HEIDELBERG

HEIDELBERG9 P.M. TO 10 P.M.

9 P.M. TO 10 P.M.

There stands an ancient castleOn yonder mountain height,Where, fenced with door and portal,Once tarried steed and knight.But gone are door and portal,And all is hushed and still;O’er ruined wall and rafterI clamber as I will.

There stands an ancient castleOn yonder mountain height,Where, fenced with door and portal,Once tarried steed and knight.

There stands an ancient castle

On yonder mountain height,

Where, fenced with door and portal,

Once tarried steed and knight.

But gone are door and portal,And all is hushed and still;O’er ruined wall and rafterI clamber as I will.

But gone are door and portal,

And all is hushed and still;

O’er ruined wall and rafter

I clamber as I will.

Goethe’s“Castle on the Mountain.”

Whenthe sun has gone down behind the Blue Alsatian Mountains and the last stain of color has faded from the skies of the Rhenish plain, when clock tower has answered clock tower and evening bell responded to evening bell from the mountain streams and mill wheels of the Odenwald to the busy squares of Mannheim, then the quiet and gentle valley of the Neckar takes on a peculiar peace and glory that is exquisite and marvelous, and Heidelberg and its lordly ruins seem set in a veritable fairy-ring of delicate charm and beauty. So tranquil and lovely is this region in the early evening that even the latest comer soon feels a comforting sense of having turned aside from out of the rush and fever oflife into a singularly placid and protected corner of earth, a hushed and happy Vale of Tempe. This sense of rest and seclusion is one of Heidelberg’s strongest appeals—and her appeals, though few, are all emphatic. For there are no “sights” here, the castle excepted. The quaint old town is friendly and genial, though not more so than many others of this comfortable German father-land; nor is the serene Neckar so exceptional as to occasion pilgrimage.

Heidelberg’s appeals are to the mind, the heart, and the senses: the mind is inspired by her impressive achievements in learning; the heart is touched by her tragic history; and the senses are spellbound by the exceptional charm of her natural beauty. She is never so fair as in the early evening. With the soft fall of night each blemish fades away, and what remains to see and feel is altogether rare and lovely.

HEIDELBERG, FROM THE CASTLE TERRACE

When the valley clocks are booming nine with muffled strokes it is delightful to be up in the castle’s ruins, lounging on the Great Balcony of the crumbling Friedrich Palace, with a broad coping for a seat and the rustling ivy of the hollow walls for a pillow. Behind and about one is the vast, ruddy wreckage of the knightly halls and towers of this far-famed “Alhambra of Germany,” and fluttering plains of tree-tops are billowing upward on every hand to the dark heights of the Königsstuhl. On the opposite side of the valley, across the river, dense forests of oak and chestnut glitter in themoonlight, sweeping aloft to the summit of the storied Saints’ Mountain. Just below our balcony the clustered spires and steep roofs of the huddled old town house their fifty thousand happy people between the wooded hillsides and the shimmering Neckar that bands the middle distance, on its placid Rhine journey, like a silver ribbon on a velvet cloak. In its bright waters hills and trees are luminously mirrored, along with the inky, motionless shadows of its bridges and the sober reflections of shuttered house-fronts along its verge.

In the dewy coolness and still of evening the guardian oaks breathe a recurrent lullaby—now softly agitated, now as hushed and ghostly and motionless as the hills in which they are rooted; and one understands how such a soothing environment could have softened even the impetuous, fiery, war-loving young Körner to indite so gentle a benediction as his beautiful “Good Night”:—

“Good night!To each weary, toilworn wight,Now the day so sweetly closes,Every aching brow reposesPeacefully till morning light.Good night.“Home to rest!Close the eye and calm the breast;Stillness through the streets is stealing,And the watchman’s horn is pealing,And the Night calls softly ‘Haste!Home to rest!’”

“Good night!To each weary, toilworn wight,Now the day so sweetly closes,Every aching brow reposesPeacefully till morning light.Good night.

“Good night!

