The Einsiedlerstein, or Hermit's Rock, is a bold and isolated crag, which rises sheer and abrupt out of the plain to the height of, perhaps, one hundred and fifty feet. It is separated from the fells, or rugged hills, which form the northern boundary of the wide vale of Hayde, by a space of about two or three hundred yards; sufficiently wide to place it, in the days of cross-bows and ballistas, pretty well beyond the reach of insult, but by far too narrow to be of the slightest avail against cannon, and even musketry. In the face of the rock a staircase is cut, by which you ascend to a door, of which the key is kept at a cottage close by, where dwells also your cicerone, or guide. The door being opened, you see before you a continuation of the rocky staircase; with this difference in character, however, between what is passed and what is to come,—that whereas you mounted to the threshold under the canopy of heaven, you now move onwards, or rather upwards, through a cavity cut in the face of the solid stone itself. By-and-bye you come to a landing-place, beyond which, at the extremity of a narrow passage, you behold what used to be the armoury of the castle,—an arched hall, chiselled out, like the gallery which leads to it, from the rock. Here are yet the grooves and niches within which warriors, long since dead, used to suspend their spears and battle-axes, their helmets and coats of mail; and here, in the face of the stone, are chiselled out some armorial bearings; probably the devices worn by the lord of the castle on his shield. We find a tiger couchant, for example, not ungracefully executed; a gate or portcullis, I believe in heraldry an honourable device; with the fragments of what have evidently been other symbols, though time has laid on them his defacing fingers so effectually that you cannot trace them out.
From the armoury you proceed round a curvature in the rock, which conducts you into the open air, and gives you a view of the opposite fells, to the dungeon,—a melancholy place, bearing to this hour numberless records of the sufferings and the patience, and even the ingenuity, of those by whom, in old times, it was tenanted. The late Count Kinsky, the proprietor of the castle, caused a breach to be made in the side of the dungeon, which you now enter through an arched passage in the rock, though originally the captive was let down by a rope from above. This arrangement has the two-fold effect of admitting an increase of light into the den, and of affording a ready means of access to such as might scruple to descend, collier-fashion, in a basket. Having passed beneath the arch, you find yourself in a circular cell some twenty feet or more beneath the surface of the earth, and girdled in by walls of solid rock, out of which the hole must, with infinite labour, have been chiselled. These walls are everywhere scratched over with representations of wounded hearts, crucifixes, death's-heads, and even of flowers with broken stems; all of them clearly enough of very old fabrication, though unfortunately none of them dated. How many gallant spirits have here pined and fretted themselves into eternity; how many noble minds and sinewy arms have long confinement and scanty fare, bowed down to this damp floor and withered. What a record of misery and wrong would not these walls give forth, were they for one little hour gifted with the power of speech, like the talking woods in the fairy tale. And yet, evil as the times were, when might, not right, was in the ascendant, they had their redeeming excellencies too. Knightly honour, chivalrous abhorrence of guile, the soul to endure, as well as the temper to inflict; these were the qualities most prized by men, who, born and bred to lives of constant warfare, held danger light, and looked upon peace as inglorious. And then their religious faith! It might be gloomy, it might be wild, it might be altogether misplaced or misdirected,—but it was at least sincere; for it exerted an influence over their most wayward humours; it urged them both to do and to suffer as none but men who believed that they acted aright would have done. Let us not, then, even when standing in the dungeon of a baron's hold, come to the conclusion, that what we call the dark ages were ages of unmitigated wrong. They might produce their tyrants and oppressors, whose power, in proportion as it was resistless, would spread misery around; but they produced also their vindicators of the oppressed; their Bayards and Lancelots, chévalliers sans peur et sans réproche,—of whose spirit of candour, and fair and open and honourable dealing, it might be well if this our intellectual and utilitarian age had inherited even a portion.
It will scarcely be expected that I am to conduct my reader through all the crannies and recesses of the Einsiedlerstein. Sufficient for both our purposes it will be to observe, that everything is in the most perfect state of preservation, and that he who is desirous of obtaining a tolerably accurate notion of the sort of style in which the barons of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries used to live, may find it worth his while to make a journey even as far as Burgstein. Here is the chapel, entire as when last the solemn mass was sung for the spirit of some departed hero. There it is, hollowed out of the rock, with its chancel and its transept, while near it are lodging-rooms of various kinds; and underneath vaulted stables capable of containing perhaps twenty horses. The well, too, that essential ingredient in a strong-hold, still remains, though now it is dry; and on the back of the kitchen fire-place the soot and smoke of other times have left their traces. The only innovations effected, indeed, in the original arrangements of the castle, are those which the hermit began; and which the father of the present lord, the Count Kinsky, of whom I have already spoken, has completed.
