The Alhambra and the Kremlin: The South and the North of Europe

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

A few hours’ ride across the country brought us to Kreusnach. The name of this watering-place had never reached me before, and it added one more to the many springs or spas with which Germany abounds. An army of servants rushed out to the carriage, as we drew up to the door of the Hotel Hollande, and in good English proffered their services to take us and our luggage in. The luggage we leave on the carriage until the rooms and the terms are found agreeable, and as we could have a handsome parlor and bedroom adjoining, on the front of the house, second floor, for one thaler, or six francs ($1.20) a day, we were not long in deciding that this was the place to stay in.

The salt springs of this region have long been known, but only of late have the wonderful medicinal properties of the waters been understood. Now some sixty thousand persons come here annually, and the number is increasing. The people, waking up to the idea that they have a fountain of wealth as well as of health in the bubbling spring, have erected a cure-house on an island in the river Nahe, and hotels and lodging-houses have sprung up along the stream; a regimen has been prescribed, by which the greatest good of the healing waters may be had, but it is left to the choice of the visitor whether he will follow the rules or disobey them, and go away no better than he came.

At Kissingen it is not so. In that delightful little town, where royal blood comes to be purified, and nobles as well as commons gather in great numbers every year, they are so jealous of the honor of their waters, that no visitor is permitted to tarry in the place who will not comply with the rules of eating and drinking and bodily exercise which are prescribed by the medical authorities. These rules are simple and wholesome, and it will do you good to take the course, but if you will not, they take their course with you, which is to send you out of town forthwith, lest you should lose your health by your imprudence, and so bring discredit on the Kissingen waters. Fancy such a law as that at Saratoga! It is said that more sick people go away from the springs than come, but this is not to be affirmed of Kissingen, beautiful Kissingen, the cheapest and prettiest of the health-giving spas of Germany. A clergyman in Paris told me that he spends a month in Kissingen every summer, fifty dollars paying all his expenses,—going, staying, and coming home!

You can live nearly,—not quite,—as cheaply here at Kreusnach. The band, a fine German band, discourses sweet music in the park near the spring, at six o’clock in the morning; we drink,—faugh! yes, we drink the salt and horrid water and return to breakfast at eight, after a promenade in the groves; at eleven a bath is to be taken in the hotel, to which the water is carried in barrels and emptied into a reservoir, from which it is led into the baths; it is artificially warmed to the temperature of the blood; it is strengthened by the addition of the strong, boiled salt water that remains uncrystallized at the salt-works in the vicinity; and this water, sold for this purpose, brings more money, by a third, than the salt itself. This drinking and bathing are good for scrofulous and all cutaneous complaints; for bad livers, that is, for those whose livers are bad; for dyspeptics, rheumatic people, and all kindred ailments. Indeed, these German springs are a pretty sure cure for almost any of the ordinary, perhaps extraordinary, ills of the flesh, because the climate is good, the mountain air is bracing, and the regimen requires a fair amount of temperance and exercise; and he must be in a very bad way who will not get well under the simple, exhilarating, purifying, and strengthening influences of this kind of life.

Here in Kreusnach we meet with men and women from the most distant parts of the Continent, attracted by the fame of this salt water. A Russian gentleman and wife, with an infant child, on whose account they came, had travelled six weeks in a sledge to St. Petersburg. Their children had died of scrofula, and they brought this live one over that vast tract of country, through northern cold, that its system in infancy might be renovated by this modern Bethesda. The Princess of Mecklenberg is here now, and last Sunday she proposed to attend the English Church service. The good rector heard of her intention, and thought it his duty to call and pay his respects. Unhappily he could not speak a word of German, and when he attempted to introduce himself at the door of the Princess’ lodgings, the servant understood him to be the postman, and brought him the letters ready to go to the post-office. His call was only deference to rank, and there was no need of it, except as every sinner needs a pastor’s care, and the Princess took no notice of it.

At a cell in the hill-side near the spring, whey is dispensed to those who daily drink it for the whey-cure. It has a great repute. So has the grape-cure in August and September. Either of them is just as good as the salt-water-cure, and that is good beyond a doubt. I have great faith in any kind of doctoring that includes rest from business, with moderate eating and drinking, and plenty of exercise in the open air. Give the waters the credit of it, or the whey, or the grapes, or the doctors, it makes no difference what or who has the credit, if you have the cure.

But stop this everlasting rushing after the world that is perishing, and wait a little while at Kreusnach, or Kissingen, or one of a dozen places I could name. Here take your ease. Eat, drink, and be happy. Bathe your weary limbs in these youth-renewing waters. Walk out among these surrounding forests and hills. There stands the ruined Castle of Rheingraffenstein, on a crag that overhangs the Nahe; wind your way up one side, and when you have rested on the height, pick your way down the other side to a garden on the banks of the river; there refresh again; then in one of the little boats be rowed down to Ebernburg, the site of an ancient castle, which has now been remodelled into a hotel; but the relics of Luther and other Reformers who once were sheltered here are still preserved, as well as the balls with which the French blew the old towers off the hill into the waters below. Rusty swords, spears, chains, and old keys are laid in heaps, as some slight index of the good time coming, when spears and swords shall be turned into ploughs and pruning-knives.

Where the Nahe flows into the Rhine, there or about there, stands Bingen, and no amount of pretty poetry that has been said or sung about “Bingen on the Rhine” can make it any thing but a dull, dry, flat, dusty village, and horribly disagreeable at noon on a scorching hot day, such as this. We footed it half a mile from the station under a blazing sun, as there was no way to ride, and found a cool shade, while waiting for the steamboat to come up the river. The sight was romantic and picturesque. In the water, a little way above us, stand the ruins of Bishop Hatto’s tower, the story of which is too familiar to be told again. He had hoarded corn in a time of famine, and the rats pursued him for his wickedness. He fled to this tower in the river. The rats swam out to it, ran up the walls, found their way in, and cleaned the Bishop’s bones for him. Southey has done the story into a ballad.

On the Rhine.