To each weary, toilworn wight,

Now the day so sweetly closes,

Every aching brow reposes

Peacefully till morning light.

Good night.

“Home to rest!Close the eye and calm the breast;Stillness through the streets is stealing,And the watchman’s horn is pealing,And the Night calls softly ‘Haste!Home to rest!’”

“Home to rest!

Close the eye and calm the breast;

Stillness through the streets is stealing,

And the watchman’s horn is pealing,

And the Night calls softly ‘Haste!

Home to rest!’”

Up in the castle ruins one is seldom alone before midnight, and not even then if the melancholy spectre of Rupert’s Tower is disposed to walk abroad. In the early evening the good people of Heidelberg, kindliest and most contented of Germans, stroll with vast delight under the lindens of the castle gardens, and groups of careless students loiter merrily along the terraces, adding bright touches of color with their peaked caps and broad corps ribbons. Bits of song and bursts of laughter give a homely suggestion of habitation to these staring walls; one could fancy the dead-and-gone old nobles at wassail again, with minstrels in the banquet hall, and Perkeo, the jester, whispering jokes in the ear of the Count Palatine.

“Under the tree-tops,” sang Goethe, “is quiet now.” There is a low sad sound of night breeze in the ivy; a swallow darts through a paneless window; a bat zig-zags among the echoing arches of a tower. Like phantom sentinels the stone statues of the old electors stand white and impressive in niches on the palace fronts. Fragrance of flowers drifts in from the castle gardens and the delicate plash of falling water comes from a terrace fountain. The lamps of the city rim the river below, and villas beyond the farther bank are marked by tiny dots of lights in the purple of the groves behind Neuenheim. Across the Neckar-cut gulf of shadow the chestnut-crowned summit of the Heiligenberg stares down solemnly at us, and not all the songs of its blithestnightingales can banish thoughts of its ancient Roman sacrifices nor divert the credulous from vigils over the blue grave lights around the Benedictine cloister where they buried the sainted Abbot of Hirschau. Up through the dark billows of this tree-top ocean rises a strain of Wagner’s music from some cheery, hidden woodland inn—and under the magic spell of the night one could fancy the golden-haired Siegfried approaching on a new Rhine Journey, following the winding Neckar up the broad Rhenish plain; the Tarnhelm is at his belt, the World-Warder Ring on his finger, and the moonlight flashes dreadfully from the glittering blade of “Nothung” as the hero’s horn winds note of arrival under the walls of our stout castle!

It is especially at such an hour as this that one realizes how easy it is for the man who thoroughly knows Heidelberg to acknowledge a delightful and lifelong bondage. A large number of the most eminent literati of the world have agreed in this. Goethe ascribed to her “ideal beauty.” Macaulay pronounced her environment “one of the fairest regions of Europe.” The father of German poetry, Martin Opitz, loved her dearly in his student days here, three centuries ago, and wrote affectionately of her all the rest of his life. The prolific Tieck found time between novels to lament the destruction of a few of her oaks. Alois Schreiber turned from his poetry and history to grieve over the loss of a lime-tree. Von Scheffel praised her in prose and verse and hailed herin seven songs of his “Gaudeamus.” La Fontaine could not conceive of more ideal surroundings in which to reunite his “Clara du Plessis” and her devoted “Clairant.” G. P. R. James, in his favorite romance “Heidelberg,” wrought prodigies of sentimentality here with the heroic “Algernon Grey” and the emotional “Agnes.” Matthisson immortalized himself by his “Elegie” in these ruins. All who have read Alexandre Dumas’s dramatic “Crimes Célèbres” will recall the young fanatic, Karl Ludwig Sand, and his assassination of the poet, Kotzebue, in our neighboring city of Mannheim, but they may not have heard of how Kotzebue once said: “If an unhappy individual were to ask me what spot to live in to get rid of the cares and sorrows which pursue him, I should say Heidelberg; and a happy one asks me what spot he would choose to adorn with fresh wreaths the joys of his life, I should still say Heidelberg.”

