After having made myself acquainted with the geography of Wiesbaden, I arose one morning at half-past five o'clock to see the visiters drinking the waters. The scene was really an odd one. The long parade, at one extremity of which stood smoking and fuming the great Koch-brunnen, was seen crowded with respectably-dressed people, of both sexes, all walking (like so many watchmen, carrying lanterns), with glasses in their hands, filled, half filled, or quarter filled, with the medicine, which had been delivered to them from the brunnen so scalding hot, that they dared not even sip it, as they walked, until they had carried it for a considerable time.
It requires no little dexterity to advance in this way, without spilling one’s medicine, to say nothing of burning or slopping it over one’s fellow patients. Every person’s eye, therefore, whatever might be the theme of his conversation, was instantly fixed upon his glass; some few carried the thing along with elegance, but I could not help remarking that the greater proportion of people walked with their backs up, and were evidently very little at their ease. A band of Wind-instruments was playing, and an author, a native of Wiesbaden, in describing this scene, has sentimentally exclaimed—“Thousands of glasses are drunk by the sound of music!”
Four or five young people, protected by a railing, are employed the whole morning in filling, as fast as they can stoop down to the brunnen to do so, the quantities of glasses, which, from hands in all directions, are extending towards them; but so excessively hot is the cauldron, that the greater proportion of these glasses were, I observed, cracked by it, and several I saw fall to pieces when delivered to their owners. Not wishing to appear eccentric, which, in this amphibious picture any one is who walks about the parade without a glass of scalding hot water in his hand, I purchased a goblet, and the first dip it got cracked it from top to bottom.
In describing the taste of the mineral water of Wiesbaden, were I to say, that, while drinking it, one hears in one’s ears the cackling of hens, and that one sees feathers flying before one’s eyes, I should certainly grossly exaggerate; but when I declare that it exactly resembles very hot chicken broth, I only say what Dr. Granville said, and what in fact everybody says, and must say, respecting it; and certainly I do wonder why the common people should be at the inconvenience of making bad soup, when they can get much better from Nature’s great stock-pot—the Koch-brunnen of Wiesbaden. At all periods of the year, summer or winter, the temperature of this broth remains the same, and when one reflects that it has been bubbling out of the ground, and boiling over, in the very same state, certainly from the time of the Romans, and probably from the time of the flood, it is really astonishing to think what a most wonderful apparatus there must exist below, what an inexhaustible stock of provisions to ensure such an everlasting supply of broth, always formed of exactly the same eight or ten ingredients—always salted to exactly the same degree, and always served up at exactly the same heat.
One would think that some of the particles in the recipe would be exhausted; in short, to speak metaphorically, that the chickens would at last be boiled to rags, or that the fire would go out for want of coals; but the oftener one reflects on these sorts of subjects, the oftener is the old-fashioned observation forced upon the mind, that let a man go where he will, Omnipotence is never from his view!
As leaning against one of the columns of the arcade under which the band was playing, I stood with my medicine in my hand, gazing upon the strange group of people, who with extended glasses were crowding and huddling round the Koch-brunnen, each eagerly trying to catch the eye of the young water-dippers, I could not help feeling, as I had felt at Langen-Schwalbach, whether it could be possible for any prescription to be equally beneficial to such differently made patients. To repeat all the disorders which it is said most especially to cure, would be very nearly to copy the sad list of ailments to which our creaky frames are subject. The inhabitants of Wiesbaden rant, the hotel-keepers rave, about the virtues of this medicine. Stories are most gravely related of people crawling to Wiesbaden and running home. In most of the great lodging-houses crutches are triumphantly displayed, as having belonged to people who left them behind.
It is good they say for the stomach—good for the skin—good for ladies of all possible ages—for all sorts and conditions of men. It lulls pain—therefore it is good, they say, for people going out of this world, yet equally good is it, they declare, for those whose fond parents earnestly wish them to come in. For a head-ache, drink, the inn-keepers exclaim, at the Koch-brunnen! For gout in the heels, soak the body, the doctors say, in the chicken-broth!—in short, the valetudinarian, reclining in his carriage, has scarcely entered the town than, say what he will of himself, the inhabitants all seem to agree in repeating—“Benè, benè respondere; dignus es entrare nostro docto corpore!”
However, there would be no end in stating what the Wiesbaden water is said to be good for; a much simpler course is to explain, that doctors do agree in saying that it is not good for complaints where there is any disposition to inflammation or regular fever, and that it changes consumption into—death.
By about seven o'clock, the vast concourse of people who had visited the Koch-Brunnen had imbibed about as much of the medicine as they could hold, and accordingly, like swallows, almost simultaneously departing, the parade was deserted; the young water-dippers had also retired to rest, and every feature in the picture vanished, except the smoking, misty fumes of the water, which now, no longer in request, boiled and bubbled by itself, as it flowed into the drains, by which it eventually reached the Rhine.
The first act of the entertainment being thus over, in about a quarter of an hour the second commenced; in short, so soon as the visiters, retiring to their rooms, could divest or denude themselves of their garments, I saw stalking down the long passage of my lodging-house one heavy German gentleman after another whose skull-cap, dressing-gown, and slippers, plainly indicated that he was proceeding to the bath. In a short time, lady after lady, in similar dishabille, was seen following the same course. Silence, gravity, and incognito were the order of the day; and though I bowed as usual in meeting these undressed people, yet the polite rule is, not, as at other moments, to accompany the inclination with a gentle smile, but to dilute it with a look which cannot be too solemn or too sad.