HEIDELBERG.
Baden-Baden, July 2nd.—I set off from Mannheim by railroad on Friday morning about ten, and got to Heidelberg in an hour. It began to rain as soon as we started, and poured torrents almost the whole day. I sat very disconsolately in my inn, hearing the rain pattering down, till a momentary cessation took place, of which I instantly availed myself, and set forth to the Castle. I went all over the ruins under the usual guidance, and then made the tour of the adjoining grounds, but the rain again fell in torrents and the opposite hills and surrounding country were immersed in dense masses of vapour. After braving the rain for some time, I descended, but had hardly got down before it cleared up, on which I crossed the bridge, and strolled down the road on the banks of the Neckar, and thence had a variety of views of the Castle from different points as well as of the course of the river, which is very pretty. Yesterday morning it was fine, so I went early up to the Castle, and wandered about for an hour or two in all directions. The statues of the Electors in the building in the inner court, the facade of which is nearly perfect, are very curious, and it is surprising how some of them have resisted such rude assaults of time and weather as they must have been exposed to. The town is swarming with students, wild-looking creatures, with long hair, open collars, and every variety of beard in cut, colour, and length. Their practice of duelling, though forbidden, still goes on, but the combats don't seem to be very dangerous, as the first wound or scratch decides it. They told me that serious mischief rarely occurred. I went to see nothing but the Castle. The library is, I believe, fine and curious, but it is mere waste of time to look at the outside of books, or hear their titles enumerated.
At eleven o'clock the railroad took me to Carlsruhe, where I was obliged to hire a carriage to bring me here. Nothing could exceed the indignation of my servant at seeing the deplorable old rattle-trap which was produced for my use. It seemed to be dropping to pieces, and could not have been cleaned, within or without, for many years. Such as it was, I was forced to take it, and at the next stage I was shifted into another of precisely the same description. At Rastadt, the last stage, Thomas implored me to demand a more presentable vehicle, and piteously remonstrated on the disgrace it would be to make my entry into Baden in such an equipage. The Fates, however, had decreed that this disgrace should befall me, for there was no carriage better or worse to be had in Rastadt, and I was obliged to come on with the same, horse and all; and, to fill the cup to overflowing, I arrived at the hotel door in presence of a numerous assemblage of smart people who were just going to dinner at the table-d'hôte. The figure I must have cut was certainly not brilliant, but I could not help being amused at it, and especially at the despair of my faithful valet, who felt much more for my dignity than I did myself. There was no room whatever at the hotel I stopped at, so I went to look for a lodging elsewhere, and addressed myself to the Hôtel de l'Europe, a grand-looking establishment. I asked if they had rooms, and they said yes; but I suppose my appearance was not prepossessing (what would they have thought if they had seen my carriage?) for they took me to some miserable looking apartments in an adjoining outhouse. I rejected these with indignation, and said I would look elsewhere, when they ran after me, and offered me others; but I said, as they had not chosen to do so at first, I would have nothing to say to them, and I went on to the Hôtel de Russie, where I got very good rooms. In the evening I went to the promenade and the gaming rooms, which are as fine as the saloons in any palace I know of, and splendidly fitted up, but the amount of play, which is to defray the expense, seemed to me very small. It is, however, a very bad season, the long continuance of bad weather having diminished the number of visitors. I did not see one individual I knew, except a Colonel O'Meara whom I had known a little in England, and who volunteered to be my cicerone, and was very civil and obliging. This morning I walked before breakfast through a delightful shady avenue to a village about a mile and a half off, stopping to drink some water at a famous spring; then came home and wrote my letters, and started to walk up to the old Castle, which, after losing my way just outside the town, I successfully accomplished, and a most glorious view it is from the top. I certainly have never seen a more lovely landscape, and am rejoiced to have seen it, to feed my memory with for the future.
LIFE AT GERMAN BATHS.
July 3rd.—Dining at the table-d'hôte with just half a dozen people whom I don't know, with whom I have no conversation or communication, and not knowing whether they are French, Russians, or what, is a bore. I have done this twice, but will have no more of it. After dinner yesterday went to the usual place of resort, which, being Sunday, was crowded with people. There was a concert in the great room, and the whole thing was gay and amusing. It is totally unlike anything that can be seen in England, or I suppose anywhere but at some of these Baths. The society is extremely promiscuous, and completely democratic in its character, nevertheless perfectly respectable in appearance and behaviour. The locality is charming, the open booths round the garden exhibiting every variety of merchandise, and the numerous tables in the open air round which little parties are sitting, talking, drinking, eating, and smoking, while others are parading up and down, present a scene of remarkable gaiety, and when the concert began all the world flocked into the magnificent rooms, where everybody ranges about from high to low without paying anything. The early hour admits of children being there, and the little wretches are scampering about in great numbers. All the time the rouge-et-noir and roulette are going on, with crowds round the tables, but not much money staked. I found at last some people I knew, the two Hannah Colmans (the youngest now Madame de Porbeck and wife to a Baden officer), Mrs. Herbert with Sir Francis Vincent and her daughter Lady Vincent. It is wonderful how glad one is to see anybody in such a solitude of unknown faces, and how people who scarcely ever notice each other at home strike up a sudden but brief intimacy under circumstances productive of a momentary attraction. Sometimes these accidental associations lead to permanent intimacies, and sometimes one discovers in a moment that people whom one has been acquainted with all one's life, without knowing anything of them, are full of merits of which one had no sort of notion.
