THE DANE. Vat imagination! vat language! vat vast science! and vat eyes!

vat a milk-vite forehead! O my heafen! vy, you’re a Got!

ANSWER. You do me too much honour, Sir.

THE DANE. O me! if you should dink I is flattering you!--No, no, no! I

haf ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand pound

a year! Vel--and vat is dhat? a mere trifle! I ’ouldn’t gif my sincere

heart for ten times dhe money. Yes, you’re a Got! I a mere man! But, my

dear friend! dhink of me, as a man! Is, is--I mean to ask you now, my

dear friend--is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak English very fine?

ANSWER. Most admirably! Believe me, Sir! I have seldom heard even a

native talk so fluently.

THE DANE. (Squeezing my hand with great vehemence.) My dear friend! vat

an affection and fidelity ve have for each odher! But tell me, do tell

me,--Is I not, now and den, speak some fault? Is I not in some wrong?

ANSWER. Why, Sir! perhaps it might be observed by nice critics in the

English language, that you occasionally use the word “is” instead of

“am.” In our best companies we generally say I am, and not I is or I’se.

Excuse me, Sir! it is a mere trifle.

THE DANE. O!--is, is, am, am, am. Yes, yes--I know, I know.

ANSWER. I am, thou art, he is, we are, ye are, they are.

THE DANE. Yes, yes,--I know, I know--Am, am, am, is dhe praesens, and is

is dhe perfectum--yes, yes--and are is dhe plusquam perfectum.

ANSWER. And art, Sir! is--?

THE DANE. My dear friend! it is dhe plusquam perfectum, no, no--dhat

is a great lie; are is dhe plusquam perfectum--and art is dhe plasquam

plue-perfectum--(then swinging my hand to and fro, and cocking his

little bright hazel eyes at me, that danced with vanity and wine)--You

see, my dear friend that I too have some lehrning?

ANSWER. Learning, Sir? Who dares suspect it? Who can listen to you for a

minute, who can even look at you, without perceiving the extent of it?

THE DANE. My dear friend!--(then with a would-be humble look, and in a

tone of voice as if he was reasoning) I could not talk so of prawns and

imperfectum, and futurum and plusquamplue perfectum, and all dhat, my

dear friend! without some lehrning?

ANSWER. Sir! a man like you cannot talk on any subject without

discovering the depth of his information.

THE DANE. Dhe grammatic Greek, my friend; ha! ha! Ha! (laughing, and

swinging my hand to and fro--then with a sudden transition to great

solemnity) Now I will tell you, my dear friend! Dhere did happen about

me vat de whole historia of Denmark record no instance about nobody

else. Dhe bishop did ask me all dhe questions about all dhe religion in

dhe Latin grammar.

ANSWER. The grammar, Sir? The language, I presume--

THE DANE. (A little offended.) Grammar is language, and language is

grammar--

ANSWER. Ten thousand pardons!

THE DANE. Vell, and I was only fourteen years--

ANSWER. Only fourteen years old?

THE DANE. No more. I vas fourteen years old--and he asked me all

questions, religion and philosophy, and all in dhe Latin language--and I

answered him all every one, my dear friend! all in dhe Latin language.

ANSWER. A prodigy! an absolute prodigy!

THE DANE. No, no, no! he was a bishop, a great superintendent.

ANSWER. Yes! a bishop.

THE DANE. A bishop--not a mere predicant, not a prediger.

ANSWER. My dear Sir! we have misunderstood each other. I said that your

answering in Latin at so early an age was a prodigy, that is, a thing

that is wonderful; that does not often happen.

THE DANE. Often! Dhere is not von instance recorded in dhe whole

historia of Denmark.

ANSWER. And since then, Sir--?

THE DANE. I was sent ofer to dhe Vest Indies--to our Island, and dhere I

had no more to do vid books. No! no! I put my genius anodher way--and

I haf made ten tousand pound a year. Is not dhat ghenius, my dear

friend?--But vat is money?--I dhink dhe poorest man alive my equal.

Yes, my dear friend; my little fortune is pleasant to my generous heart,

because I can do good--no man with so little a fortune ever did so much

generosity--no person--no man person, no woman person ever denies it.

But we are all Got’s children.

Here the Hanoverian interrupted him, and the other Dane, the Swede, and

the Prussian, joined us, together with a young Englishman who spoke the

German fluently, and interpreted to me many of the Prussian’s jokes. The

Prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of threescore, a hale

man, tall, strong, and stout, full of stories, gesticulations, and

buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a mountebank, who,

while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid all his droll

looks and droll gestures, there remained one look untouched by laughter;

and that one look was the true face, the others were but its mask. The

Hanoverian was a pale, fat, bloated young man, whose father had made a

large fortune in London, as an army-contractor. He seemed to emulate

the manners of young Englishmen of fortune. He was a good-natured

fellow, not without information or literature; but a most egregious

coxcomb. He had been in the habit of attending the House of Commons, and

had once spoken, as he informed me, with great applause in a debating

society. For this he appeared to have qualified himself with laudable

industry: for he was perfect in Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary, and

with an accent, which forcibly reminded me of the Scotchman in Roderic

Random, who professed to teach the English pronunciation, he was

constantly deferring to my superior judgment, whether or no I had

pronounced this or that word with propriety, or “the true delicacy.”

When he spoke, though it were only half a dozen sentences, he always

rose: for which I could detect no other motive, than his partiality

to that elegant phrase so liberally introduced in the orations of

our British legislators, “While I am on my legs.” The Swede, whom

for reasons that will soon appear, I shall distinguish by the name

of Nobility, was a strong-featured, scurvy-faced man, his complexion

resembling in colour, a red hot poker beginning to cool. He appeared

miserably dependent on the Dane; but was, however, incomparably the

best informed and most rational of the party. Indeed his manners

and conversation discovered him to be both a man of the world and a

gentleman. The Jew was in the hold: the French gentleman was lying on

the deck so ill, that I could observe nothing concerning him, except the

affectionate attentions of his servant to him. The poor fellow was very

sick himself, and every now and then ran to the side of the vessel,

still keeping his eye on his master, but returned in a moment and seated

himself again by him, now supporting his head, now wiping his forehead

and talking to him all the while in the most soothing tones. There

had been a matrimonial squabble of a very ludicrous kind in the cabin,

between the little German tailor and his little wife. He had secured two

beds, one for himself and one for her. This had struck the little woman

as a very cruel action; she insisted upon their having but one, and

assured the mate in the most piteous tones, that she was his lawful

wife. The mate and the cabin boy decided in her favour, abused the

little man for his want of tenderness with much humour, and hoisted

him into the same compartment with his sea-sick wife. This quarrel was

interesting to me, as it procured me a bed, which I otherwise should not

have had.

