Now, all this time we have been wandering from Bonn and its gardens, sloping down into the very Rhine, and its beautiful park, the former pleasure-ground of that palace which now forms the building of the University. There are few sweeter spots than this. You have escaped from the long, low swamps of Holland, you have left behind you the land of marsh and fog, and already the mountainous region of Germany breaks on the view; the Sieben Gebirge are in sight, and the bold Drachenfels, with its ruined tower on its summit, is an earnest of the glorious scenery to come. The river itself looks brighter and fresher; its eddies seem to sparkle with a lustre they know not when circling along the swampy shores of Nimmegen.
Besides, there is really something in a name, and the sound of Deutschland is pleasanter than that of the country of ‘dull fogs and dank ditches’; and although I would not have you salute it, like Voltaire—
‘Adieu, canaille—canards, canaux!’
still, be thankful for being where you are, take your coffee, and let us have a ramble through the Park.
Alas! the autumn is running into the winter; each breeze that sighs along the ground is the dirge over the dead leaves that lie strewn around us. The bare branches throw their gaunt arms to and fro as the cold grey clouds flit past; the student, too, has donned his fur-lined mantle, and strides along, with cap bent down, and hurried step. But a few weeks since, and these alleys were crowded with gay and smiling groups, lingering beneath the shadow of tall trees, and listening to the Jager band that played in yonder pavilion. The grey-haired professor moved slowly along, uncovering his venerable head as some student passed, and respectfully saluting him; and there too walked his fair daughters, the ‘frauleins with the yellow hair.’ How calmly sweet their full blue eyes! what gentleness is written in their quiet gait! Yet, see! as each bar of the distant waltz is heard beating on the ear, how their footsteps keep time and mark the measure! Alas! the summer hours have fled, and with them those calm nights when by the flickering moon the pathways echoed to the steps of lingering feet now homeward turning.
I never can visit a University town in Germany without a sigh after the time when I was myself a Bursche, read myself to sleep each night with Ludwig Tieck, and sported two broadswords crosswise above my chimney.
I was a student at Göttingen, the Georgia Augusta; and in the days I speak of—I know not well what King Ernest has done since—it was rather a proud thing to be ein Göttinger Bursche. There was considered something of style to appertain to it above the other Universities; and we looked down upon a Heidelberger or a Halle man as only something above a ‘Philister.’ The professors had given a great celebrity to the University too. There was Stromeyer in chemistry, and Hausman in philology; Behr in Greek, Shrader in botany; and, greater than all, old Blumenbach himself, lecturing four days each week on everything he could think of—natural philosophy, physics, geography, anatomy, physiology, optics, colours, metallurgy, magnetism, and the whale-fishery in the South Seas—making the most abstruse and grave subjects interesting by the charm of his manner, and elevating trivial topics into consequence by their connection with weightier matters. He was the only lecturer I ever heard of who concluded his hour to the regret of his hearers, and left them longing for the continuation. Anecdote and illustration fell from him with a profusion almost inconceivable and perfectly miraculous, when it is borne in mind that he rarely was known to repeat himself in a figure, and more rarely still in a story; and when he had detected himself in this latter he would suddenly stop short, with an ‘Ach Gott, I’m growing old,’ and immediately turn into another channel, and by some new and unheard-of history extricate himself from his difficulty. With all the learning of a Buffon and a Cuvier, he was simple and unaffected as a child. His little receptions in the summer months were in his garden. I have him before me this minute, seated under the wide-spreading linden-tree, with his little table before him, holding his coffee and a few books—his long hair, white as snow, escaping beneath his round cap of dark-green velvet, falling loosely on his shoulders, and his large grey eyes, now widely opened with astonishment at some piece of intelligence a boy would have heard without amazement, then twinkling with sly humour at the droll thoughts passing through his mind; while around him sat his brother professors and their families, chatting pleasantly over the little news of their peaceful community —the good vraus knitting and listening, and the frauleins demurely sitting by, wearing a look of mock attention to some learned dissertation, and ever and anon stealing a sly glance at the handsome youth who was honoured by an invitation to the soirée.
How charming, too, to hear them speak of the great men of the land as their old friends and college companions! It was not the author of Wallenstein and Don Carlos, but Frederick Schiller, the student of medicine, as they knew him in his boyhood—bold, ardent, and ambitious; toiling along a path he loved not, and feeling within him the working of that great genius which one day was to make him the pride of his Fatherland; and Wieland, strange and eccentric, old in his youth, with the innocence of a child and the wisdom of a sage; and Hoffman, the victim of his gloomy imagination, whose spectral shapes and dark warnings were not the forced efforts of his brain, but the companions of his wanderings, the beings of his sleep. How did they jest with him on his half-crazed notions, and laugh at his eccentricities! It was strange to hear them tell of going home with Hummel, then a mere boy, and how, as the evening closed in, he sat down to the pianoforte, and played and sang, and played again for hours long, now exciting their wonder by passages of brilliant and glittering effect, now knocking at their hearts by tones of plaintive beauty. There was a little melody he played the night they spoke of—some short and touching ballad, the inspiration of the moment—made on the approaching departure of some one amongst them, which many years after in Fidelio called down thunders of applause; mayhap the tribute of his first audience was a sweeter homage after all.
While thus they chatted on, the great world without and all its mighty interests seemed forgotten by them. France might have taken another choleric fit, and been in march upon the Rhine; England might have once more covered the ocean with her fleets, and scattered to the waves the wreck of another Trafalgar; Russia might be pouring down her hordes from the Don and Dnieper—little chance had they of knowing aught of these things! The orchards that surrounded the ramparts shut out the rest of Europe, and they lived as remote from all the collisions of politics and the strife of nations as though the University had been in another planet.
I must not forget the old Hofrath Froriep, Ordentliche-Professor von—Heaven knows what! No one ever saw his collegium (lecture-room); no one ever heard him lecture. He had been a special tutor to the Princes—as the Dukes of Cumberland and Cambridge were then called—about forty years ago, and he seemed to live upon the memory of those great days when a Royal Highness took notes beside his chair, and when he addressed his class as ‘Princes and Gentlemen!’ What pride he felt in his clasp of the Guelph, and an autograph letter of the Herzog von Clarence, who once paid him a visit at his house in Gottingen! It was a strange thing to hear the royal family of England spoken thus of among foreigners, who neither knew our land nor its language. One was suddenly recalled to the recollection of that Saxon stock from which our common ancestry proceeded—the bond of union between us, and the source from which so many of the best traits of English character take their origin. The love of truth, the manly independence, the habits of patient industry which we derived from our German blood are not inferior to the enterprising spirit and the chivalrous daring of Norman origin.