I passed out of the church, and walked slowly down to the hotel, purchasing by the way, at a mean little shop, some tolerable engravings of Luther's room, the church, &c. To show how immutable every thing has been in Wittenberg since Luther died, let me mention that on coming back through the market-place, we found spread out for sale upon a cloth about a dozen pairs of shoes of the precise pattern of those belonging to Luther, which we had seen in Frankfort—clumsy, rude, and heelless. I have heard that Swedenborg said, that in his visit to the invisible world, he encountered a class of spirits who had been there fifty years, and had not yet found out that they were dead. These Wittenbergers, I think, must be of the same conservative turn of mind.
Failing to get a carriage to the station, we started to walk. I paused a moment before the church, to make some little corrections and emendations in my engravings, and thought, as I was doing so, of that quite other scene years ago, when the body of Luther was borne through this gate by a concourse of weeping thousands. These stones, on which I was standing, then echoed all night to the tread of a closely-packed multitude—a muffled sound, like the patter of rain among leaves. There rose through the long, dark hours, alternately, the unrestrained sobbings of the throng, and the grand choral of Luther's psalms, words and music of his own. Never since the world began was so strange a scene as that. I felt a kind of shadow from it, as I walked homeward gazing on the flat, dreamy distance. A great windmill was creaking its sombre, lazy vanes round and round,—strange, goblin things, these windmills,—and I thought of one of Luther's sayings. "The heart of a human creature is like the millstones: if corn be shaken thereon, it grindeth the corn, and maketh good meal; but if no corn be there, then it grindeth away itself." Luther tried the latter process all the first part of his life; but he got the corn at last, and a magnificent grist he made.
Arrived at the station, we found we must wait till half past five in the afternoon for the train. This would have been an intolerable doom in the disconsolate precincts of an English or American station, but not in a German one. As usual, this had a charming garden, laid out with exquisite taste, and all glowing and fragrant with plats of verbena, fuschias, heliotropes, mignonette, pansies, while rows of hothouse flowers, set under the shelter of neatly trimmed hedges, gave brightness to the scene. Among all these pretty grounds were seats and walks, and a gardener, with his dear pipe in his mouth, was moving about, watering his dear flowers, thus combining the two delights of a German, flowers and smoke. These Germans seem an odd race, a mixture of clay and spirit—what with their beer drinking and smoking, and their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earthly; but an ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursting out in most unexpected little jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus.
The station room was an agreeable one, painted prettily in frescoes, with two sofas. So we arranged ourselves in a party. S. and I betook ourselves to our embroidery, and C. read aloud to us, or tried the Amati, and when we were tired of reading and music we strolled in the garden, and I wrote to you.
I wonder why we Anglo-Saxons cannot imitate the liberality of the continent in the matter of railroad stations, and give the traveller something more agreeable than the grim, bare, forbidding places, which now obtain in England and America. This Wittenberg is but a paltry town; and yet how much care is spent to make the station house comfortable and comely! I may here say that nowhere in Europe is railway travelling so entirely convenient as in Germany, particularly in Prussia. All is systematic and orderly; no hurrying or shoving, or disagreeable fuss at stations. The second class cars are, in most points, as good as the first class in England; the conductors are dignified and gentlemanly; you roll on at a most agreeable pace from one handsome station house to another, finding yourself disposed to be pleased with every thing.
There is but one drawback to all this, and that is the smoking. Mythologically represented, these Germans might be considered as a race born of chimneys, with a necessity for smoking in their very nature. A German walking without his pipe is only a dormant volcano; it is in him to smoke all the while; you may be sure the crater will begin to fume before long. Smoking is such an acknowledged attribute of manhood, that the gentler sex seem to have given in to it as one of the immutable things of nature; consequently all the public places where both sexes meet are redolent of tobacco! You see a gentleman doing the agreeable to a lady, cigar in mouth, treating her alternately to an observation and a whiff, both of which seem to her equally matters of course. In the cars some attempt at regulation subsists; there are cars marked "Nich rauchen" into which we were always very careful to get; but even in these it is not always possible to make a German suspend an operation which is to him about the same as breathing.
On our way from Frankfort to Halle, in a "nich rauchen" car, too, a jolly old gentleman, whose joyous and abundant German sounded to me like the clatter of a thousand of brick, wound up a kind of promiscuous avalanche of declamation by pulling a matchbox from his pocket, and proceeding deliberately to light his pipe. The tobacco was detestable. Now, if a man must smoke, I think he is under moral obligation to have decent tobacco. I began to turn ill, and C. attacked the offender in French; not a word did he understand, and puffed on tranquil and happy. The idea that any body did not like smoke was probably the last that could ever be made to enter his head, even in a language that he did understand. C. then enlisted the next neighbor, who understood French, and got him to interpret that smoke made the lady ill. The chimney-descended man now took his pipe out, and gazed at it and me alternately, with an air of wondering incredulity, and seemed trying to realize some vast conception, but failing in the effort, put his pipe back, and smoked as before! Some old ladies now amiably offered to change places with me, evidently regarding me as the victim of some singular idiosyncrasy. As I changed, a light seemed to dawn on the old chimney's mind—a good-natured one he was; he looked hard at me, and his whiffs became fainter till at last they ceased, and he never smoked more till I was safe out of the cars.
LETTER XLVI.
ERFURT, Saturday Evening.