Dec. 24th.
The weather is still so bad, and hangs such a drapery over all distant objects, that I can make no excursions, and am obliged to confine myself to the town; which indeed, by the number and variety of its prospects, affords interesting walks enough. I begin every time with my favourite monumental church, and finish with it. The architect who built this magnificent structure went quite out of the beaten track of ornaments and proportions. On the outside, for instance, near the great door, are two Jacob’s ladders reaching to the roof, where the ascending angels are lost from sight. The busy heaven-stormers are extremely pretty; and the design appears to me conceived completely in the spirit of that fanciful architecture, which blended the most childish with the most sublime; the greatest minuteness of ornaments with the vastest effect of masses; which imitated the whole range of natural productions,—gigantic trunks of trees, and delicate foliage and flowers; awful rocks, and gaudy gems, men and beasts; and combined them all so as to strike our imaginations with wonder, reverence, and awe. This has always appeared to me the true romantic, i. e. true German, architecture;—the offspring of our most peculiar spirit and fashion of mind. But I think we are now wholly estranged from it; it belongs to a more imaginative and meditative age. We may still admire and love its models, but we can create nothing of the same kind, which does not bear the most obvious stamp of flat imitation. Steam-engines and Constitutions now prosper better than the arts,—of whatever kind.—To each age, its own.
As I love contrasts, I went this evening straight from the temple crowded with the dead, to the market-place, equally populous in another way, and equally well lighted, where all sorts of provisions are sold under covered galleries. Every thing here is inviting and elegant; subjects for a thousand master-pieces of Flemish pencils; and a luxurious sight for the ‘gastronome,’ who here contemplates his beauties of Nature. Enormous pieces of beef, of a juicy red streaked with golden fat; well-fed poultry, looking as if stuffed with eider-down; magnificent vegetables; bright yellow butter; ripe and fresh fruit, and tempting fish, presented a picture such as my astonished eyes never beheld. The whole was heightened by the brilliancy of a hundred variegated lamps, and decorated with laurel and red-berried holly. Instead of one Weihnachtstisch,[158] here were a hundred; the caricatures of market-women did admirably for the gingerbread dolls, (Pfefferkuchenpuppen,) and we buyers for the curious and wondering children. The most brilliant assembly could hardly have amused me more. When I saw a grave-looking sheep holding a candle in each foot, and thus lighting himself; or a hanging fowl, in whose rump they had stuck a red wax taper; a calf’s head with a lantern between its teeth, next neighbour to a great gander illuminated by two huge altar tapers; or an ox-tail, through which a gas tube was passed, ending pompously in a tuft of flame,—I made the most diverting comparisons with an assembly in my native land; and found the resemblances often more striking than those of the celebrated portrait-painters W—— and S——.
Living is very cheap here, especially in the so-called boarding-houses, where a man is well lodged and admirably boarded for two or three guineas a-week, and finds agreeable and easy society: equipages are not wanted, as sedan-chairs are still in use.
Eight-and-twenty hours have at length appeased the angry heavens, and to-day was what is here called “a glorious day,”—a day, that is, in which the sun occasionally peeps out from between the clouds. You may be sure that I took advantage of it: I ascended the hill near the town, from which you have a bird’s-eye view of the whole, and can distinguish almost every separate house. The Abbey church lies, like the kernel, in the centre; the streets radiate upwards in every direction, and in the bottom of the valley the Avon winds like a silver riband. I continued my way along a pretty walk to Prior Park, a large and formerly splendid mansion, built by a haughty Lord, but now possessed by a meek Quaker, who lets the house stand empty, and, true to the simplicity of his faith, lives in the stable.
Thus passed the morning.—By twilight and moonlight I took another walk to the other side of the town, and found the view still more magnificent in the stillness of the clear night. The sky was of a pale green, and on the right hand masses of black deeply indented clouds were piled up. The hills cut their rounded outlines sharply upon the clear sky, while the whole valley was filled with one curtain of blue mist, through which you saw the glimmering of a thousand lamps, without being able to distinguish the houses. It seemed a sea of mist, out of which countless stars twinkled with multiplied rays.
I closed the day with a hot bath in the principal bathing establishment; and found the accommodations convenient, clean and cheap, and the attendants prompt and respectful.
Dec. 26th.
The bad habit of reading in bed occasioned me a laughable misfortune last night. My hair caught fire, and I was forced to bury my head in the bed-clothes to extinguish it. The injury is horrible;—one entire half of my hair was destroyed, so that I have been obliged to have it cut almost close to my head all over. Happily my strength does not reside in my hair.
A letter from you consoled me on waking. Your fable of the nightingale is charming. Had L—— imagined that, and in his twentieth year said, “Be dead to the world till your five-and-thirtieth,” how brilliantly and prosperously could he now (according to the world’s standard) enter it. In the course of that time I too have often accused the world and others; but when dispassionately viewed, this is as foolish as it is unjust. The world is, and will be, the world; and to reproach it with all the evil that accrues to us from it, is to be like the child who would beat the fire because he has burnt his finger in it. L—— should therefore regret nothing; for if he had slept fifteen years like a marmot, he would not have enjoyed animation or consciousness. Let us stick to the belief, ‘que tout est pour le mieux dans ce meilleur des mondes.’