Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877

Various

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• Publié par: unja
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 45
• Langue: English

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Project Gutenberg's Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20,
August 1877, by Various
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Title: Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877
Author: Various
Release Date: August 2, 2009 [EBook #29575]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Christine D. and the
Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.netLippincott's Magazine
OF
POPULAR LITERATURE AND
SCIENCE.
Vol. XX.
AUGUST, 1877.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year
1877, by J. B. Lippincott & Co., in the Office of the
Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
DOWN THE RHINE.
CONCLUDING PAPER.
CASTLE OF ELTZ. CASTLE OF ELTZ.
Coblenz is the place which many years ago gave me
my first associations with the Rhine. From a
neighboring town we often drove to Coblenz, and thewide, calm flow of the river, the low, massive bridge of
boats and the commonplace outskirts of a busy city
contributed to make up a very different picture from
that of the poetic "castled" Rhine of German song and
English ballad. The old town has, however, many
beauties, though its military character looks out
through most of them, and reminds us that the Mosel
city (for it originally stood only on that river, and then
crept up to the Rhine), though a point of union in
Nature, has been for ages, so far as mankind was
concerned, a point of defence and watching. The great
fortress, a German Gibraltar, hangs over the river and
sets its teeth in the face of the opposite shore: all the
foreign element in the town is due to the deposits
made there by troubles in other countries, revolution
and war sending their exiles, émigrés and prisoners.
The history of the town is only a long military record,
from the days of the archbishops of Trèves, to whom
it was subject, to those of the last war. It has,
however, some pleasanter points: it has long been a
favorite summer residence of the empress of
Germany, who not long before I was there had by her
tact and toleration reconciled sundry religious
differences that threatened a political storm. Such
toleration has gone out of fashion now, and the
peacemaking queen would have a harder task to
perform now that the two parties have come to an
open collision. There is the old "German house" by the
bank of the Mosel, a building little altered outwardly
since the fourteenth century, now used as a food-
magazine for the troops. The church of St. Castor
commemorates a holy hermit who lived and preached
to the heathen in the eighth century, and also covers
the grave and monument of the founder of the"Mouse" at Wellmich, the warlike Kuno of Falkenstein,
archbishop of Trèves. The Exchange, once a court of
justice, has changed less startlingly, and its
proportions are much the same as of old; and besides
these there are other buildings worth noticing, though
not so old, and rather distinguished by the men who
lived and died there, or were born there, such as
Metternich, than by architectural beauties. Such
houses there are in every old city. They do not invite
you to go in and admire them: every tourist you meet
does not ask you how you liked them or whether you
saw them. They are homes, and sealed to you as
such, but they are the shell of the real life of the
country; and they have somehow a charm and a
fascination that no public building or show-place can
have. Goethe, who turned his life-experiences into
poetry, has told us something of one such house not
far from Coblenz, in the village of Ehrenbreitstein,
beneath the fortress, and which in familiar Coblenz
parlance goes by the name of "The Valley"—the house
of Sophie de Laroche. The village is also Clement
Brentano's birthplace.
The oldest of German cities, Trèves (or in German
Trier), is not too far to visit on our way up the Mosel
Valley, whose Celtic inhabitants of old gave the
Roman legions so much trouble. But Rome ended by
conquering, by means of her civilization as well as by
her arms, and Augusta Trevirorum, though claiming a
far higher antiquity than Rome herself, and still bearing
an inscription to that effect on the old council-house—
now called the Red House and used as a hotel—
became, as Ausonius condescendingly remarked, a
second Rome, adorned with baths, gardens, temples,theatres and all that went to make up an imperial
capital. As in Venice everything precious seems to
have come from Constantinople, so in Trier most
things worthy of note date from the days of the
Romans; though, to tell the truth, few of the actual
buildings do, no matter how classic is their look. The
style of the Empire outlived its sway, and doubtless
symbolized to the inhabitants their traditions of a
higher standard of civilization. The Porta Nigra, for
instance—called Simeon's Gate at present—dates
really from the days of the first Merovingian kings, but
it looks like a piece of the Coliseum, with its rows of
arches in massive red sandstone, the stones held
together by iron clamps, and its low, immensely strong
double gateway, reminding one of the triumphal
arches in the Forum at Rome. The history of the
transformations of this gateway is curious. First a
fortified city gate, standing in a correspondingly
fortified wall, it became a dilapidated granary and
storehouse in the Middle Ages, when one of the
archbishops gave leave to Simeon, a wandering
hermit from Syracuse in Sicily, to take up his abode
there; and another turned it into a church dedicated to
this saint, though of this change few traces remain.
Finally, it has become a national museum of
antiquities. The amphitheatre is a genuine Roman
work, wonderfully well preserved; and genuine enough
were the Roman games it has witnessed, for, if we are
to believe tradition, a thousand Frankish prisoners of
war were here given in one day to the wild beasts by
the emperor Constantine. Christian emperors
beautified the basilica that stood where the cathedral
now is, and the latter itself has some basilica-like
points about it, though, being the work of fifteencenturies, it bears the stamp of successive styles
upon its face. To the neighborhood, and also to
strangers, one of its great attractions lies in its
treasury of relics, the gift of Constantine's mother,
Saint Helena, for many hundred years objects of
pilgrimage, and even to the incredulous objects of
curiosity and interest, for the robe of a yellowish brown
—supposed to have been once purple—which is
shown as Our Lord's seamless garment, has been
pronounced by learned men to be of very high
antiquity. But what possesses the Rhine tourist to
moralize? He is a restless creature in general, more
occupied in staring than in seeing—a gregarious
creature too, who enjoys the evening table d'hôte, the
day-old Times and the British or American gossip as a
reward for his having conscientiously done whatever
Murray or Baedeker bade him. Cook has only
transformed the tourist's mental docility into a bodily
one: the guidebook had long drilled his mind before
the tour-contractor thought of drilling his body and
driving willing gangs of his species all over the world.
RUINS OF THE CASTLE OF AUERBACH. RUINS OF
THE CASTLE OF AUERBACH.
There is a funny, not over-reverent, legend afloat in
Trier to account for the queer dwarf bottles of Mosel
wine used there: it refers to a trick of Saint Peter, who
is supposed to have been travelling in these parts with
the Saviour, and when sent to bring wine to the latter
drank half of it on his way back, and then, to conceal
his act, cut the cup down to the level of the wine that
remained. These measures are still called
Miseräbelchen, or "wretched little remainders."The Mosel has but few tributary streams of
importance: its own course is as winding, as wild and
as romantic as that of the Rhine itself. The most
interesting part of the very varied scenery of this river
is not the castles, the antique towns, the dense woods
or the teeming vineyards lining rocks where a chamois
could hardly stand—all this it has in common with the
Rhine—but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in
ancient craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa,
the great wastes strewn with dark boulders, the rifts
that are called valleys and are like the Iceland gorges,
the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary
rusticity, not to say coarseness, of the inhabitants.
This grotesque, interesting country—unique, I believe,
on the continent of Europe—lies in a small triangle
between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier and the
Schiefer hills of the Lower Rhine: it goes by the names
of the High Eifel, with the High Acht, the Kellberg and
the Nürburg; the Upper (Vorder) Eifel, with Gerolstein,
a ruined castle, and Daun, a pretty village; and the
Snow-Eifel