In the evening, at seven o’clock, the sea rolled higher, and the Dane,

by means of the greater agitation, eliminated enough of what he had been

swallowing to make room for a great deal more. His favourite potation

was sugar and brandy, i.e. a very little warm water with a large

quantity of brandy, sugar, and nutmeg His servant boy, a black-eyed

Mulatto, had a good-natured round face, exactly the colour of the skin

of the walnut-kernel. The Dane and I were again seated, tete-a-tete,

in the ship’s boat. The conversation, which was now indeed rather an

oration than a dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that I ever

heard. He told me that he had made a large fortune in the island of

Santa Cruz, and was now returning to Denmark to enjoy it. He expatiated

on the style in which he meant to live, and the great undertakings which

he proposed to himself to commence, till, the brandy aiding his vanity,

and his vanity and garrulity aiding the brandy, he talked like a

madman--entreated me to accompany him to Denmark--there I should see his

influence with the government, and he would introduce me to the king,

etc., etc. Thus he went on dreaming aloud, and then passing with a very

lyrical transition to the subject of general politics, he declaimed,

like a member of the Corresponding Society, about, (not concerning,)

the Rights of Man, and assured me that, notwithstanding his fortune, he

thought the poorest man alive his equal. “All are equal, my dear friend!

all are equal! Ve are all Got’s children. The poorest man haf the same

rights with me. Jack! Jack! some more sugar and brandy. Dhere is dhat

fellow now! He is a Mulatto--but he is my equal.--That’s right, Jack!

(taking the sugar and brandy.) Here you Sir! shake hands with dhis

gentleman! Shake hands with me, you dog! Dhere, dhere!--We are all equal

my dear friend! Do I not speak like Socrates, and Plato, and Cato--they

were all philosophers, my dear philosophe! all very great men!--and so

was Homer and Virgil--but they were poets. Yes, yes! I know all about

it!--But what can anybody say more than this? We are all equal, all

Got’s children. I haf ten tousand a year, but I am no more dhan de

meanest man alive. I haf no pride; and yet, my dear friend! I can

say, do! and it is done. Ha! ha! ha! my dear friend! Now dhere is dhat

gentleman (pointing to Nobility) he is a Swedish baron--you shall see.

Ho! (calling to the Swede) get me, will you, a bottle of wine from the

cabin. SWEDE.--Here, Jack! go and get your master a bottle of wine from

the cabin. DANE. No, no, no! do you go now--you go yourself you go now!

SWEDE. Pah!--DANE. Now go! Go, I pray you.” And the Swede went!!

After this the Dane commenced an harangue on religion, and mistaking

me for un philosophe in the continental sense of the word, he talked of

Deity in a declamatory style, very much resembling the devotional rants

of that rude blunderer, Mr. Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, and

whispered in my ear, what damned hypocrism all Jesus Christ’s business

was. I dare aver, that few men have less reason to charge themselves

with indulging in persiflage than myself. I should hate it, if it were

only that it is a Frenchman’s vice, and feel a pride in avoiding it,

because our own language is too honest to have a word to express it by.

But in this instance the temptation had been too powerful, and I have

placed it on the list of my offences. Pericles answered one of his

dearest friends, who had solicited him on a case of life and death, to

take an equivocal oath for his preservation: Debeo amicis opitulari, sed

usque ad Deos [75]. Friendship herself must place her last and boldest

step on this side the altar. What Pericles would not do to save a

friend’s life, you may be assured, I would not hazard merely to mill the

chocolate-pot of a drunken fool’s vanity till it frothed over. Assuming

a serious look, I professed myself a believer, and sunk at once an

hundred fathoms in his good graces. He retired to his cabin, and I

wrapped myself up in my great coat, and looked at the water. A beautiful

white cloud of foam at momently intervals coursed by the side of the

vessel with a roar, and little stars of flame danced and sparkled and

went out in it: and every now and then light detachments of this white

cloud-like foam darted off from the vessel’s side, each with its own

small constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a

Tartar troop over a wilderness.

It was cold, the cabin was at open war with my olfactories, and I found

reason to rejoice in my great coat, a weighty high-caped, respectable

rug, the collar of which turned over, and played the part of a night-cap

very passably. In looking up at two or three bright stars, which

oscillated with the motion of the sails, I fell asleep, but was awakened

at one o’clock, Monday morning, by a shower of rain. I found myself

compelled to go down into the cabin, where I slept very soundly, and

awoke with a very good appetite at breakfast time, my nostrils, the most

placable of all the senses, reconciled to, or indeed insensible of the

mephitis.

Monday, September 17th, I had a long conversation with the Swede, who

spoke with the most poignant contempt of the Dane, whom he described as

a fool, purse-mad; but he confirmed the boasts of the Dane respecting

the largeness of his fortune, which he had acquired in the first

instance as an advocate, and afterwards as a planter. From the Dane and

from himself I collected that he was indeed a Swedish nobleman, who had

squandered a fortune, that was never very large, and had made over his

property to the Dane, on whom he was now utterly dependent. He seemed

to suffer very little pain from the Dane’s insolence. He was in a high

degree humane and attentive to the English lady, who suffered most

fearfully, and for whom he performed many little offices with a

tenderness and delicacy which seemed to prove real goodness of heart.

Indeed his general manners and conversation were not only pleasing,

but even interesting; and I struggled to believe his insensibility

respecting the Dane philosophical fortitude. For though the Dane was

now quite sober, his character oozed out of him at every pore. And after

dinner, when he was again flushed with wine, every quarter of an hour or

perhaps oftener he would shout out to the Swede, “Ho! Nobility, go--do

such a thing! Mr. Nobility!--tell the gentlemen such a story, and

so forth;” with an insolence which must have excited disgust and

detestation, if his vulgar rants on the sacred rights of equality,

joined to his wild havoc of general grammar no less than of the English

language, had not rendered it so irresistibly laughable.