Goethe loved the Neckar, and scarcely less its famous old bridge. In an interpretative mood he once observed, “The bridge shows itself in such beauty as is perhaps not to be equaled by any other in the world.” And, indeed, it is an easy thing to divide enthusiasm between bridge and river. Nothing is jollier than loafing against the broad balustrades of this solid old veteran, as the students love to do, and lazily take note of the river’s tinted reflections, the ripple and eddy about the piers, the mirroring of the arches in perfect reverse, and watch the deep green shadows of the hills creep out andsteal across. Great rafts come downstream laden with the output of the Odenwald and Black Forest, and swift steamers hurry under the massive arches bound upstream for the mountain towns or downward to Mannheim. Ferries ply beside it, fishermen drift beneath it, and throngs of townspeople and countrymen stroll along it, with now and then a be-petticoated peasant girl from the Odenwald whose fair hair is hidden under a huge black coif. How redolent it is of Rhenish life! One lingers beside the great statue of its builder, the old Elector, and gazes with unwearying satisfaction on the strange mediæval gateway, loopholed and portcullised, and wonders where two other such queer round towers can be found with such odd bell-shaped capitals and such slender little spires. Terrible and tragic experiences have befallen this sturdy old hero, and its antique towers are pitted from the riddling of French and Swedish and German bullets. Fire has swept it, cannon shaken it, floods grappled with it, and blood drenched it from shore to shore. Wan processions of famine-stricken people have dragged themselves across its paving-stones, and its gateways have reëchoed with groans and prayers and curses. To-night we see it as defiant as ever, battle-scarred and unshaken, with “head bloody but unbowed,” striding its river with broad and shapely arches—as real a part of Heidelberg as the very hills above it.

One looks down from the castle on the twinklinglights of the cramped old town, and notes how it has ambitiously spread its suburbs even beyond the opposite bank and that its villa-lamps sprinkle their way in the distance toward that little hamlet with the great mouthful of a name,—Handschuhsheim,—in the hills. It is there, could we see it, that the tumbledown hut stands that sheltered Luther when he escaped from the “Tile-Devils” of Worms; at a sight of it one wonders if he did not exclaim here as he did at the Diet: “Here I take my stand. I can do no otherwise.God help me!” In Heidelberg itself, the shops of that one long street, Hauptstrasse, send up a wavering, crooked path of softened light, but the more elegantAnlageis discreetly reserved with all its hotels and imposing homes. One distinguishes little at this hour of the peaked tile roofs and faded shutters of the venerable town—the little awninged shops, sombre cafés,Stuben, and restaurants; or the excited appearance of an occasional side street that starts with all enthusiasm at the river, loses heart in a block or two, and comes suddenly to a discouraged end in a tangle of trees and forest paths. We only know that Emperor WilliamIcanters his bronze steed with its capacious girth along the middle of Ludwigs-Platz right up to the university building where the celebrated professors have their “readings” before their frisky young “Meine Herren”; and that the market-place is probably as shabby and gloomy as usual, and the Kornmarkt subsided again to its customary listlessnesssince the last of the evening crowds have taken the mountain railroads there for cool trips to the Königsstuhl or the Molkenkur or for a trout dinner at the distant Wolfsbrunnen.

