your voice, and to have been beneath the
same roof, was an honor greater than kings could bestow!
But Boppart, Lurlei Berg, Oberwisel, Bingen, and Geisenheim were soon
left behind, and Mayence, with its Cathedral six centuries old, its walls
and fortresses, welcomed them to its monotonous shades.
A beautiful trait of Bayard’s character comes gracefully into view as we
read his grateful acknowledgments of the kindnesses he received. On his
first walk in his apprentice days, in Pennsylvania, having determined to
see some mountains, although he had to walk two hundred miles to view
them, he was kindly served at a well, on the way, by a farmer’s girl,
who cheerfully drew the bucket from the well and ran for a glass, that
he, a dusty, thirsty stranger, might drink without further fatigue; and
in his later years he records the fact in his book, with the sweetest
expressions of thankfulness. So when he arrived at Frankfort, and was
kindly received and entertained by Mr. Richard S. Willis, the American
consul, brother of Bayard’s old friend, Nathaniel P. Willis, he sits
down at once, and in his letters to his friends, and in his public
correspondence, he speaks of the generosity and thoughtfulness of his
old friend, and the hospitable and cultured characteristics of his
new friend. They were noble friends, who made for him a home at their
fireside in Frankfort, and deserve the thanks of every admirer of Bayard
Taylor. His thanks they had throughout a long life, and not only thanks,
but grateful deeds.
It was Bayard’s purpose to go to Heidelberg, with his cousin, and give
himself to close study, at the University, or with private tutors;
but just how he was going to obtain the means to pay his expenses was
something of an enigma. It may be that his good fortune in the outset
made him too confident and careless in regard to other undertakings.
At all events, his stay in Heidelberg was much shorter than he had
at first intended that it should be, and his studies were much more
broken and superficial than his letters show he thought they would be.
He was not constituted for close, hard, metaphysical study, and made
but little attempts in that direction, after he arrived at Heidelberg.
He loved the grand old Castle better than the whittled benches of the
University. He enjoyed the Kaisersthul and the lesser mountains, far more
than the monotonous recital of German theories. The river Neckar called
him in its murmurs, the clouds beckoned to him as they flew over the
Heligen Berg, the wind called for him as it sighed around the vineyards
of Ziegelhausen, and all thoughts of private, quiet study fled at the
summons. So he climbed the mountains. It was always a passion with him
to gain an altitude as high as possible, and look out upon the world. He
tells how, when a boy, he ventured out of a chamber window in the old
farm-house at Kennett, and seeing a row of slats which the carpenters had
used for steps in ascending the roof, he sallied forth, and there astride
of the roof, gained his first view of a landscape. He said afterward,
that the roof appeared to be so high and the view so extensive, that he
imagined he could see Niagara Falls. Whether this inclination to climb up
came to him through the stories of his old Swiss nurse, whose bed-time
stories were of the mighty Alps and their towering cones, or whether it
was an hereditary trait in his nature, none may be able to decide. He was
certainly prone to go upwards, and had a tendency, for horizontal motion
equally as strong. He would not remain stationary; hence, at Heidelberg,
he inspected every nook and crevice of the picturesque old Castle,
crouched through its conduits, rapped its ponderous tun, scaled its
roofless and crumbling walls, rushed into the recesses of the adjacent
thickets, and tested the celebrated beer at the students’ resorts. He
joined excursion parties which visited the neighboring mountains, and
after he had been there a month, he knew the fields, rocks, trees,
valleys, dells, and peaks, as well as a native, and appears to have loved
them with a patriotic regard almost equal to the eldest burgher.