At four o’clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single

solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing

it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. I had associated

such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt exceedingly

disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and

nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So little are images

capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words. In the

evening the sails were lowered, lest we should run foul of the land,

which can be seen only at a small distance. And at four o’clock, on

Tuesday morning, I was awakened by the cry of “land! land!” It was an

ugly island rock at a distance on our left, called Heiligeland, well

known to many passengers from Yarmouth to Hamburg, who have been obliged

by stormy weather to pass weeks and weeks in weary captivity on it,

stripped of all their money by the exorbitant demands of the wretches

who inhabit it. So at least the sailors informed me.--About nine o’clock

we saw the main land, which seemed scarcely able to hold its head above

water, low, flat, and dreary, with lighthouses and land-marks which

seemed to give a character and language to the dreariness. We entered

the mouth of the Elbe, passing Neu-werk; though as yet the right bank

only of the river was visible to us. On this I saw a church, and thanked

God for my safe voyage, not without affectionate thoughts of those I

had left in England. At eleven o’clock on the same morning we arrived

at Cuxhaven, the ship dropped anchor, and the boat was hoisted out, to

carry the Hanoverian and a few others on shore. The captain agreed to

take us, who remained, to Hamburg for ten guineas, to which the Dane

contributed so largely, that the other passengers paid but half a guinea

each. Accordingly we hauled anchor, and passed gently up the river. At

Cuxhaven both sides of the river may be seen in clear weather; we could

now see the right bank only. We passed a multitude of English traders

that had been waiting many weeks for a wind. In a short time both banks

became visible, both flat and evidencing the labour of human hands by

their extreme neatness. On the left bank I saw a church or two in

the distance; on the right bank we passed by steeple and windmill and

cottage, and windmill and single house, windmill and windmill, and neat

single house, and steeple. These were the objects and in the succession.

The shores were very green and planted with trees not inelegantly.

Thirty-five miles from Cuxhaven the night came on us, and, as the

navigation of the Elbe is perilous, we dropped anchor.

Over what place, thought I, does the moon hang to your eye, my dearest

friend? To me it hung over the left bank of the Elbe. Close above the

moon was a huge volume of deep black cloud, while a very thin fillet

crossed the middle of the orb, as narrow and thin and black as a ribbon

of crape. The long trembling road of moonlight, which lay on the water

and reached to the stern of our vessel, glimmered dimly and obscurely.

We saw two or three lights from the right bank, probably from bed-rooms.

I felt the striking contrast between the silence of this majestic

stream, whose banks are populous with men and women and children, and

flocks and herds--between the silence by night of this peopled river,

and the ceaseless noise, and uproar, and loud agitations of the desolate

solitude of the ocean. The passengers below had all retired to their

beds; and I felt the interest of this quiet scene the more deeply from

the circumstance of having just quitted them. For the Prussian had

during the whole of the evening displayed all his talents to captivate

the Dane, who had admitted him into the train of his dependents. The

young Englishman continued to interpret the Prussian’s jokes to me. They

were all without exception profane and abominable, but some sufficiently

witty, and a few incidents, which he related in his own person, were

valuable as illustrating the manners of the countries in which they had

taken place.

Five o’clock on Wednesday morning we hauled the anchor, but were soon

obliged to drop it again in consequence of a thick fog, which our

captain feared would continue the whole day; but about nine it cleared

off, and we sailed slowly along, close by the shore of a very beautiful

island, forty miles from Cuxhaven, the wind continuing slack. This

holm or island is about a mile and a half in length, wedge-shaped,

well wooded, with glades of the liveliest green, and rendered more

interesting by the remarkably neat farm-house on it. It seemed made for

retirement without solitude--a place that would allure one’s friends,

while it precluded the impertinent calls of mere visitors. The shores of

the Elbe now became more beautiful, with rich meadows and trees running

like a low wall along the river’s edge; and peering over them,

neat houses and, (especially on the right bank,) a profusion of

steeple-spires, white, black, or red. An instinctive taste teaches men

to build their churches in flat countries with spire-steeples, which,

as they cannot be referred to any other object, point, as with silent

finger, to the sky and stars, and sometimes, when they reflect the

brazen light of a rich though rainy sun-set, appear like a pyramid of

flame burning heavenward. I remember once, and once only, to have seen

a spire in a narrow valley of a mountainous country. The effect was

not only mean but ludicrous, and reminded me against my will of an

extinguisher; the close neighbourhood of the high mountain, at the foot

of which it stood, had so completely dwarfed it, and deprived it of

all connection with the sky or clouds. Forty-six English miles from

Cuxhaven, and sixteen from Hamburg, the Danish village Veder ornaments

the left bank with its black steeple, and close by it is the wild and

pastoral hamlet of Schulau. Hitherto both the right and left bank, green

to the very brink, and level with the river, resembled the shores of a

park canal. The trees and houses were alike low, sometimes the low trees

over-topping the yet lower houses, sometimes the low houses rising

above the yet lower trees. But at Schulau the left bank rises at once

forty or fifty feet, and stares on the river with its perpendicular

facade of sand, thinly patched with tufts of green. The Elbe continued

to present a more and more lively spectacle from the multitude of

fishing boats and the flocks of sea gulls wheeling round them, the

clamorous rivals and companions of the fishermen; till we came to

Blankaness, a most interesting village scattered amid scattered trees,

over three hills in three divisions. Each of the three hills stares upon

the river, with faces of bare sand, with which the boats with their

bare poles, standing in files along the banks, made a sort of fantastic

harmony. Between each facade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper

than the other. In short it is a large village made up of individual

cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or orchard,

and each with its own separate path: a village with a labyrinth of

paths, or rather a neighbourhood of houses! It is inhabited by fishermen

and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in great request through the

whole navigation of the Elbe. Here first we saw the spires of Hamburg,

and from hence, as far as Altona, the left bank of the Elbe is

uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of an industrious and

republican city--in that style of beauty, or rather prettiness, that

might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet gratify the taste

which he had acquired in the town. Summer-houses and Chinese show-work

are everywhere scattered along the high and green banks; the boards

of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily painted with green and

yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes and made to remind the

human being of his own power and intelligence instead of the wisdom of

nature. Still, however, these are links of connection between town and

country, and far better than the affectation of tastes and enjoyments

for which men’s habits have disqualified them. Pass them by on Saturdays

and Sundays with the burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the women

and children feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a

nature of its own. On Wednesday, four o’clock, we left the vessel, and

passing with trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to

choke the wide Elbe from Altona upward, we were at length landed at the

Boom House, Hamburg.

LETTER II

To a lady.

RATZEBURG.

Meine liebe Freundinn,

See how natural the German comes from me, though I have not yet

been six weeks in the country!--almost as fluently as English from my

neighbour the Amtsschreiber, (or public secretary,) who as often as

we meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day,

never fails to greet me with--“---ddam your ploot unt eyes, my

dearest Englander! vhee goes it!”--which is certainly a proof of great

generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of English.

