I heard similar profanity on my return trip across the Atlantic. One night when a storm assailed our ship, so that the waves rolled over the deck and the fierce rocking of the vessel threw many almost out of their beds, I heard many of them swear, even during the very time that the thunder rolled with tremendous roarings and crashes across the heavens. It seems almost impossible that conscious intelligent beings could behave thus, but the fact that they do, helps us to believe other strange truths recorded in history, without which, no correct conception of man's former depraved condition can be formed at this advanced day. For example, few seem to appreciate the part played by the Catholic Church with her images, shrines, sacred relics, paid magnificent temples, in taming and civilizing man, because they do not know who and what he was when the light of intelligence first began to direct his footsteps, and he had not yet learned to control his selfish nature which had hitherto been guided by an instinct worth a hundred times more than intelligence without morality or religion. We make a sad mistake yet in the nineteenth century, in cultivating the intellect and leaving morality so much out of the question. We see some of the fruits already in the corruption which prevails alike in all circles without regard to party or sect. I will recur to this again in speaking of the influence of the church, when I come to describe the magnificent churches of Italy.
On the second afternoon that I spent at Cologne there had been a shower, and from sunset till dusk I beheld one of the grandest atmospheric phenomena that I had ever witnessed. From a window of Mlüler's Hotel (facing the Dom-Platz) I was looking over the Cathedral at the western sky, as the sun throw its colored light through the small drops of rain still descending, and thus colored both the green foliage of the trees and the grand edifice before me, presenting a scene of such enchanting beauty as would afford almost a sufficient excuse for one to go into raptures, or sink down in a fit of ecstatic delight.
I may add that before leaving Cologne, I saw among the many dog-teams used in distributing produce over the city, a span whose disproportion I shall never forget; there was a dog hitched to one side of the shaft and a woman took hold of the other side and assisted him in pulling the load!
Bonn.
On Friday morning, August 13th, I left Cologne and went by rail to Bonn, 21 miles further up the Rhine. It is the seat of the Freidrich Wilhelm University, and contains about 26,000 inhabitants. The Poppelsdorfer Allee, an excellent quadruple avenue of fine horse-chestnuts, three quarters of a mile long, is the principal promenade of the town. At the end of it stands the Schloss containing the University, with a library (200,000 volumes) and a museum rich in Roman antiquities. The Münster (or Cathedral) dates from the 12th and 13th centuries. In the Münsterplatz stands a fine bronze statue of Beethoven, a celebrated German musician, who was born in the Bonngasse, No. 515. This statue faces south, (as do most of the statues that I have seen in Europe, except when the surroundings are unfavorable). One side of the pedestal contains the following inscription:
LUDWIG
VAN
BEETHOVEN
Geb. zu Bonn MDCCLXX.
The other three sides contain base reliefs representing muses playing upon musical instruments.
Half a mile above the Poppelsdorfer Schloss rises the Kreuzberg (400 feet high) crowned with a white church. This contains the "Holy Steps" 28 in number, which must only be ascended on the knees, and are in imitation of the Scala Sancta at the Lateran in Rome, piously believed to be the identical steps of the Prætorium ascended by the Savior when he appeared before Pilate.
The view from the tower of this church is one of the most beautiful on the Rhine. After enjoying the scenery a while, with a party of ladies and gentlemen whose society I had joined in the church below, we came down, and I took a rustic seat on an eminence and surveyed the beauties of the landscape more at leisure. The most beautiful part of the Rhine is from Bonn to Mayence, and this view from the Kreuzberg constituted for me a fine initiation into the charming scenery that fell to my portion to enjoy the coming three days. Large sections of the country here are entirely without fences, there being no hedge-fences even, and the landscape checkered by the different fresh colors of the various crops, spreads out like a beautiful carpet of green, red, yellow, gray, and a dozen other tints and shakes, all mixed up, or like a pavement rich in mosaics. We had also gone into the cellar of the church to see the skeletons and bodies of 26 Servitten lying about in boxes or coffins set in rows upon the ground. These, it is said, built the church in 1627. The bodies of several of them seem to have petrified more or less perfectly, but the rest of them are mere skeletons, and present an anatomical display that reminded me of what I had seen in St. Ursula, in Cologne, as above described. This cellar is perfectly dark and is entered by a trap-door in the form of a heavy stone, which an attendant removes by means of a crow-bar. The steps leading down are narrow and the passage very low, so that several of the ladies at first declined to enter, but we persuaded them, however, to accompany us. A tallow candle afforded us some little light, and after brushing away the cobwebs which the spiders had spun since the last party had made their entry, we came upon the sickening sight of the dozen or more skeletons still preserved. The ladies in the party were intelligent and dressed tastefully, and I shall never forget how the gaudy colors of their dresses contrasted with the gloom of that nasty cellar.
The frequent odd adventures into such places as many would not like to enter in their own homes in the presence of their friends and companions, constitutes a prolific source of amusement. After we had crept out of that dirty cobwebbed passage, our clothes were slightly soiled and cobwebby. With the remark, "If we were all with our fashionable circles at home, I suppose we should not go on this way," or some such allusion, that reminds the company of how differently they are wont to go on at home,-one can, under such circumstances generally provoke a fit of merriment. To the traveler, every day is a day of adventures--frequently of rather funny adventures!