July 4th.—Madame de Porbeck, who is gay, good-natured, and agreeable, proposed to me to go to Eberstein Castle, one of the most celebrated excursions from hence, which I gladly accepted, and we went after dinner. I have no talent for description of scenery, and, if I had, it would be superfluous, to describe these noted spots. Suffice to say that I never was so enchanted in my life as with this Castle and the panorama it commands. I cannot figure to myself anything more lovely, and it wants nothing to make it perfect. There is a mixture of everything that can interest, astonish, and delight; the magnificent pine forests, feathering up the sides of the mountains; the vast chaos of hills cast into every variety of form; the river winding, rushing, sparkling, and murmuring in its course; the innumerable villages with which the banks are studded; the patches of cultivation striping the hill-sides, so curiously subdivided, diversified between corn-fields, potatoes, and vineyards, looking so minute in the vast space; the bridges; the curling smoke; the moving objects, like Lilliputians, in the distance; the sounds and the smells wafted by the air—altogether make a combination which affords inexpressible pleasure. Above all, I must not forget the lights and shadows, and the glorious effects of the setting sun in the calm and clear evening. The afternoon is the time for visiting such spots as these, when the noonday heats are past, and the blaze of the sun is softened and harmonised into a milder but a clearer light; and as the shadows lengthen and produce constant variety of shape, and draw fresh outlines on the opposite hills and in the valleys, and colours bright and changing like those of a rainbow dye the whole horizon, lighting up the course of the Rhine, and painting with purple hues the mountains of the Vosges, I looked and thought that nothing on earth could surpass this in beauty, and I thanked God for the faculty of enjoying it so much as I do. We went over the Castle, from which the views are charming. It is perched like an eagle's nest on the top of a conical hill; it was once a fortress of a feudal lord, and is now a small hunting-lodge, the new part curiously grafted on the old, and the interior prettily and comfortably arranged, but with hardly any accommodation. The Grand Duke comes here sometimes for a little while to shoot in the forest. The road up to it is like the Simplon, and has been recently made by the town. As we descended, we overtook some of the huge pines, which looked as if they were hewn 'to be the mast of some great ammiral.' They are put upon wheels at a great distance from each other, and drawn by oxen, and the way in which they contrive to get them round the turnings is really wonderful. We came on one at the turn, and it so completely barred the way, and seemed itself at such a fix, that I thought no one would have been able to pass; but by shifting, and moving, and dragging, between the men and the oxen, they managed it, I can hardly tell how. These are the vast pines that are floated down the Rhine; but those that we fell in with are used for domestic purposes.
THE CASTLE OF EBERSTEIN.