I had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my

proficiency: for I wished to put you in good humour with a language,

from the acquirement of which I have promised myself much edification

and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your

sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this better than

by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? Our English affix,

ess, is, I believe, confined either to words derived from the Latin, as

actress, directress, etc., or from the French, as mistress, duchess, and

the like. But the German, inn, enables us to designate the sex in

every possible relation of life. Thus the Amtmann’s lady is the Frau

Amtmanninn--the secretary’s wife, (by the bye, the handsomest

woman I have yet seen in Germany,) is die allerliebste Frau

Amtsschreiberinn--the colonel’s lady, die Frau Obristinn or

Colonellinn--and even the parson’s wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am

especially pleased with their Freundinn, which, unlike the amica of the

Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now, I know

it will be said, that a friend is already something more than a friend,

when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a

female; but this I deny--in that sense at least in which the objection

will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than

abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their

perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a

sister--nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be

loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.

Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself--“This

is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance has

blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to learn

where he is and what he has seen.” Well then! that I am settled at

Ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey hither,

will inform you. My first letter to him, with which doubtless he has

edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg on the

Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I was

amused by the contents of the passage-boat which crosses the river once

or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was stowed close with all

people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men all with pipes

in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and fancies--straight

and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short, cane, clay, porcelain,

wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with silver chains and silver

bole-covers. Pipes and boots are the first universal characteristic of

the male Hamburgers that would strike the eye of a raw traveller. But

I forget my promise of journalizing as much as possible.--Therefore,

Septr. 19th Afternoon. My companion, who, you recollect, speaks

the French language with unusual propriety, had formed a kind of

confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who appeared to be a man

of sense, and whose manners were those of a perfect gentleman. He seemed

about fifty or rather more. Whatever is unpleasant in French manners

from excess in the degree, had been softened down by age or affliction;

and all that is delightful in the kind, alacrity and delicacy in little

attentions, etc., remained, and without bustle, gesticulation,

or disproportionate eagerness. His demeanour exhibited the minute

philanthropy of a polished Frenchman, tempered by the sobriety of

the English character disunited from its reserve. There is something

strangely attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the

word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is more

easy to feel than to define. It neither includes the possession of high

moral excellence, nor of necessity even the ornamental graces of manner.

I have now in my mind’s eye a person whose life would scarcely stand

scrutiny even in the court of honour, much less in that of conscience;

and his manners, if nicely observed, would of the two excite an idea

of awkwardness rather than of elegance: and yet every one who conversed

with him felt and acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the matter,

I believe to be this--we feel the gentlemanly character present to us,

whenever, under all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial

not less than the important, through the whole detail of his manners

and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to

others in such a way, as at the same time implies in his own feelings

an habitual and assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to

himself. In short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling

of Equality acting, as a Habit, yet flexible to the varieties of

Rank, and modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. This

description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own

remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting dialogue concerning

the causes of the corruption of eloquence. “What perfect gentlemen these

old Romans must have been! I was impressed, I remember, with the

same feeling at the time I was reading a translation of Cicero’s

philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary correspondence: while in

Pliny’s Letters I seemed to have a different feeling--he gave me the

notion of a very fine gentleman.” You uttered the words as if you had

felt that the adjunct had injured the substance and the increased degree

altered the kind. Pliny was the courtier of an absolute monarch--Cicero

an aristocratic republican. For this reason the character of gentleman,

in the sense to which I have confined it, is frequent in England, rare

in France, and found, where it is found, in age or the latest period

of manhood; while in Germany the character is almost unknown. But

the proper antipode of a gentleman is to be sought for among the

Anglo-American democrats.

I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable Frenchman,

and of humiliation for myself. For in a little controversy between us

on the subject of French poetry, he made me feel my own ill behaviour by

the silent reproof of contrast, and when I afterwards apologized to him

for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful expression

of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman might both

make with dignity and receive with pleasure. I was pleased therefore to

find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up our quarters in

the same house. My friend went with him in search of an hotel, and I to

deliver my letters of recommendation.

I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by anything I

actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for the first time

in my life on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a

liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his

first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally I

began to wonder at all things, some for being so like and some for being

so unlike the things in England--Dutch women with large umbrella hats

shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of

petticoat behind--the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the caul

with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which

stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled

through it--the Hanoverian with the fore part of the head bare, then a

stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on the cap, and the cap

behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon which lies or tosses

on the back:

“Their visnomies seem’d like a goodly banner

Spread in defiance of all enemies.”

The ladies all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth:

which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal, too

glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth of the

laughing, loud-talking country-women and servant-girls, who with their

clean white stockings and with slippers without heel quarters, tripped

along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by a charm from

the dirt: with a lightness too, which surprised me, who had always

considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an Inn, that I

had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets narrow; to my

English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at first sight

the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the

foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street,

some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the botanists say;

but the greater number notched and scolloped with more than Chinese

grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion of windows,

so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mr. Pitt’s window

tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out from it like young

toadlets on the back of a Surinam toad, would certainly improve the

appearance of the Hamburg houses, which have a slight summer look, not

in keeping with their size, incongruous with the climate, and precluding

that feeling of retirement and self-content, which one wishes to

associate with a house in a noisy city. But a conflagration would, I

fear, be the previous requisite to the production of any architectural

beauty in Hamburg: for verily it is a filthy town. I moved on and

crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with huge black deformities of

water wheels close by them. The water intersects the city everywhere,

and would have furnished to the genius of Italy the capabilities of all

that is most beautiful and magnificent in architecture. It might have

been the rival of Venice, and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and

stagnation. The Jungfer Stieg, (that is, Young Ladies’ Walk), to which

my letters directed me, made an exception. It was a walk or promenade

planted with treble rows of elm trees, which, being yearly pruned and

cropped, remain slim and dwarf-like. This walk occupies one side of a

square piece of water, with many swans on it perfectly tame, and, moving

among the swans, shewy pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by

their husbands or lovers.------

(Some paragraphs have been here omitted.)------thus embarrassed by sad

and solemn politeness still more than by broken English, it sounded like

the voice of an old friend when I heard the emigrant’s servant inquiring

after me. He had come for the purpose of guiding me to our hotel.