Out of this cramped nest of roofs the shadowy Gothic tower of St. Peter’s Church rises boldly, challenging beholders to forget—if they can—how Jerome of Prague once nailed his theses on its doors and defended them before excited multitudes; calling, besides, on the distant and indifferent to sometimes have a thought of the famous university scholars who lie under the weeping-willows of its churchyard. A neighboring bidder for consideration, the famous Heilig-Geistkirche, thrusts a lofty spire skyward above the dark tree-tops until its weather vane is almost on a level with our feet. There is little need for this ecclesiastic to feel any apprehension on the score of being forgotten, so renowned has it been for half a thousand years as once the foremost cathedral of the Palatinate, celebrated for richness of endowment, extent of revenues, the beauty of its art treasures, and the learning of its prebendaries. As it appeals to us to-night it is as one fallen far from its former high estate, and yet the very eagles that soar over Heidelberg must have enough knowledge of religious controversy to recall its past amusing dilemmas of divided orthodoxy. The stranger in the castle ruins will smile as he thinks of what he has read of the days when both Protestants and Catholics worshiped there at one and the sametime, through the effective device of a partition wall thrown up to separate choir from nave. The elaborate Catholic ceremonials of the altar necessitated the reservation of the choir for them, while the Protestants got along very nicely with a pulpit built in the end of the nave. What unusual entertainment might have been contrived by neutrals to the controversy had a brick or two been removed from the partition wall and an ear applied alternately to either service! On one side,Ave MariasandPater Nosters—on the other, hymns of the Lutherans; here, the wailingConfiteorand the penitential breast-beating ofmea culpa—there, grim scorn of all ritual and ceremony; in the choir, the intoning of versicle and response, reiterations of “Dominus Vobiscum” and “Et cum Spiritu tuo,” the solemnTantum Ergo, the passionateAgnus Dei, and the triple sound of the acolyte’s bell as the Host is elevated above the kneeling, praying throngs—in the nave, a rapt absorption in the new significance of old truths, and lengthy discourses by stern and ascetic expounders; for one congregation, a glittering altar, sacred images, flaming candles, and a jeweled monstrance—stiff pews and a painted pulpit, for the other; for the Catholics, flocks of priests and choir boys, deacons and subdeacons, sumptuously vested in alb and stole and gorgeous chasuble—for the Protestants, one solemn man in black. Neutrals at the dividing wall could have rendered both congregations a service by loosening abrick or two and letting a little incense and beauty pass to the Dissenters’ side, and some word of wisdom concerning a release from dogma get through to the Catholics. Had America’s new policy of church unity existed then, it would have advocated doing away with the wall altogether and finding some compromise for approaching a common God in a common way. Time, the great umpire, has settled the contest as a draw; for the partition wall has come out and the rival camps with it: the present occupants are “Old Catholics”—a sect with which either side has little sympathy and less patience.

The evening lounger in the old castle will doubtless have more than one thought of the famous seat of learning that has, for five and a quarter centuries, invested the name of Heidelberg with so much lustre and glory. He will, of course, have heard it called the “cradle of Germanic science,” and will have been told that of all Germanic universities only those at Prague and Vienna are older than this. He can form some conclusion as to its rich contributions to human knowledge by merely recalling the names of its famous scholars,—Reuchlin, Melanchthon, Ursinus, Voss, Helmholtz, Bunsen, Kuno Fischer, and the rest,—and will gauge its present standing by the acknowledged eminence of its faculties in medicine, law, and philosophy. One thinks of its long eras of philosophic speculation, always deeply earnest if not invariably profitable, and applauds the force ofLongfellow’s simile in “Hyperion” when he compared them to roads in our Western forests that are broad and pleasant at first, but eventually dwindle to a squirrel-track and run up a tree. If the loiterer be a Presbyterian, he will want to acknowledge indebtedness to old Ursinus for that celebrated “Heidelberg Catechism” of three hundred and fifty years ago that supplied the Westminster Assembly with a model for the “Shorter Catechism” in use to-day. That the university has survived the destructive rigors of so many fierce wars is perhaps sufficient proof of its vitality and the estimate men have set on its usefulness. Tilly carried off its library and presented it to the Pope, when he conquered Heidelberg in the Thirty Years’ War, but although only a small portion of it has ever been returned it has to-day a half-million volumes and documents, among which are original writings of Martin Luther and manuscripts of the Minnesingers. The pleasant summer semester attracts students here,—being allowed, under the “Freiheit” system, to exchangealma maters,—and then one may count up perhaps two thousand scholastic transients in Heidelberg. To many visitors the equipment will appear meagre, for, excepting the main building in Ludwigs-Platz, the library building, medical institution, and botanical gardens, there is little in sight to remind one of its existence. In witness of which there is the popular joke about a new arrival who inquired of a passer-by where the universitymight be: “Don’t know,” was the reply: “I’m a student myself.”

