"Dresden, July 11.—We have seen a number of places on the way here. In the old cathedral of Naumbourg is a fine Cranach picture of St. Elizabeth, with the Wartbourg above her head and the Marbourg church at her feet. In the cathedral of Mersebourg is a most extraordinary picture of the Electoral family of Saxe-Mersebourg receiving the dead Christ and bearing him to the sepulchre. The family became extinct in 1738, and they all lie in the crypt under the church in the order in which they lived, in coffins covered with vermilion and gold, the little children in front and the grown people behind. Above, is the tomb of the Emperor Rudolph of Swabia, and in the sacristy they put into my hand a thing which I thought was a hand carved in oak, but found it was his own real hand, cut off in 1080!
"Dresden announces itself by four black-looking domes and towers above the flat horizon and then by the many arches of the long Elbe bridge. It is very like a little—a very little Paris; the same rows of tall white houses with green shutters: the same orange and lime trees filling the air with their sweetness: only the river is different, so gigantic and so bright. A broad flight of steps took us to the stately Bruhl terrace above the river—golden in the sunset. At the end an odd-looking building with a dome turned out to be a Jewish synagogue, and we went in. One old Jew in his hat dropped in after another, till at last one of them put on a white muslin shawl, and going up to a desk where the altar should be, began bobbing his head up and down and quacking like a duck. Then another in a corner, standing with his face close to the wall, quacked also at intervals, and then all the rest chimed in, till it was exactly like a farmyard. But no words can say how ridiculous it eventually became, when they all burst out into choruses which sounded like 'Cack a lack-lack-lack. Oh Jeremiah! Jeremiah! Oh Noah's ark, Noah's ark! Cack a lack-lack-lack, lack, lack: loo, loo, loo.' All the little black Wellington boots stamping on the floor together, and all the long white beards bobbing up and down, and giving an audible thump on the table at every bob.... And not the least absurd part was that they seemed to think our presence a compliment, at least they all bowed when we went out."
"Schona on Elbe, July 16.—We left Dresden by the steamer—the last view of the town very striking, with the broad flood of the Elbe sweeping through a line of palaces. At Pirna we left the boat, and a long walk through hot fields brought us to the entrance of the Ottowalder Gründ. A flight of steps leads into a chasm, with high rocks towering all round and the most brilliant and varied greens beneath. In one place the narrow path is crossed by a natural arch; then it winds up again through masses of forest and deep rocky glens, till it emerges on the top of the Bastei.
"I was disappointed with the Bastei, which is like a scene on the Wye rather exaggerated. You look over a precipice of seven hundred feet, and see all around rocks equally high shooting straight up skywards in every conceivable and inconceivable form—pillars, pyramids, cones: and up all of them fir-trees cling and scramble, and bright tufts of bilberries hang where no human hand can ever gather their fruit. There are bridges between some of the rocks, and they support fragments of castles of the robbers who used to infest the Elbe, and, beyond the river, all the distant hills rise in columnar masses of equal irregularity. After dining at the little inn, we walked on to Königstein, a fortress which has never been taken, large enough to hold the whole population of Dresden. Here a tremendous thunderstorm rolled with grand effect around the mountain. There is a terrible parapet overhanging the precipice, where a page fell asleep, and was awakened by one of the Electors firing a pistol close to his ear to break him of the habit. A long path through bilberry thickets brought us to the station, and we took the train to Schandau, where we slept—very glad to go to bed at ten, having been on foot since 4 A.M.
"This morning we took a carriage for the first eight miles up the valley of the Raven's Crag, and walked on to the Kuhl-stuhl. In the very top of the hill the rock has made a huge natural arch, which leads to an otherwise inaccessible platform overhanging the valleys. The peasants drove their cattle here for protection in the Thirty Years' War, whence the name of Kuhl-stuhl, and hither the Bohemian Protestants fled for refuge. There is a natural slit in the rock, with a staircase to an upper platform, which was the refuge of the women, but only a thin woman could reach this place of safety.
"Forest again, ever deeper and darker—and no human life but a few women gathering faggots with bare arms and legs, till we reached the Jagd-Haus on the promontory of the Lesser Winterberg, where Schiller's name is cut, with others, in the mossy stone. Forest and bilberries again to the hotel on the Greater Winterberg, where we dined on mountain florellen and strawberries and cranberries. Forest, ever the same, to the Prebischthor, a natural arch projecting over an abyss, splendid in light and shadow, and altogether the finest scene in the Saxon Switzerland ... then a descent to Schona. We found it easy to accomplish in a day and a half that for which Murray allots four days."
"Prague, July 17.—All through the night we travelled in a railway carriage with twenty-two windows and eighty inmates. Dawn broke on a flat country near the Moldau. At last a line of white wall crowned a distant hill. Then, while an Austrian official was collecting passports, railway and river alike made a turn, and a chain of towers, domes, and minarets appeared above the waving cornfields, one larger than the others—the citadel of Prague!
"What a poem the town is!—the old square of the Grosse Ring, where the beautiful delicately-sculptured Rathhaus and church look down upon a red marble fountain, ever surrounded by women with pitchers, in tall white caps: the streets of Bohemian palaces, with gigantic stone figures guarding the doors: the bridge, with statues of saints bending inwards from every pier, and the huge Hradschin palace on the hill beyond, with the cathedral in its midst: the gloomy precipice from which the Amazonian Queen Libessa hurled down her lovers one by one as she got tired of them: the glorious view from the terrace of the Hradschin, recalling pictures of the view from the Pincio at Rome: the wonderful tombs of the Bohemian kings, and the silver chandeliers and red lights before the shrine of St. John Nepomuck in the cathedral."
"July 18.—On Sunday afternoon we were at the Jewish synagogue, the oldest building here—older than Prague itself, and now only used on the Day of Atonement and other great occasions. It is quite in the midst of the Jews' quarter, which is entirely given up to them, and inside it is black with age, its gothic pillars looming out of a coating of soot and smoke, never allowed to be cleared away. The centre was spread with draperies of cloth of gold and silver. On the platform within them was the chief Rabbi, a venerable man with a white beard which swept over his brown robe as far as his waist. 'He is wonderfully learned,' whispered my neighbour to me. 'He understands every language in the whole world, and as for English he speaks it as well as an Englishman.' At last there was a bustle in the crowd, and a young woman made her way through, enveloped in a very curious ancient hood of worked gold, and several very smart ladies crowded up after her: we followed. Then the priest shouted in Hebrew so that the little building rang again, and the Rabbi took a little silver cup of oil and—I think—anointed the lady, and a service followed in which all the people responded electrically as if a bell were struck; but it was not till we came out that I found the lady in the golden hood had been—married.
"We went afterwards to the Jewish burial-ground—a wide rambling expanse in the heart of the town, literally crammed with tombstones, falling one over the other, and, between them, old gnarled elder-trees growing fantastically. The cemetery has been twice emptied!—and filled again. On one of the graves a young Jewess was lying, evidently very ill. 'You see,' said the old woman who let us into the cemetery, 'that the Rabbi who is buried there was so good when he was alive, that when all the other people were rooted up, they left him and his wife alone; and his good works live on so much, that sick persons are often brought here to lie upon his grave, in the hope of their being cured.'