[Concluded.]
Travelers are like conchologists, vying with one another in picking up different shells, and herein lies the unending interest of their records.
In the roundabout route from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Mediterranean, Cassel, the electorate in former years of Hesse-Cassel, afforded a most suggestive visit. To be sure, its history is not altogether pleasant to an American, for the fact that the old elector hired his troops to England to fight us during the Revolutionary war, is not a savory bit of German history. Even Frederick the Great saw the meanness of it, for when he heard they were to take their route to England by Prussian roads, he sent word, “if they did so, he would levy a cattle tax on them.” Perhaps some of the money paid by England at that time was laid up in the public treasury and expended afterward upon the extravagant ornamentation of the grounds of the elector’s summer residence, “Wilhelmshöhe.” The palace is in itself one of the most magnificent in Europe. Above the cascades in front of it is the highest fountain on the continent. One stream, twelve inches in diameter, is thrown to the height of two hundred feet. The colossal Hercules which crowned the summit of this artificial grandeur was thirty feet high, and the cascades are nine hundred feet long. The whole arrangement is said to have kept two thousand men engaged for fourteen years, and to have cost over ten million dollars! Jerome Napoleon occupied this palace of Wilhelmshöhe when he was king of Westphalia.
A walk of three miles under the straight and narrow road shaded by lime trees, leads one back to Cassel, after this visit to Wilhelmshöhe. The town is beautifully situated on either side of the river Fulda, and has a population of thirty-two thousand. The beautiful terrace overlooking the angarten, crowned by its new picture gallery, offers as delightful promenades as the celebrated Dresden Terrace. The strains of sweet music coming up from the angarten (meadow) while one is looking at the beautiful Rembrandts and Van Dykes in the gallery, give the enchantment which one never fails to find in a German town. Napoleon carried away many of the most valuable pictures from the Cassel gallery—but it is redeemed from the number of horrible Jordaens and Teniers by possessing the “pearl of Rembrandts,” a portrait of “Saskia,” his wife.
Chemical products, snuff included, are manufactured in Cassel, and it is quite a wide-awake business place—the old town preserved for picturesque effect, and the new town building up for enterprising manufacturers.
Leaving Cassel any day at one o’clock, one can reach Coblenz at half-past seven in the evening, and the Bellevue Hotel will shelter one delightfully for the night, provided a room on the hof, or court, is not given. Four hundred feet above the river at Coblenz stands the old fortress of “Ehrenbreitstein.” How fine its old gray stone and its commanding situation is! No wonder Auerbach, the novelist, in his “Villa on the Rhine,” devoted so many pages to Ehrenbreitstein, the Gibraltar of the Rhine. It cost the government five million dollars. With its four hundred cannon, and capacity to store provision for ten years for eight thousand men in its magazine, well may it scorn attacks “as a tempest scorns a chain.”
Instead of driving up to see this monstrous fortress, one may prefer to wander into St. Castor’s Church in the early morning, and, like a devout Catholic, kneel and pray. It may be more restful to thus “commune with one’s own heart and be still,” than to keep up a perpetual sight-seeing. Charlemagne divided his empire among his grandchildren in this very church. It dates to the eighth century, and is one of the best specimens of Lombard architecture in all the Rhine provinces. Coming out in the morning about ten o’clock, the sun will light up the severe outlines of the great old Ehrenbreitstein across the river, and the thought comes to one, did Luther compose his celebrated hymn, “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (A mighty fortress is our God), while in such a moment of inspiration as this scene produces upon the mind?
We left Coblenz at ten o’clock on the steamer “Lorlei” for Mainz. This romantic name for our boat, the waters we were plying, St. Castor’s Church on the left, and Ehrenbreitstein on the right, brought a strange combination of war, romance and religion to the mind. The only prosaic moment which seized me was in passing the Lorlei Felsen on the Rhine—when instead of remembering Lorlei, I exclaimed, so my companions told me: “O! here is where they catch the fine salmon!” Rheinstein was to my mind the most beautiful and picturesque castle of all, and being owned by the Crown Prince is kept in becoming repair. The little “panorama des Rheins” is a troublesome little companion, for it leaves one not a moment for calm enjoyment and forgetfulness, constantly pointing out the places of interest and crowding their history and romance upon one.
The Dom at Mainz is a curious study for an architect—combining as it does so many styles and containing such curious old tombs.
Frankfort, the birthplace of Goethe, and the native place of the Rothschilds family, has too much history to detail in an article like this. When it was a free city it had, and still retains, I believe, the reputation of being the commercial capital of that part of Germany.