Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

Caskets of amber, of ivory; drinking-horns,—one-third horn and two-thirds embossed silver,—bowls and globes of wrought silver, hunting-cups of solid silver made to fit into deer's antlers and with coral knobs for handles; closets full of fowling-pieces, pistols, silver-sheathed hunting-knives, falcon hoods set with real pearls and embroidered in gold,—orders of all sorts known to Denmark; elephants and St. Georges in silver and crystal and cameo; gold jugs, gold beakers, bowls of green jade, with twisted snakes for handles and dragons' heads at bottom; goblets of solid crystal, of countless shapes and sizes,—one in shape of a flying-fish borne by two dolphins; onyx and jasper and agate and porcelain, made into no end of shapes and uses;—these are a few of the things which "God provided" for this Danish king and queen. One of these rooms is hung with tapestries of lilac silk and gold moire, embroidered with gold and silver threads and colors. These were provided by Frederick himself, who brought them from Italy.

But you don't care a fig who brought the things, or when they were brought; and perhaps you don't care very much about the things anyhow. I dare say they do not sound half as superb as they were; but I must tell you of a few more. What do you think of a room with walls, ceiling, and a large space in the centre of the floor all of plate glass, the rest of the floor being of exquisite mosaic in wood; and of a coat of crimson velvet embroidered thick with silver thread, to be worn with a pale blue waistcoat, also embroidered stiff with silver thread; and of cups cut out of rubies; and a great bowl of obsidian set with rubies and garnets; and of topazes big enough to cut heads on in fine relief? There are hundreds and hundreds more of things I have not mentioned, and hundreds of things I did not see even, in the rooms I walked through; and there were seventeen rooms more into which I did not even go. If I had, I should have seen twelve superb tapestries, 12 feet in height, by 10 to 20 feet broad, each giving a picture of a battle, and all strictly historical; the Royal Font, of solid embossed silver, inside which is placed at every christening another dish of gold; one whole room full of the costliest and rarest porcelain from all parts of the world,—here is the splendid and famous "Flora Danica" service. I saw at a porcelain shop a reproduction of this service, every article bearing some Danish flower most exquisitely painted. A great platter heaped full of wild roses was as lovely as a day in June. Here also are the Danish Regalia, kept in a room hung with Oriental carpets, and with a floor of black and white marble. "In the middle of the floor a pyramid arises behind clear thick plate glass, from the flat sides of which, covered with red velvet, the rays of gold and precious stones flash upon us, whilst the summit is adorned by a magnificent and costly crown." This sentence is from the catalogue written by my friend the noble Dane, and is a very favorable specimen of his English. Bless him, how I do wish I had gone back to that museum! At this distance of time it seems incomprehensible to me that I did not. But that day I felt as if one more look at the simple door of a museum would make a maniac of me. So this is all I can tell you about the famous Rosenborg. And with the others I will not bore you much, for I have made this so long; only I must tell you that in the Ethnographic, which is in some respects, I suppose, the most valuable of them all, having five rooms full of Prehistoric antiquities from the stone, bronze, and early iron ages in every part of the world, and twenty or thirty rooms more full of characteristic things,—dresses, implements, ornaments, weapons, of the uncultivated savage or semi-savage races, also of the Chinese, Persians, Arabians, Turks, East Indians, etc.;—in this museum I found a most important place assigned to the North American Indian; and Dr. Steinhauer, the director of the museum, a man whose ethnographical studies and researches have made him known to all antiquarians in the world was full of interest in them, and appreciation of their noble qualities, of their skill and taste in decoration, and still more of the important links between them and the old civilizations. Here were portraits of all the most distinguished of our Indian chiefs; a whole corridor filled with glass cases full of their robes, implements, weapons, decorations; several life-size figures in full war-dress: and their trappings were by no means put to shame, in point of design and color, by the handsomest trappings in Rosenborg; in fact, they were far more wonderful, being wrought by an uncivilized race, living in wildernesses, with only rude paints, porcupine quills, and glass beads to work with. My eyes filled with tears, I confess, to find at last in little Denmark one spot in the world where there will be kept a complete pictorial record of the race of men that we have done our best to wipe out from the face of the earth,—where historical justice will be done to them in the far future, as a race of splendid possibilities, and attainments marvellous, considering the time in which they were made. Here was a superb life-size figure of a Blackfeet warrior on his horse; the saddle, trappings, etc., are exactly the same in shape and style as an old Arab saddle used hundreds of years ago. On the warrior's breast is a round disk of lines radiating from a centre, in gay colors, of straw and beads, of a device identical with a rich Moorish ornament; the same device Dr. Steinhauer pointed out to me on a medicine-bag of the Blackfeet tribe.