July 5th.—Yesterday went to dine at Gersbach, a small village just below the Castle of Eberstein. Went by the circuitous but flat road that leads through the valley of the Murg; but the beauties of the valley only begin at Gersbach itself, so that there was not much good got by taking this broiling roundabout route. There we met a party of people I never saw before, and after dinner we sat by the side of the river enjoying the fine weather and fine scenery in luxurious repose. Returned by a new and beautiful road over the mountain. My companion in the carriage, Mr. de Porbeck, an officer in the Baden army, a well-conditioned and intelligent man, gave me some scraps of information about what may be called German politics, some of which I was not prepared for. I asked him about the Chambers of his Grand-Duchy, and he told me they exercised a very real and effectual control over the finances and internal administration generally; that they sat long, debated a good deal, and there are some men of great ability and very good speakers in them. The particulars of the discussions of a Baden Parliament are not very interesting, but he told me that there is a great and growing desire on the part of the smaller States to form one nation with one or other of the great Powers, and that before long they would all be thus absorbed by their own desire. I said surely none of them could desire to belong to Austria. He said this feeling was more prevalent in the north, and he thought eventually all the Rhenish and Protestant States, Baden, Nassau, Würtemberg, Saxony, would be united to Prussia; that the first war which broke out would produce this revolution; that the fate of the Catholic parts of Germany might be different: that Bavaria might survive and possibly unite other provinces to herself. But as to Austria, he was convinced that the death of Metternich would be the signal for a great movement in that country; that everything was preparing for it, and that event would bring the projects which were spreading more and more every day to maturity. While this desire to make Germany a nation, or to merge the petty independencies in one or two great German Powers, is, according to him, becoming strong and general, there is also a great wish to have colonies and a navy, all of which he deems feasible, and says Prussia is already beginning to build ships of war. Whether there is truth in all this, or these are my friend's reveries, I know not; but as I had never before heard of such aspirations, I was struck by what he told me. We had a great deal of talk besides, about the condition of the people, and he expressed with some pride his satisfaction that while they had nothing of the grandeur of English opulence to boast of, they had not the afflicting spectacle of English misery and destitution. The subdivision of land (the effects of which I saw in the minute stripes of cultivated land on the hill-sides) caused all the agricultural population—much the greatest part of Baden—to be removed above want, and he assured me that the whole of the people are tolerably educated. No soldier, for instance, is allowed to enlist without being able to read and write. I remarked that on Sunday, though all the shops were shut in the town, labour was going on in the fields—that is, haymaking; I won't answer for any other. There is certainly a degree of social equality which is very foreign to our habits, and yet it is not subversive of the respect which is due from persons in one station to those in another. To me it has nothing offensive. I see it as a trait of national character and manners. At the table-d'hôte here the master of the hotel did not sit down as at Mayence, but he conversed with the guests. Both he and all the waiters, who are very obliging and attentive, talk to me continually when I go out or come in. There is something of independence mixed with kindness in their way of doing these things, which quite reconciles me to what anybody, thoroughly imbued with English customs and prejudices, would probably be affronted or provoked at. As far as I can ascertain, nothing can go on more harmoniously than the Catholics and Protestants do here. Two-thirds of the people are Catholics, the reigning family Protestants; clergy of both persuasions paid by the State, education in common, and the schools open to teachers who give separate religious instruction. Go where one will, it seems to me that one finds a more satisfactory and harmonious state of things with regard to religion than in England. There is more intolerance, bigotry, obstinacy, and déraison at home than in all the world besides. In what I have written here I am well aware that there is very little but the merest superficial view of the condition of the country, picked up in one or two casual conversations, and I value it at no more than it is worth. With regard to what De Porbeck told me of the German movement, it is not to be suspected as proceeding from an enemy of the Court, for he is on very good terms with the Royal Family, and appears to be something of a favourite.
CONDITION OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE.
July 7th.—On Wednesday evening we drove up an avenue of poplars to a Gasthaus, whence there is a view over the whole country through which the Rhine runs, bounded by the Vosges. There we saw the sunset, lighting up the Rhine till it shone like silver along its devious course, and the mountains and sky were bathed in tints of yellow and afterwards of purple, presenting a picture such as Claude delighted to paint. Last night to the old Castle and to the rocks above it, and afterwards to the Conversation-house garden to enjoy the cool air. The life here is the most idly luxurious I ever led, but however enjoyable, and much as I delight in the scenery, I begin already to feel that it would not do for long. It seems here as if everybody was enjoying one vast holiday, and had nothing to do but to amuse themselves. I get up between six and seven, walk for a couple of hours—yesterday to the top of the hill to see the view; this morning along the new road and back—then go into a cold bath, and dress, breakfast, and read and write for about two hours; go to the Club to read the newspapers, make visits and stroll about till dinner, dine at some of the tables-d'hôte or in my own room at something between four and five, then drive wherever I fancy to go, returning home when the sun is gone down and the moon and the stars are out, and repair to the garden. Then I sit with any friends I find at a little round table, in the cool of a delicious evening, eating ice and drinking what I please, a band of music playing, and the odours of new-mown hay, orange trees, limes, and roses, wafted on every gale. It is true that with these sweets the fumes of tobacco are very often mingled, for almost all the men smoke. There are crowds of men and women doing the same thing that I do, some repairing to the newspaper-room, some flirting with the young lady who superintends it. Every now and then one saunters into the magnificent rooms where the eternal play goes on, and the monotonous voice of the croupier, 'Le jeu, est-il fait?'—'Messieurs, faites vos jeux,' wearies the ear. These creatures sit hour after hour, peddling with their florin stakes, and assiduously making cards with pins, till between ten and eleven the gardens are gradually deserted, and at eleven a kind of curfew tolls the knell of day departed and gambling ends. A bell rings, which is the signal for general dispersion and the closing of houses of resort. The lights in the rooms are extinguished, and the weary croupiers retire. The police drive people even out of the hotels, and long before midnight no sound is heard in Baden but the waters of the river gurgling over their pebbled bed.