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, a hundred 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 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 earliest stronghold 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 come up 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 façades were 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-starred Frederick’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 here en route to 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, Emperor Charles V, and his sallow little son who was later Phillip II, feasted and reveled here for days at a time.