Through streets and streets I pressed on as happy as a child, and, I

doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy eyes,

amused by the wicker waggons with movable benches across them, one

behind the other, (these were the hackney coaches;) amused by the

sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are

painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion, (a

useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations;) amused

with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house door bells, the

bell hanging over each door and struck with a small iron rod at every

entrance and exit;--and finally, amused by looking in at the windows,

as I passed along; the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee or playing

cards, and the gentlemen all smoking. I wished myself a painter, that I

might have sent you a sketch of one of the card parties. The long pipe

of one gentleman rested on the table, its bole half a yard from his

mouth, fuming like a censer by the fish-pool--the other gentleman, who

was dealing the cards, and of course had both hands employed, held his

pipe in his teeth, which hanging down between his knees, smoked beside

his ancles. Hogarth himself never drew a more ludicrous distortion both

of attitude and physiognomy, than this effort occasioned nor was there

wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same

Hogarth, in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty

which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly introduces, as

the central figure, in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figures,

(such is the power of true genius!) neither acts, nor is meant to act

as a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group,

a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and, even when the

attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this

feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter: and thus

prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature or the foibles

or humours of our fellow-men from degenerating into the heart-poison of

contempt or hatred.

Our hotel DIE WILDE MAN, (the sign of which was no bad likeness of the

landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a restless grin, that

was at every man’s service, and which indeed, like an actor rehearsing

to himself, he kept playing in expectation of an occasion for

it)--neither our hotel, I say, nor its landlord were of the genteelest

class. But it has one great advantage for a stranger, by being in the

market place, and the next neighbour of the huge church of St. Nicholas:

a church with shops and houses built up against it, out of which wens

and warts its high massy steeple rises, necklaced near the top with a

round of large gilt balls. A better pole-star could scarcely be desired.

Long shall I retain the impression made on my mind by the awful echo,

so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-toned clock within this

church, which awoke me at two in the morning from a distressful dream,

occasioned, I believe, by the feather bed, which is used here instead

of bed-clothes. I will rather carry my blanket about with me like a wild

Indian, than submit to this abominable custom. Our emigrant acquaintance

was, we found, an intimate friend of the celebrated Abbe de Lisle:

and from the large fortune which he possessed under the monarchy, had

rescued sufficient not only for independence, but for respectability. He

had offended some of his fellow-emigrants in London, whom he had obliged

with considerable sums, by a refusal to make further advances, and

in consequence of their intrigues had received an order to quit the

kingdom. I thought it one proof of his innocence, that he attached no

blame either to the alien act, or to the minister who had exerted it

against him; and a still greater, that he spoke of London with rapture,

and of his favourite niece, who had married and settled in England, with

all the fervour and all the pride of a fond parent. A man sent by force

out of a country, obliged to sell out of the stocks at a great loss, and

exiled from those pleasures and that style of society which habit had

rendered essential to his happiness, whose predominant feelings were yet

all of a private nature, resentment for friendship outraged, and anguish

for domestic affections interrupted--such a man, I think, I could dare

warrant guiltless of espionnage in any service, most of all in that of

the present French Directory. He spoke with ecstasy of Paris under the

Monarchy: and yet the particular facts, which made up his description,

left as deep a conviction on my mind, of French worthlessness, as his

own tale had done of emigrant ingratitude. Since my arrival in

Germany, I have not met a single person, even among those who abhor

the Revolution, that spoke with favour, or even charity of the French

emigrants. Though the belief of their influence in the organization

of this disastrous war (from the horrors of which, North Germany deems

itself only reprieved, not secured,) may have some share in the general

aversion with which they are regarded: yet I am deeply persuaded

that the far greater part is owing to their own profligacy, to their

treachery and hardheartedness to each other, and the domestic misery or

corrupt principles which so many of them have carried into the families

of their protectors. My heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled

to mind the stern yet amiable characters of the English patriots, who

sought refuge on the Continent at the Restoration! O let not our civil

war under the first Charles be paralleled with the French Revolution!

In the former, the character overflowed from excess of principle; in the

latter from the fermentation of the dregs! The former, was a civil war

between the virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the

latter, between the vices. The Venetian glass of the French monarchy

shivered and flew asunder with the working of a double poison.

Sept. 20th. I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the brother of the poet,

who again introduced me to Professor Ebeling, an intelligent and lively

man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort to talk

with him, as we were obliged to drop our pearls into a huge ear-trumpet.

From this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters, (I hope, the

German literati in general may resemble this first specimen), I heard a

tolerable Italian pun, and an interesting anecdote. When Buonaparte was

in Italy, having been irritated by some instance of perfidy, he said in

a loud and vehement tone, in a public company--“’tis a true proverb, gli

Italiani tutti ladroni”--(that is, the Italians all plunderers.) A lady

had the courage to reply, “Non tutti; ma BUONA PARTE,” (not all, but a

good part, or Buonaparte.) This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one

of the many good things that might have been said. The anecdote is more

valuable; for it instances the ways and means of French insinuation.

Hoche had received much information concerning the face of the country

from a map of unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker of which, he

heard, resided at Duesseldorf. At the storming of Duesseldorf by the

French army, Hoche previously ordered, that the house and property of

this man should be preserved, and intrusted the performance of the order

to an officer on whose troop he could rely. Finding afterwards, that the

man had escaped before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, “HE had

no reason to flee! It is for such men, not against them, that the French

nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its children.” You

remember Milton’s sonnet--

“The great Emathian conqueror bid spare

The house of Pindarus when temple and tower

Went to the ground”------

Now though the Duesseldorf map-maker may stand in the same relation to

the Theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by lines of film on

the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars sunward and beats the

tempest with its wings; it does not therefore follow, that the Jacobin

of France may not be as valiant a general and as good a politician, as

the madman of Macedon.

From Professor Ebeling’s Mr. Klopstock accompanied my friend and me

to his own house, where I saw a fine bust of his brother. There was a

solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance, which corresponded to my

preconceptions of his style and genius.--I saw there, likewise, a very

fine portrait of Lessing, whose works are at present the chief object of

my admiration. His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if anything, rather

larger and more prominent. But the lower part of his face and his

nose--O what an exquisite expression of elegance and sensibility!--There

appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in the forehead.--The

whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a man of quick and voluptuous

feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute; yet acute not in the

observation of actual life, but in the arrangements and management of

the ideal world, that is, in taste, and in metaphysics. I assure you,

that I wrote these very words in my memorandum-book with the portrait

before my eyes, and when I knew nothing of Lessing but his name, and

that he was a German writer of eminence.

We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d’hote.

“Patience at a German ordinary, smiling at time.” The Germans are the

worst cooks in Europe. There is placed for every two persons a bottle

of common wine--Rhenish and Claret alternately; but in the houses of the

opulent, during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the servants

hand round glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin’s they came

in this order. Burgundy--Madeira--Port--Frontiniac--Pacchiaretti--Old

Hock--Mountain--Champagne--Hock again--Bishop, and lastly, Punch. A

tolerable quantum, methinks! The last dish at the ordinary, viz. slices

of roast pork, (for all the larger dishes are brought in, cut up, and

first handed round and then set on the table,) with stewed prunes and

other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese and butter, with plates

of apples, reminded me of Shakespeare [76], and Shakespeare put it in my

head to go to the French comedy.

