Around the clock in Europe

by Charles Fish Howell

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 blithest nightingales 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 her in 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 and steal 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 twinkling lights 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 elegant Anlage is 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 William I canters 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 listlessness since 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 same time, 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 Marias and Pater Nosters—on the other, hymns of the Lutherans; here, the wailing Confiteor and the penitential breast-beating of mea 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 solemn Tantum Ergo, the passionate Agnus 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 a brick 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 of Longfellow’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 exchange alma 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 university might 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 they not in 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 their Wohnungen. In spite of the appearance of extreme hauteur conveyed by their invariable and ceremonious punctilio these ruddy-faced boys are highly sociable, and take a prodigious delight in smoking, drinking, and singing together. A Kaffeeconcert is entirely to their liking, and even more a jolly Kegelbahn supper in some forest restaurant at the end of a long tramp. Most of all, which is amazing, they relish their stupid Kneipen where 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, at Commerces, 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 that German 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 the Füchse (who are freshmen) to the Bürschen (who are seniors). Granted that the occasional sabre duel is really dangerous, still injuries are trifling in the ordinary encounters Auf der Mensur, fought with the thin, basket-hilted Schläger, and preferably on the Paukboden of 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.