The presence of the jovial student, however, is too much in evidence at this time of the evening, through distant shouts and songs, to leave any one in doubt about the university being somewhere hereabouts. But when are theynotin evidence? At any hour of the day and night you come across them in the cafés, on the streets, loafing on the bridge or up in the castle, or returning or departing on their favorite recreation of walking-trips through the hills. Their smart peaked caps and broad corps ribbons are scenic features of the neighborhood. You wonder when they study, and how much time they ever spend in the private rooms they call theirWohnungen. In spite of the appearance of extremehauteurconveyed by their invariable and ceremonious punctilio these ruddy-faced boys are highly sociable, and take a prodigious delight in smoking, drinking, and singing together. AKaffeeconcertis entirely to their liking, and even more a jollyKegelbahnsupper in some forest restaurant at the end of a long tramp. Most of all, which is amazing, they relish their stupidKneipenwhere every friendly draft of their weak beer is preceded by a challenge to drink, and where the only redeeming feature is the fine singing. Still, atCommerces, one hears the time-honored Fox Chorus, “What comes there from the hill.” Even the pet vice of dueling might be mildly defended on the ground thatGerman students have no such athletic contests as their brothers of America and England and that each looks to the sword, in consequence, as an arbiter of courage and prowess—from theFüchse(who are freshmen) to theBürschen(who are seniors). Granted that the occasional sabre duel is really dangerous, still injuries are trifling in the ordinary encountersAuf der Mensur, fought with the thin, basket-hilted Schläger, and preferably on thePaukbodenof the famous Hirschgasse tavern up the little valley across the river. Blood apart, it is rather amusing than otherwise to watch the contestants in their pads and goggles, the seconds straddling between them with drawn words, and the callous umpire keeping merry count of the wounds. Few topers and bullies here, but vigorous, wholesome youth.

The outlook from the Grand Balcony is upon a sea of foliage so vast as completely to surround castle, gardens, and terraces and convert them into just such an enchanted island as springs so naturally out of the pages of the “Arabian Nights.” Evidences of sorcery and magic multiply as we make the rounds of our fortress, for voices and music come up out of the tremulous green depths, and companion isles emerge in the moonlit distance, but lifted far above us and set on prodigious wave-shoulders of steadily increasing height. The loftiest of these rocks we know to be famous Königsstuhl, a name they have vainly been trying to change to Kaisersstuhl since the visit of Emperor Francis of Austria, ahundred years ago, and Emperor Alexander of Russia. From this eyrie perch one looks abroad by day on a very considerable portion of the wide, wide world, and the distance covered is only limited by the imagination of the observer. Then the Neckar valley is at one’s feet, and a little farther off is the Rhine, and away yonder are the Haardt Mountains and the sombre edges of the Black Forest. The faint blur on the southwestern horizon is said to be Speyer, where the followers of the Reformation were first called “Protestants,” and the lofty pinnacle of the cathedral, rising above the tombs of its imperial dead, quickens thoughts of that “mellifluous doctor” whose writings were “a river of Paradise,” the crusade preacher, St. Bernard, to whom the Madonna is credited with having revealed herself in that very church. Our mortal eyes may confirm the identity of this much from the Königsstuhl’s observation tower, but we can only envy the miraculous vision of those who see the spire of the Strassburg Cathedral, sixty miles away. Doubtless they could distinguish the identical tree of the famous Odenwald rhyme:—

“There stands a tree in the Odenwald,With many a bough so green,’Neath which my own true love and IA thousand joys have seen.”

“There stands a tree in the Odenwald,

With many a bough so green,

’Neath which my own true love and I

A thousand joys have seen.”