Bless me! why it is worse than our modern English plays! The first act

informed me, that a court martial is to be held on a Count Vatron, who

had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his brother-in-law. The officers

plead in his behalf--in vain! His wife, the Colonel’s sister, pleads

with most tempestuous agonies--in vain! She falls into hysterics and

faints away, to the dropping of the inner curtain! In the second act

sentence of death is passed on the Count--his wife, as frantic and

hysterical as before: more so (good industrious creature!) she could

not be. The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic

indeed!--the soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually

dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes:

and in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still

frantic, only with joy; that was all!

O dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed

by melancholy: for such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted

every where for Shakespeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer

violence to my own feelings in joining these names. But however meanly

I may think of the French serious drama, even in its most perfect

specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual

falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions

of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion; still,

however, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the

offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the

parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own,

though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the spectators to

active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The soul is not

stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our

own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising,

undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight the

imagination. What, (I would ask of the crowd, that press forward to

the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of Kotzebue and his

imitators), what are you seeking? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of

Shakespeare and Moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more

profoundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with

my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers pourtray are

ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitely

ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such

as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own

heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often

are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest

illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human

thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters,

but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and

clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and Hypocrite,

of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions: for these

class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of a

character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the

Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly

that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical

as it may sound, one of the essential properties of geometry is not

less essential to dramatic excellence, and, (if I may mention his name

without pedantry to a lady,) Aristotle has accordingly required of

the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief

differences are, that in geometry it is the universal truth itself,

which is uppermost in the consciousness, in poetry the individual form

in which the truth is clothed. With the ancients, and not less with the

elder dramatists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were

considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy to make

us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of

jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of commonplace morals

in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their

characters; nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the

applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similes

of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on

their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than

the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to

affect us indeed, but within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with

the activity both of our understanding and imagination. They wished to

transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant

the germs of that greatness during the temporary oblivion of the

worthless “thing, we are” and of the peculiar state, in which each man

happens to be; suspending our individual recollections and lulling them

to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts.

Hold!--(methinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will

listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defendant.)

DEFENDANT. Hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the

best Christian morality?

PLAINTIFF. Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which

you can exercise without a single Christian virtue--without a single

sacrifice that is really painful to you!--just as much as flatters you,

sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled to

your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep

such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and

generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man’s

face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you

interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite

satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble

it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards--no Antony,

no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache!

D. No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain citizen of

London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old

school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body knows the stories; and what

curiosity can we feel----

P. What, Sir, not for the manner?--not for the delightful language

of the poet?--not for the situations, the action and reaction of the

passions?

D. You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the story: and

how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be surprised by

it, when we know how it will turn out?

P. Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each

other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the

highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you

receive from a new novel, the last German romance, and other dainties of

the day, which can be enjoyed but once. If you carry these feelings to

the sister art of Painting, Michael Angelo’s Sixtine Chapel, and the

Scripture Gallery of Raphael can expect no favour from you. You know

all about them beforehand; and are, doubtless, more familiar with the

subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the historic

or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore, in your preference of

contemporary writers: for the great men of former times, those at least

who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so little to gratify this

kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have regarded the story in a not

much higher light, than the painter regards his canvass: as that on, not

by, which they were to display their appropriate excellence. No work,

resembling a tale or romance, can well show less variety of invention

in the incidents, or less anxiety in weaving them together, than the DON

QUIXOTE of Cervantes. Its admirers feel the disposition to go back and

re-peruse some preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they

find any eagerness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts

which they best recollect, even as we visit those friends oftenest whom

we love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most

intimately acquainted. In the divine Ariosto, (as his countrymen call

this, their darling poet,) I question whether there be a single tale of

his own invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to the

readers of “old romance.” I will pass by the ancient Greeks, who thought

it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its substance should

be previously known. That there had been at least fifty tragedies with

the same title, would be one of the motives which determined Sophocles

and Euripides, in the choice of Electra as a subject. But Milton--

D. Aye Milton, indeed!--but do not Dr. Johnson and other great men tell

us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task?

P. So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! But why

then do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? The greater part, if not

all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main incidents are

concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at least, on which they

are built, pre-existed in the chronicles, ballads, or translations of

contemporary or preceding English writers. Why, I repeat, do you pretend

to admire Shakespeare? Is it, perhaps, that you only pretend to admire

him? However, as once for all, you have dismissed the well-known events

and personages of history, or the epic muse, what have you taken in

their stead? Whom has your tragic muse armed with her bowl and dagger?

the sentimental muse I should have said, whom you have seated in the

throne of tragedy? What heroes has she reared on her buskins?

D. O! our good friends and next-door neighbours--honest tradesmen,

valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews,

virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental

rat-catchers!--(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous,

tender-hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all

our misanthropes very tender-hearted.)

P. But I pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting, can

such men be engaged?

D. They give away a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young

men and maidens who have all other good qualities; they brow-beat

lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as

Hector!)--they rescue stage coaches at the instant they are falling down

precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing armies; and some

of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such perfection,

that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in their eye, seldom

fail to make their favourite male character as strong as Samson. And

then they take such prodigious leaps!! And what is done on the stage is

more striking even than what is acted. I once remember such a deafening

explosion, that I could not hear a word of the play for half an act

after it: and a little real gunpowder being set fire to at the same

time, and smelt by all the spectators, the naturalness of the scene was

quite astonishing!

P. But how can you connect with such men and such actions that

dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an

interest to the personages of Shakespeare, and the Greek Tragedians? How

can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the power of

destiny and the controlling might of heaven, which seems to elevate the

characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow?

D. O mere fancies! We seek and find on the present stage our own wants

and passions, our own vexations, losses, and embarrassments.

P. It is your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to

have represented before you?--not human nature in its height and vigour?

But surely you might find the former with all its joys and sorrows, more

conveniently in your own houses and parishes.

D. True! but here comes a difference. Fortune is blind, but the poet has

his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is capricious.

He makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it. He gratifies

us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom we hate and

wish to despise.

P. (aside.) That is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your superiors.

D. He makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be better than

their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and

hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and

their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and, (that

no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the last

scene, and leave no doubt in the minds of the ladies, that they will

make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a pity,

that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had made them

so interesting! Besides, the poor become rich all at once; and in the

final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born themselves are made

to confess; that VIRTUE IS THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY, AND THAT A LOVELY

WOMAN IS A DOWRY OF HERSELF!!

P. Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of loyalty,

those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which, especially

if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so often solicit

and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give your prudence

credit for the omission. For the whole system of your drama is a moral

and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind, and those

common-place rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your

playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion.

For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you in the

confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes

and their effects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the

qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour,

(those things rather which pass among you for such), in persons and in

classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and

in rewarding with all the sympathies, that are the dues of virtue, those

criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our

esteem!

And now--good night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet without

having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by your own

fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to forget now and

then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other good friends have

made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever place I write you

will expect that part of my “Travels” will consist of excursions in my

own mind.

LETTER III

RATZEBURG.

No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned

from a child’s hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I this

clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves,

and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing. My spirits

certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink under the

noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I left it

on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, with a letter of introduction from the poet

Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me with

kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board

and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The vehicle,

in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an English

stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude

resemblance, that an elephant’s ear does to the human. Its top was

composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have been

parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were leathern

curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly answered

the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold. I

could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at which

we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room, like

a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts

through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor

of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes

one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end. These are

commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men,

women, and children, live in amicable community; yet there was an

appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of these houses I

measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken

off from one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small

interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two

where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight

feet in depth. The faces of the cows, etc. were turned towards the room;

indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing

each other’s faces. Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany,

a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely

to entertain opposite opinions--or at least, to have very different

feelings. The woodwork of these buildings on the outside is left

unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and

green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within

three miles of Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it,

the country, as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by

woods. At Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly

surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of

Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were

nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to

Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred

and twenty-six miles.

The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in

length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About a

mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course very

unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge and a

narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of immense

length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this island

the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor’s house or vicarage, together

with the Amtmann’s Amtsschreiber’s, and the church, stands near the

summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and the little

bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you step into

the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little hill, by

ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long bridge, and so to

the other shore. The water to the south of the town is called the Little

Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties of the whole the

shores being just often enough green and bare to give the proper

effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater part of their

circumference. From the turnings, windings, and indentations of the

shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the whole has a sort

of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the north of the Great Lake,

and peeping over it, I see the seven church towers of Luebec, at the

distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as distinctly as if they

were not three. The only defect in the view is, that Ratzeburg is built

entirely of red bricks, and all the houses roofed with red tiles. To the

eye, therefore, it presents a clump of brick-dust red. Yet this evening,

Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five, I saw the town perfectly beautiful,

and the whole softened down into complete keeping, if I may borrow a

term from the painters. The sky over Ratzeburg and all the east was a

pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered with light sandy

clouds. Hence a deep red light spread over the whole prospect, in

undisturbed harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the

yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake. Two or three boats, with

single persons paddling them, floated up and down in the rich light,

which not only was itself in harmony with all, but brought all into

harmony.

I should have told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept.

27th) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned

hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from

Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary

flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised; but

the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses, which

you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with arbours and

trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in cloisters and

piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green seats within

the rails. Every object, whether the growth of nature or the work of

man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better, than if the

houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste:

for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The busy, anxious,

money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have adopted, he could not

have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. The mind begins to love nature by

imitating human conveniences in nature; but this is a step in intellect,

though a low one--and were it not so, yet all around me spoke

of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered with

unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the

busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this charitable and

catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city. These are huge

green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the

interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my return I have

nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which

answers to posting in England. These north German post chaises are

uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a

chef d’auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the horses!--a savage

might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table.

Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye

bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the

horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin.

Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to

the objects in search of which I left you: namely, the literati and

literature of Germany.

Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as

W----and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother,

the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate.

It is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they

looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the

windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with

several roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the poet’s

eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We

waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the

figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were

from Klopstock’s odes. The poet entered. I was much disappointed in his

countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to the bust. There was

no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over the eye-brows, no

expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on the eyes, no

massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if anything, rather below

the middle size. He wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled,

so fearfully were they swollen. However, though neither W---- nor

myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his

physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his

kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French with my friend, and with

difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in English. His enunciation was

not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. The

conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the

surrender of the detachment of French troops under General Humbert.

Their proceedings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they

had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have

given the poet great entertainment. He then declared his sanguine belief

in Nelson’s victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and

triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement

Anti-Gallicanism. The subject changed to literature, and I inquired

in Latin concerning the history of German poetry and the elder German

poets. To my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little

on the subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their

elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits.

Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of

this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity.

He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover’s blank verse

superior to Milton’s. W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and

my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that

it consisted, (the English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt

arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,

“with many a winding bout

Of linked sweetness long drawn out,”

and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence of antithetic

vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total

effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose.

Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover’s

superiority to single lines. He told us that he had read Milton, in

a prose translation, when he was fourteen [77]. I understood him thus

myself, and W---- interpreted Klopstock’s French as I had already

construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our

poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose

translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad, very

bad--but the English was no translation--there were pages on pages

not in the original--and half the original was not to be found in the

translation. W---- told him that I intended to translate a few of his

odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in English, “I

wish you would render into English some select passages of THE MESSIAH,

and revenge me of your countryman!”. It was the liveliest thing which he

produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that his first ode was

fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion--I

considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man;

as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen;

yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt

as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing

there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his

physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By the

bye, old men ought never to wear powder--the contrast between a large

snow-white wig and the colour of an old man’s skin is disgusting, and

wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt. It is

an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of

nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as

when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks.--The author

of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own grey hair.--His powder and

periwig were to the eye what Mr. Virgil would be to the ear.

Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the German language

possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated

parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always

sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do this. I

answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line

in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that

this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than

one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me [78]: and I, who

wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did

not.

We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution

Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary

presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe), and,

like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he

declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he

sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence of

their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than enough

an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation

of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to

forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence;

and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their

iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klopstock’s house we walked

to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation,

till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the

sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the

distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,)

lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of

the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist

floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro

between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and

brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been

divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions

could not have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a

fairy scene!--and to increase its romantic character, among the moving

objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a

beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English

child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other

accoutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before

I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two

longer than I otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the

feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see

the civic pomp of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed.

There were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two

or three old women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and

his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of

entertainment, theatre, etc. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg,

there seems to be no religion at all; in Luebec it is confined to the

women. The men seemed determined to be divorced from their wives in the

other world, if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more

singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal

church at Luebec, seen from the organ loft: for being filled with female

servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps

having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold

and silver.

