If you come to Heidelberg, you will never want to go away. To arrive
here is to come into a peaceful state of rest and content. The great
hills out of which the Neckar flows, infold the town in a sweet
security; and yet there is no sense of imprisonment, for the view is
always wide open to the great plains where the Neckar goes to join the
Rhine, and where the Rhine runs for many a league through a rich and
smiling land. One could settle down here to study, without a desire to
go farther, nor any wish to change the dingy, shabby old buildings of
the university for anything newer and smarter. What the students can
find to fight their little duels about I cannot see; but fight they do,
as many a scarred cheek attests. The students give life to the town.
They go about in little caps of red, green, and blue, many of them
embroidered in gold, and stuck so far on the forehead that they require
an elastic, like that worn by ladies, under the back hair, to keep
them on; and they are also distinguished by colored ribbons across the
breast. The majority of them are well-behaved young gentlemen, who carry
switch-canes, and try to keep near the fashions, like students at home.
Some like to swagger about in their little skull-caps, and now and then
one is attended by a bull-dog.
I write in a room which opens out upon a balcony. Below it is a garden,
below that foliage, and farther down the town with its old speckled
roofs, spires, and queer little squares. Beyond is the Neckar, with the
bridge, and white statues on it, and an old city gate at this end, with
pointed towers. Beyond that is a white road with a wall on one side,
along which I see peasant women walking with large baskets balanced on
their heads. The road runs down the river to Neuenheim. Above it on
the steep hillside are vineyards; and a winding path goes up to
the Philosopher's Walk, which runs along for a mile or more, giving
delightful views of the castle and the glorious woods and hills back
of it. Above it is the mountain of Heiligenberg, from the other side
of which one looks off toward Darmstadt and the famous road, the
Bergstrasse. If I look down the stream, I see the narrow town, and the
Neckar flowing out of it into the vast level plain, rich with grain
and trees and grass, with many spires and villages; Mannheim to the
northward, shining when the sun is low; the Rhine gleaming here and
there near the horizon; and the Vosges Mountains, purple in the last
distance: on my right, and so near that I could throw a stone into them,
the ruined tower and battlements of the northwest corner of the castle,
half hidden in foliage, with statues framed in ivy, and the garden
terrace, built for Elizabeth Stuart when she came here the bride of the
Elector Frederick, where giant trees grow. Under the walls a steep
path goes down into the town, along which little houses cling to the
hillside. High above the castle rises the noble Konigstuhl, whence the
whole of this part of Germany is visible, and, in a clear day, Strasburg
Minster, ninety miles away.
I have only to go a few steps up a narrow, steep street, lined with the
queerest houses, where is an ever-running pipe of good water, to which
all the neighborhood resorts, and I am within the grounds of the castle.
I scarcely know where to take you; for I never know where to go myself,
and seldom do go where I intend when I set forth. We have been here
several days; and I have not yet seen the Great Tun, nor the inside of
the show-rooms, nor scarcely anything that is set down as a “sight.”
I do not know whether to wander on through the extensive grounds, with
splendid trees, bits of old ruin, overgrown, cozy nooks, and seats
where, through the foliage, distant prospects open into quiet retreats
that lead to winding walks up the terraced hill, round to the open
terrace overlooking the Neckar, and giving the best general view of
the great mass of ruins. If we do, we shall be likely to sit in some
delicious place, listening to the band playing in the “Restauration,”
and to the nightingales, till the moon comes up. Or shall we turn into
the garden through the lovely Arch of the Princess Elizabeth, with its
stone columns cut to resemble tree-trunks twined with ivy? Or go rather
through the great archway, and under the teeth of the portcullis, into
the irregular quadrangle, whose buildings mark the changing style and
fortune of successive centuries, from 1300 down to the seventeenth
century? There is probably no richer quadrangle in Europe: there is
certainly no other ruin so vast, so impressive, so ornamented with
carving, except the Alhambra. And from here we pass out upon the broad
terrace of masonry, with a splendid flanking octagon tower, its base
hidden in trees, a rich facade for a background, and below the town the
river, and beyond the plain and floods of golden sunlight. What shall we
do? Sit and dream in the Rent Tower under the lindens that grow in its
top? The day passes while one is deciding how to spend it, and the sun
over Heiligenberg goes down on his purpose.