The history of the Burgstein, as far as I have been able to trace it, is this. The name being a combination of the words birke and stein, signifies the birchy-rock, an appellation which both now and in remote times, would appear to have justly belonged to it, for its crest is overgrown with birch trees, one at least of which is as fine a specimen of the plant as it would be easy to discover either in Bohemia or elsewhere. Its bold and isolated character seems to have pointed it out as a fit situation for one of those keeps or strong-holds in which even monarchs were, during the middle ages, glad at times to seek refuge, and which constituted the groundwork of their power to chiefs of less elevated rank. So early as the year 1250, a castle accordingly was erected on it, in which the Baron von Ronow, a nobleman of vast influence, held his court, and frequently entertained the King of Bohemia himself, Wenzel I. By the caprice of his grandson, however, it passed into the hands of the Knights Templars, who established there one of their chief colleges, and, according to tradition, enacted many and horrid rites, such as tended not a little to hurry on the ruin of their order. When that catastrophe befel them, the sovereign seems to have restored his prize to a noble of the same lineage with him who willed it away, so that down to the year 1515, we find it in the possession of a long line of Placek von Lippa und Berksteins. But heirs male at length failed, and the heiress marrying a Baron Kollowart, the lordship of this noble keep was transferred to a new line, which transmitted it from father to son in uninterrupted succession, down to the year 1670. To them succeeded, somehow or another, a race of Von Rokortzowas, who again in 1710, made way for the house of Kinsky, and in their possession it has ever since remained, neglected, indeed, till of late, but holding time and decay alike at defiance.
Old chroniclers tell of many a lordly festival having been celebrated within its walls. Repeatedly, too, it has withstood and repelled the attacks of an enemy, once when an army of not less than fifteen thousand men sat down before it, and a second time, when pressed by thirteen thousand. But the invention of gunpowder, and still more effectually the changes in men's manners which followed the discovery of printing, slowly robbed it of its importance, till at last it was deserted by its owners, who transferred their residence to the more commodious, but far less picturesque mansion which they still continue to inhabit. Then began a new race of tenants to occupy the rock, in giving accommodation to whom the Graffs Kinsky doubtless believed that they were benefiting their own souls, and doing their Maker laudable service.
Towards the close of the seventeenth century, while the lordship of the manor yet remained in the hands of the Kokortzowas, a bouerman, or small landed proprietor, distinguished in the circle for his skill in agriculture, suddenly took it into his head to become a hermit, and fixed on the deserted rock as his place of residence. The gräfinn—for a female seems then to have exercised the authority of count, gave immediate attention to his wishes; and fitted up, at her own cost, such a cell as the pious bouerman described. There, for some years, dwelt Brother Constantine, telling his beads at stated periods, both by day and night, and living abundantly on the alms which the pious of all classes bestowed upon him. At his decease, an enthusiastic miller stepped forward to fill the vacancy, and Brother Wentzel, so long as the sands of life continued to run, was, to the good people of Birkstein, and the districts around, all that Brother Constantine had been. To him, in 1720, succeeded Brother Antony, or rather two brothers, Antony and Jacob, who dwelt in cheerful community one with another, praying before the same altar, and conversing during the hours of relaxation, but, in strict propriety, occupying separate cells in the rock. In 1735, however, Jacob died, when one Samuel Görner, a modelist, and perspective maker, took his place. Some ingenious representations of Mount Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre, executed in wood by the hands of Brother Samuel, still remain, and are exhibited to the stranger with becoming pride. And last of all came a weaver, hight Müller, who at the age of twenty-two, devoted himself to a life of seclusion, and dwelt apart upon the rock up to the year 1785. At that time, the strong arm of power was stretched out, and hermits, as well as many communities of monks, disappeared. Yet Joseph, who seems to have been conscientiously attached to his calling and place of abode, was not driven into exile. Being appointed parish-clerk to the church of Birkstein, he continued to hold the office several years; and dying at an advanced age was, by his own desire, buried in a grave which he had dug out for himself in one of the cells on the rock. Such are the circumstances which have contributed to cast into the shade the ancient and warlike name of this curious piece of architecture, and to describe as a hermit's cell, what was, in point of fact, one of the strongest among the many and strong baronial castles with which Bohemia abounds.
The hermits have not sat in the seats of armed men so long, without leaving numerous traces of their sojourn behind them. Three or four caves are hollowed out in the rock, one of which contains a skull, a rosary, and a narrow stone bedstead, overlaid with moss. In another, besides the usual ornaments, such as crucifixes, &c., we found an image of Brother Antony Müller, arrayed in his brown robe and hood, with beads, a long gray beard, and bare feet, just as he is stated to have exhibited himself in the land of the living. A third cave, or cell, contains a representation of the same hermit's dead body, as it lay in state,—for to the rock the corpse was carried both for exhibition and interment; and finally, we have his grave,—a small heap of stones, with a stone cross erected over them, and an epitaph inscribed on the rock at his feet. I subjoin the original, and give, for the benefit of such as may not be acquainted with the German, a loose translation.
Du hällst den Tod für deinen feind,
Du irrst; er ist dein bestest Freund:
Er ummt dir alle leibin ab