Here was a figure of a chief of the Sacs and Foxes, in full array; by his side the portrait of his father, with the totem of the tribe tattooed on his breast. With enthusiasm Dr. Steinhauer pointed out to me how in one generation the progress had been so great that on the robe of the son was set in a fine and skilful embroidery the same totem which the father had rudely tattooed on his breast. Here were specimens of the handiwork of every tribe,—of their dresses, of their weapons; those of each tribe carefully assorted by themselves. Dr. Steinhauer knew more, I venture to say, about the different tribes, their race affinities and connections, than any man in America knows to-day. When I told him a little about the scorn and hatred which are felt in America towards the Indians, the indifference with which their fate is regarded by the masses of the people, and the cruel injustice of our government towards them, he listened to me with undisguised astonishment, and repeated again and again and again, "It is inexplicable; I cannot understand."

You can imagine what a thrilling pleasure all this was to me. But it was marred by the keenest sense of shame of my country, that it should have been left for Denmark alone to keep a place in historical archives for a fair showing and true appreciation of the "wards of the United States Government."

I might fill another letter with accounts of the "Collection of Northern Antiquities;" but don't be frightened: I won't, only to tell you that it is far the largest and most complete in Europe. And you may see there a specimen of everything that has been made, wrought, and worn in the way of stone, bronze, iron, or gold and silver, in the north countries, from the rude stone chisel with which the prehistoric man pried open his oyster and clam shells at picnics on the shore, and went away and left his shells and "openers" in a careless pile behind him, so that we could dig them all up together some thousands of years later, down to the superb gold bracelets worn by the strong-armed women who queened it in Norway ten centuries ago. It is a great thing for us that those old fellows had such a way of flinging their ornaments into lakes as offerings to gods, and burying them by the wheelbarrow-full in graves. It wasn't a safe thing to do, even as long ago as that, however; for there are traces in many of these burial-mounds of their having been opened and robbed at some period far back. In one of the rooms of this museum are several huge oak coffins, with the mummied or half-petrified bodies lying in them, just as they were buried sixteen hundred years ago. The coffins were made of whole trunks of trees, hollowed out so as to make a sort of trough with a lid; and in this the body was laid, with all its usual garments on. There is an indescribable and uncanny fascination in the sight of one of these old mummies,—the eyeless sockets, the painful cheekbone, the tight-drawn forehead; they look so human and unhuman at once, so awfully dead and yet somehow so suggestive of having been alive, that it stimulates a far greater curiosity to know what they did and thought and felt, than it is possible to feel about neighbors to-day. I never see half a dozen of these mummies together without wishing they would sit up and take up the thread of their gossip where they left it off,—so different from the feeling one has about live gossips, and so utterly unreasonable too; for gossip is gossip all the same, and nothing but an abomination in any age, whether that of Pharaoh or Ulysses Grant. If I did not feel a dreadful misgiving that you had had enough museum already, and would be bored by more, I really would like to tell you about a few more of these things: a necklace, found in a peat bog by a poor devil who had begged leave to cut a bit of turf there to burn, and to be sure he found eleven beautiful gold things of one sort and another. The necklace is very heavy to lift. I asked permission to take it in my hands. I laid it around my neck, and it would have hurt to wear it ten minutes. It was a great snake coil of solid gold, the body half as big as my wrist! If Queen Thyra wore it, she must have been a giantess, or else have had a wadded "chest protector" underneath her necklaces. She and her husband, King Gorm, were buried in two enormous mounds in Jutland, some fourteen hundred years ago. The mounds were so high that they nearly overtopped the little village church; and yet, at some time or other, robbers had burrowed into them, and carried off a lot of things, so that when the mounds were scientifically excavated, few relics were found. Stealing from that sort of grave seems to make the modern methods of body-snatching quite insignificant. Even A. T. Stewart's body would have been safe if it had been in a mound as high as the church steeple.

Now I must tell you a little more about Harriet. She leaves me to-morrow, and I shall grieve at parting with the garrulous old soul. Niobe, I call her in my own mind; for she melts into tears at the least emotion. I am afraid nobody has ever been very good to her; for the smallest kindness touches her to the quick, and she cannot refrain from perpetually breaking out into expressions of fondness for me, and gratitude, which are sometimes tiresome. The explanation of her good English is that her parents were English, though she was born in Copenhagen, has lived there all her life, and married a Dane when she was quite young. He was a tradesman, and they lived in comparative comfort, though, as she said, "we never could lay up a penny, because we always sent the children to the best schools; and for ten children, ma'am, it does take a heap of schooling!"

