This brewery, too, is a great place, where one can see German types of many curious kinds, and know what German beer-drinking really is. As we came out into the court, we were near being drowned by some careless employee’s turning loose several barrels of dirty water, from a spout over the doorway. Some soldiers in the vicinity laughed at the speed with which we escaped the flood of beer and water.
Out in the street we noticed a not uncommon Munich sight. It was a little parade of University students in open carriages. They wore their corps uniforms of high boots, jaunty caps, and ribbon across the breast. Some of them held aloft a schooner of beer. The front seat, or the place of honor, in each carriage was occupied by a stately bull-dog, arrayed in ribbons and brass collar.
The great bronze foundry was a place that entertained us greatly. The method of casting statues and monuments was explained to us, and the copies of noted American figures they had cast at different times, now in the exhibition room, made us feel very proud.
It was a group of great men who long ago won for our country the respect of the world. There is not a spot in America, or elsewhere, where one can see more of American genius represented in one room than is seen here in the museum of this foundry.
The sights of the city were not so different from the sights of other cities. King Otto drove by us a time or two on his way to that wonderful palace of his, with its gardens and lake and swans, and all that, up in the top of the building.
One of his Cabinet had spent a summer with us at Obstalden, in Switzerland. His family invited us to a little lunch, where we could talk much about the King; but it had to be in a complimentary way, for these good people saw nothing of what everybody else saw--that is, that he was a very unique personage, and probably going crazy. All the world, though, has been glad that he was sane enough to give it Wagner, for without Otto’s long and splendid patronage, Wagner’s music would still have been “a music of the future.”
One of King Otto’s freaks is his wonderful fairy castle, built high up in the Bavarian Alps. When the snow is deep on the mountains, and the wind blows, he goes sleigh-riding late at night, and quite alone, in his wonderful sleigh. This sleigh is a gorgeous little coupé on runners. Inside, it is all cushions, luxury and shining lights. Outside, it is illuminated too, and when the mountaineers hear the jingling of bells late at midnight, and see the apparition passing, they cross themselves, and say: “God keep King Otto in his right mind.”
We heard Wagner’s operas given by his own trained orchestra, almost nightly. They were so long as to be absolutely fatiguing, and made me wonder if this craze for his music is not in part affectation. Enough is enough of anything. We went to bed nights, tired to death; but “it was the thing” to hear Wagner to the end, so we heard.
I think few things interested me so much in Munich as to stand and look at the river Iser. It was full, and dark, and rapid, and great cakes of broken ice floated past. I thought of that night at Hohenlinden
When dark as Winter was the flow
Of Iser rolling rapidly.