Another of the companion isles of this moonlit, tree-top ocean is the popular Molkenkur, a modern “whey-cure,” that flourishes on the princely site of the earlieststronghold of this whole region. To those who are strolling its broad terrace and reflecting, perhaps, upon the tragic history of the place, seven centuries roll back and Barbarossa’s brother, the savage Conrad of Hohenstaufen, climbs the forest trail with archers and spearmen, returning to his mountain retreat from a robber raid along the Rhine. And perhaps the visitor fancies he even hears the roar of that historic explosion that rained the wreckage of old Conrad’s fortress on town and river, or sees the blinding lightning stroke that crumbled this dread stronghold into a stalking-ground for the shuddering phantoms of winter fireside legends.

Reflections that penetrate still farther back into the gloaming of local tradition will precede Conrad’s fortress with the temple of the enchantress Jetta; and could we distinguish in the distance the rock where the cozy inn of the Wolfsbrunnen perches and serves its rare dinners of mountain trout, we should see the very spot where the wolf slew Jetta in judgment of the Goddess Hertha, who was properly indignant that her priestess should have fallen in love with a mortal.

The nearer waters of the billowy forest-sea that ripples around the ruined castle walls contain in their dark, cool depths a picturesque tangle of woodland paths and romantic walks, thickets of fragrant flowers, a shattered arch half cloaked with ivy, and many a pleasant wayside café opened to the sky and gay with its little German band. For those who emerge from the shadows and comeup like Undines into the moonlight that streams in a silver mist on terrace and garden, as fair a picture reveals itself as can be seen in any part of our world. Here are lakes and grottoes and fountains and statues, all flecked with the heavy shadows of lindens and beeches. Here are crumbling towers and vine-mantled turrets and shattered, moss-grown arch and cornice. Even lovelier to-day are these gardens and scarcely less celebrated than three hundred years ago when old Solomon de Caus, architect and engineer of the Counts Palatine and first prophet of the power of steam, “leveled the mountain-tops and filled up the valleys” (as he has recorded in a Latin inscription in one of the older grottoes), and built these “plantations” and made them the haunts of singing birds, and filled them with orange-trees and rare exotic plants, and ornamented them with statues and with fountains that made music as they played. The ruined castle is embraced and enfolded in these beautiful gardens as an ailing child by its mother’s arms. The ravages of fire and war have scarred and wrecked it beyond man’s redemption, but the sturdy walls still oppose their twenty-foot masonry to the attacks of Time as stubbornly as did the great Wrent Tower when it defied the powder blasts of the detested Count Mélac and his devastating Frenchmen.

As the hour of ten draws near, we return through the vaulted passage from the Great Balcony and enter the grass-grown central courtyard. Outside the façadeswere grim and bleak and built to meet an enemy’s blows, but toward the courtyard the castle turned faces of ornament and beauty. One feels at once the force of the saying that this is not the ruin of a castle, but of an epoch. It slowly flowered through the five hundred years that Heidelberg was the capital of the Palatinate, and all the development of those intervening times is expressed in its varying architecture. Pomp and circumstance are written big across it, for its masters and builders were counts and princes, kings and emperors. One feels the love and pride they took in these deserted palaces, now masterless. In the pale moonlight whole rows of effigies of the illustrious dead stand boldly forth in niches of the hollow, staring walls, and medallion heads peer curiously out of pediment recesses, and history and allegory find expression in lifelike statue and carven bust. Delicate arabesques and fanciful conceits wreathe themselves in stones of portal and cornice, and the armorial chequers of Bavaria and the Lion of the Palatinate oppose the lordly Eagle of the Empire. Time has modulated the discordant keys of architecture of divergent periods into a common and mellow harmony, so that the first rude stones laid by old Rudolph seem a consistent part of an assemblage that includes that finest example of Renaissance architecture in all Germany—Otto-Heinrich’s wonderful ruddy palace set with its yellow statues. One thinks of Prague and the battle of the White Hill as he sees the ill-starredFrederick’s massive contribution, and wonders why this beautiful realm could not have enticed him from playing that tragic rôle of “Winter King.” Frederick’s palace looms impressively by night; in its varied architecture and majestic effigies of the House of Wittelsbach one feels the propriety of having here a comprehensive levy upon the building-knowledge of all previous time as an adequate and appropriate expression of the catholic culture of the lords of the Palatinate.