I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which

my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during the

interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall make but

one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely,

that Klopstock’s remarks on the venerable sage of Koenigsburg are to my

own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true,

that his system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of

Germany there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean or

a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean, and

presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of Kant, as

to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral

system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. “Klopstock having wished

to see the CALVARY of Cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in

England, I went to Remnant’s (the English bookseller) where I procured

the Analytical Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland’s

CALVARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse

translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he

had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the

book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began

THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen; he devoted three entire years to the

plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in

what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of

versification in the German language before this time. The first three

cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This, though

done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying him. He

had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and

there had been also in the German language attempts in that style of

versification. These were only of very moderate merit.--One day he was

struck with the idea of what could be done in this way--he kept his

room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the

evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of

what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased with his

efforts, he composed no more in prose. Today he informed me that he

had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted to see an

author who before him had trod the same path. This is a contradiction

of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his poem to any one

till it was finished: but some of his friends who had seen what he had

finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in

a journal. He was then, I believe, very young, about twenty-five.

The rest was printed at different periods, four books at a time. The

reception given to the first specimens was highly flattering. He was

nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem, but of these thirty

years not more than two were employed in the composition. He only

composed in favourable moments; besides he had other occupations. He

values himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical

writers of gross deficiency in this respect. I laid the same accusation

against Horace: he would not hear of it--but waived the discussion.

He called Rousseau’s ODE TO FORTUNE a moral dissertation in stanzas.

I spoke of Dryden’s ST. CECILIA; but he did not seem familiar with our

writers. He wished to know the distinctions between our dramatic and

epic blank verse. He recommended me to read his HERMANN before I read

either THE MESSIAH or the odes. He flattered himself that some time or

other his dramatic poems would be known in England. He had not heard of

Cowper. He thought that Voss in his translation of THE ILIAD had done

violence to the idiom of the Germans, and had sacrificed it to the

Greeks, not remembering sufficiently that each language has its

particular spirit and genius. He said Lessing was the first of their

dramatic writers. I complained of NATHAN as tedious. He said there was

not enough of action in it; but that Lessing was the most chaste of

their writers. He spoke favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS

OF WERTER was his best work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred

the first written to the rest of Goethe’s dramas. Schiller’s ROBBERS he

found so extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of

the setting sun. He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live.

He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot

was inextricable.--It was evident he knew little of Schiller’s works:

indeed, he said, he could not read them. Buerger, he said, was a true

poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be

forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare, who

often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times more so.

He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an immoral author in the first

place, and next, as deficient in power. At Vienna, said he, they are

transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of Vienna either

the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany. He said Wieland was a

charming author, and a sovereign master of his own language: that in

this respect Goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could any

body else. He said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance. I

told him the OBERON had just been translated into English. He asked me

if I was not delighted with the poem. I answered, that I thought the

story began to flag about the seventh or eighth book; and observed, that

it was unworthy of a man of genius to make the interest of a long poem

turn entirely upon animal gratification. He seemed at first disposed to

excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and

that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered,

that I thought the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of

poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing

to fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere

appetite. Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every

body. I answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise

people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and

confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work

like the OBERON. He spoke in raptures of Wieland’s style, and pointed

out the passage where Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely

beautiful. I said that I did not perceive any very striking passages;

but that I made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. Of the

thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that the

greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He considered the

books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the ancient

mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was free to

take whatever he could make a good use of. An Englishman had presented

him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with pleasure. He

knew little or nothing of Gray, except his ELEGY written in a country

CHURCH-YARD. He complained of the fool in LEAR. I observed that he

seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress; but still he

complained. He asked whether it was not allowed, that Pope had written

rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our writers--I said I

preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater variety in their

movement. He thought my reason a good one; but asked whether the rhyme

of Pope were not more exact. This question I understood as applying to

the final terminations, and observed to him that I believed it was the

case; but that I thought it was easy to excuse some inaccuracy in the

final sounds, if the general sweep of the verse was superior. I told him

that we were not so exact with regard to the final endings of the lines

as the French. He did not seem to know that we made no distinction

between masculine and feminine (i.e. single or double,) rhymes: at

least he put inquiries to me on this subject. He seemed to think that

no language could be so far formed as that it might not be enriched by

idioms borrowed from another tongue. I said this was a very dangerous

practice; and added, that I thought Milton had often injured both his

prose and verse by taking this liberty too frequently. I recommended to

him the prose works of Dryden as models of pure and native English. I

was treading upon tender ground, as I have reason to suppose that he has

himself liberally indulged in the practice.”

The same day I dined at Mr. Klopstock’s, where I had the pleasure of a

third interview with the poet. We talked principally about indifferent

things. I asked him what he thought of Kant. He said that his reputation

was much on the decline in Germany. That for his own part he was not

surprised to find it so, as the works of Kant were to him utterly

incomprehensible--that he had often been pestered by the Kanteans;

but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. His custom was to

produce the book, open it and point to a passage, and beg they would

explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do by substituting their

own ideas. I do not want, I say, an explanation of your own ideas, but

of the passage which is before us. In this way I generally bring the

dispute to an immediate conclusion. He spoke of Wolfe as the first

Metaphysician they had in Germany. Wolfe had followers; but they could

hardly be called a sect, and luckily till the appearance of Kant,

about fifteen years ago, Germany had not been pestered by any sect of

philosophers whatsoever; but that each man had separately pursued his

inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a master. Kant had appeared

ambitious to be the founder of a sect; that he had succeeded: but that

the Germans were now coming to their senses again. That Nicolai and

Engel had in different ways contributed to disenchant the nation; but

above all the incomprehensibility of the philosopher and his philosophy.

He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet Kant’s doctrines had not met with

many admirers in England--did not doubt but that we had too much wisdom

to be duped by a writer who set at defiance the common sense and common

understandings of men. We talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate highly

the power of exciting tears--I said that nothing was more easy than to

deluge an audience, that it was done every day by the meanest writers.

I must remind you, my friend, first, that these notes are not intended

as specimens of Klopstock’s intellectual power, or even “colloquial

prowess,” to judge of which by an accidental conversation, and this with

strangers, and those too foreigners, would be not only unreasonable, but

calumnious. Secondly, I attribute little other interest to the remarks

than what is derived from the celebrity of the person who made them.

Lastly, if you ask me, whether I have read THE MESSIAH, and what I

think of it? I answer--as yet the first four books only: and as to my

opinion--(the reasons of which hereafter)--you may guess it from what

I could not help muttering to myself, when the good pastor this morning

told me, that Klopstock was the German Milton--“a very German Milton

indeed!!!”

Heaven preserve you, and S. T. COLERIDGE.