Of the ten children, six are still living; and Harriet, at sixty-four, has thirty-six grandchildren. When she first came to me she looked ten years older than she does now. Good food, freedom from care, and her enjoyment of her journey have almost worked miracles on her face. Every morning she has come out looking better than she did the night before. I see that she must have been a very handsome woman in her day,—delicate features, and a soft dark brown eye, with very great native refinement and gentleness of manner. Poor soul! her hardest days are before her, I fear; for the daughter with whom she lives, and for whom she works night and day, is the wife of that worthless fellow, our commissionnaire. He is a drunkard, and not much more than four fifths "witted." Harriet is pew-opener at the English church, and gets a little money from that; the clergyman is very kind to her, and she has the promise of a place at last in a sort of "Old Lady's Home" in Copenhagen. This is her outlook! I must send you the verses she presented to me yesterday. I had left her alone for the greater part of the forenoon, and she took to her pen for company. That was the way Katrina used to amuse herself when I left her alone. I always found her sitting with her elbows on the table, a pile of scribbled sheets in front of her, her hair pushed off her forehead, and a general expression of fine frenzy about her. Katrina's English did not compare with Harriet's at all; that is, it was not so good. I liked it far better. It was one perpetual fund of amusement to me; but I think Katrina had more nearly a vein of genius about her, and she was not sentimental; whereas Harriet is a sentimentalist of the first water,—no, of the "seventy thousandth"!

Paris, September 19.

I kept my letter and brought it here to tell you about Ole Bull's funeral, full accounts of which reached the H——'s just before we left Munich on the 9th. It was a splendid tribute to the dear old man; I shall always regret that I did not see it. His home is on a beautiful island about sixteen miles from Bergen. If it were only possible to make you understand how much more the word island means in Norway than anywhere else! But it is not. To those of you who know the sort of mountain pasture in which great hillocks of moss and stone are thrown up, piled up, crowded in, in such labyrinths that you go leaping from one to the other, winding in and out in crevice-like paths, never knowing where moss leaves off and stone begins,—where you will strike firm footing, and where you will plunge your foot down suddenly into moss above your ankles; and to those of you who love the country and the spring in the country so well that you know just the look of a feathery young birch-tree on the first day of June, and of slender young spruce-trees all the year round, it is enough to say that if you take a dozen miles or so of such a pasture, and make the hillocks many feet high, and then set in here and there little hollows full of the birches, and a ravine or two full of the young spruces, and then launch your hillocks and birches and spruces straight out into deep blue sea, you'll have something such an island as there are thousands of on the Norway coast. Ole Bull's home was on such an island as this, and he had made it an ideally beautiful place. Eighteen miles of pathway he had made in the labyrinths of the island; had brought soil from the shore, and set gardens in hollows here and there. The house is a picturesque and delightful one; and in the great music-room, nearly a hundred feet long, there he lay dead, two days, in state like a king, with steamers full of sorrowing friends and mourning strangers coming to take their last look at his face. The king sent a letter of condolence to Mrs. Bull, and the peasants came weeping to the side of his bed; from highest to lowest, Norway mourned. On the day of the funeral, after some short services at the house, the body was carried on board a steamer, to be taken to Bergen. The steamer was draped with black and strewn with green. I believe I have told you of the beautiful custom the Norwegians have of strewing green juniper twigs in the street in front of their houses whenever they have lost a friend. No matter how far away the friend may have lived, when they hear of his death they strew the juniper around their house to show that a death has given them sorrow. It was a commentary on human life (and death!) that I never went out in Bergen without seeing in some street, and often in many, the juniper-strewn sidewalks. As the steamer with Ole Bull's body approached the entrance of Bergen harbor, sixteen steamers, all draped in black, with flags at half-mast, sailed out to meet it, turned, and fell into line on either side to convoy it to shore. Bands were playing his music all the way. At the wharf they were met by nearly all Bergen; and the body was borne in grand procession through the streets, which were strewn thick with juniper from the wharf to the cemetery, at least two or three miles. The houses were all draped with black, and many of the people had put on black. The golden wreath which was given him in San Francisco was borne in the procession by one of his friends, and a procession of little girls bore wreaths and bouquets of flowers. The grave was hidden and half filled with flowers; and last of all, after the body had been laid there,—last and most touching of all, came the peasants, crowds of them, gathering close, and each one flinging in a fern leaf or a juniper bough or a bunch of flowers. Every one had brought something, and the grave was nearly filled up with their offerings. It is worth while to be loved like that by a people. Whatever scientific critics may say of Ole Bull's playing, he played so that he swayed the hearts of the common people; and his own nation loved him and were proud of him, just as the Danes loved Hans Christian Andersen, with a love that asked no indorsement and admitted no question from the outside world. The school of music to which Ole Bull belonged has passed away; but what scientific art has gained the people have lost. It will never be seen that one of these modern violinists can make uneducated people smile and weep as he did. The flowers that are dying on his coffin are all immortelles. Such blossoms as these will never again be strewn by peasant hands in a player's grave.

It took two days to come from Munich to Paris,—two hard days, from seven in the morning till six at night. We broke the journey by sleeping at Strasburg, where we had just one hour to see the wonderful cathedral and its clock. The clock I didn't care so much about, though the trick of it is a marvel; but the twilight of the cathedral, lit up by its great roses of topaz and amethyst, I shall never forget as long as I live. In my next letter I will tell you about it. But now I have only time to copy Harriet's verses, and send off this letter. Here they are:—