And, indeed, one reflects, there was need for both strength and beauty to a fortress that was to play so momentous a rôle in the fierce dissensions of its time. In that dungeon a pope once lay a prisoner; in this chamber Huss found refuge; in yonder chapel Luther has preached, and all the foremost spiritual lords of the hour. This courtyard has echoed with shouts for the Emperor Sigismund when he tarried hereen routeto play that perfidious part at the Council of Constance, and has rocked with wild applause as “Wicked Fritz,” returning in triumph from the battlefield of Seckenheim, marched in his captive princes. These staring walls have blazed with royal fêtes—in the hush and desolation of to-night one feels a deep sadness in contrasting the ominous silence that pervades them now with the splendor and uproar that vitalized them when a princess was wedded in this crumbling chapel; when Emperor Maximilian came up from his coronation at Frankfort; when the foremost figure of his era, EmperorCharlesV, and his sallow little son who was later PhillipII, feasted and reveled here for days at a time.

We look up at the Gothic balconies, and it seems as though we could almost see some early lord of this stronghold peering down through painted windows at the athletic sports of his hardy sons; and a certain unreality takes phantom form and substance, and the sentinel figures descend solemnly from their niches as a train of valorous knights and pages issues from Otto-Heinrich’s broad portal with music and laughter; there is the scrape and tread of mailed feet and the shouts of a gallant company as fair-haired women in shimmering silks and high-peaked headdresses award prizes of the tourney to kneeling men in glittering armor; and the trumpets sound and the torches flare and the noble retinue sweeps into the great banquet hall, while the “merry councilor” who brings up the rear makes us a profound and mocking bow as the door is closed—and we are alone with the statues in the moonlight.

The empty, silent courtyard is spectral and sad; it is an hour for reverie, for apprehension. The pale silver of the moon whitens into phantom-life two sides and a corner; the rest is a deep, hushed shadow. A cushion of ivy stirs in the faint night air; a bat flashes over a shattered cornice; a stone detaches itself exhaustedly and falls with a tinkle of sand, waking a protest of little echoes.

One steals away silently, resigning ward of all this senile decay to faithful Perkeo, who, in wooden effigy, still companions his huge empty tuns in the darkness of the cellars—the little, red-haired, faithful jester who alone remains constant to his master, of all the army of attendants that thronged these palaces for half a thousand years.

We pass the old stone-canopied well whose columns once were Charlemagne’s, pass the ponderous clock tower and the moat bridge, and enter the fragrant gardens as the valley bells sound ten and the purple mists are rising from the Neckar.

It is impossible to escape a feeling of profound melancholy. Where now are the powerful princes whose rusted swords may not strike back were I to raise a hand of destruction against the halls they reared and loved and guarded with such might? “The fate of every man,” said the Koran, “have We bound about his neck.”

It is depressing to think that such glory, power, and beauty as once were here should have flourished so wonderfully and come to so little. Was all this magnificence created merely for destruction? Could nothing less suffice grim Time to build him an eyrie for bats and swallows? Was Von Matthisson right in the judgment he expressed in the sad and sympathetic “Elegie” he penned in these ruins, and must we conclude with him that temporal glory is but ashes andthat the darkness of the grave adorns impartially the proud brow of the world ruler and the trembling head that shakes above the pilgrim’s staff?

“Hoheit, Ehre, Macht und Ruhm sind eitel!Eines weltgebieters stolze ScheitelUnd ein zitternd Haupt am PilgerstabDeckt mit einer Dunkelheit das Grab!”

“Hoheit, Ehre, Macht und Ruhm sind eitel!

Eines weltgebieters stolze Scheitel

Und ein zitternd Haupt am Pilgerstab

Deckt mit einer Dunkelheit das Grab!”

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