Walter of Eschenbach sent to his wife the deeds of the property she had brought him as her marriage portion, became a shepherd, and lived as one, in the county of Würtemberg, thirty-five years. He made himself known only when at the point of death, and was interred with the pomp due to the dignity of the ancient family which in his person closed. On the spot where the emperor was murdered, the Empress Elizabeth and Queen Agnes founded the monastery of Kœnigsfelden the high altar being built on the very place where he expired.
No one crime was ever succeeded by so many in pretended expiation. All who bore the same name with any of the guilty; all who had ever had connexion with them; all found within the prescribed domains, were sacrificed without pity. The accomplices not taken were put to the ban of the empire, their marriage vows dissolved, their friends commanded to avoid their presence, their enemies permitted to free themselves of their lives, their lands adjudged to the empire.
Agnes having founded the convent, ever averse to communion with the world, hard, cold, and cruel, though only six-and-twenty, enclosed herself within its walls, distributing alms, practising fast and penance, and performing the most humble offices. It was in vain however that she strove to attract to Kœnigsfelden the old brother Berthold of Offtringen, who had been a knight and warrior, and lived as a hermit on the mountain: “Woman,” he said, “you serve God ill while shedding innocent blood, and founding monasteries with the fruit of your rapine; only on goodness and mercy doth he look with favouring eye.”
The road having passed Unspunnen, skirts a wild stream in an enchanting glen, the White Lutschine, which waters the valley of Lauterbrunnen. On entering the village of Zweylustchinenr the mountains open to leave a way to Grindelwald, and through the chasm rushes the sister torrent, the Black Lutschine, a picturesque bridge crossing the place where meet these troubled waters.
Our road lay straight before, made beautiful by the varied forms and tints of the bold rocks which are the belt of the White Lutschine, and the dark and vivid green of pines and beech, which rise among the crevices, or from the strangely shattered summits of these crags, stained brown and grey, like genius springing from and brightening poverty.
Somewhere hereabouts, where there is barely room left for the car between rock and river, one of the former, projecting over the path sombre and sternly, once shadowed a fratricide. Of the tradition I heard only that the murderer was a powerful noble, who after his crime left in remorse his castle to ruin, and his lands to the first invader, and died in his wanderings.
The valley continued to narrow till we had surmounted the ascent to the first houses of Lauterbrunnen. On the left was the rock of Hunenflue, having the form and regularity of a bastion. Before us we saw the Jungfrau, who had dropped her veil, demanding I suppose the sun’s homage on her maiden brow, which he yielded soon after, but not until we had seen the Staubbach,—alas! without its iris.
The fall is on the right hand, about a quarter of a mile from the Capricorn, where we left our conveyance. The new hotel, which bears its name, and is built closer to it, commands the best view, saving that from the mound beneath it, which, in its deceitful neighbourhood, appears a hillock, but whose steep side I climbed with difficulty, and was puzzled to descend with sober step. We offered due reverence to the cascade, arriving ancle deep in the rivulet, from the plank made slippery by its spray; receiving a bath on the before-named mound, where the voice of the water was so loud we could not hear our own; but certainly not aware that in its spring of eight hundred feet it sometimes brings down stones to break its admirers’ reveries. The late rains had increased its volume and grandeur, and therefore perhaps lessened its resemblance to the tail of a white horse in the wind. In the winter it forms a colonnade of ice.
Along the wall of cliff which bounds this side of the valley, are other falls of equal beauty, though less fame. The Jungfrau and Wetterhorn close its extremity, and up the mountains, on the stream’s opposite shore, the green pastures stretch nearly to the summit, dotted with chalets to receive cattle and herdsmen, some seeming too high for human foot to rest on. These and the poorer houses of the village, which is scattered over the valley, are built of whole pine trunks, rudely mortised at the corners, a hole left for door and window, and the heavy stones laid on their roofs of bark, that the wind may not whirl them away.
The more aristocratic dwellings have the sawn planks which form their walls carved and ornamented, the open balconies of elaborate workmanship, and below the jutting roof inscriptions graven to recall the name of the owner, and the year and day in which the work was done, and generally some blessing, in quaint rhyme, on building and builder.