The company, which consisted of several hundred, appeared to be full of enjoyment. They sat under the trees in the calm, cool twilight with the stars twinkling above, and talked and laughed sociably together between the pauses of the music, or strolled up and down the lighted alleys. We walked up and down with them, and thought how much we should enjoy such a scene at home, where the faces around us would be those of friends and the language our mother-tongue.
We went a long way through the suburbs one bright afternoon to a little cemetery about a mile from the city to find the grave of Beethoven. On ringing at the gate a girl admitted us into the grounds, in which are many monuments of noble families who have vaults there. I passed up the narrow walk, reading the inscriptions, till I came to the tomb of Franz Clement, a young composer who died two or three years ago. On turning again my eye fell instantly on the word "Beethoven" in golden letters on a tombstone of gray marble. A simple gilded lyre decorated the pedestal, above which was a serpent encircling a butterfly—the emblem of resurrection. Here, then, moldered the remains of that restless spirit who seemed to have strayed to earth from another clime, from such a height did he draw his glorious conceptions.
The perfection he sought for here in vain he has now attained in a world where the soul is freed from the bars which bind it in this. There were no flowers planted around the tomb by those who revered his genius; only one wreath, withered and dead, lay among the grass, as if left long ago by some solitary pilgrim, and a few wild buttercups hung with their bright blossoms over the slab. It might have been wrong, but I could not resist the temptation to steal one or two while the old gravedigger was busy preparing a new tenement. I thought that other buds would open in a few days, but those I took would be treasured many a year as sacred relics. A few paces off is the grave of Schubert, the composer whose beautiful songs are heard all over Germany.
We visited the imperial library a day or two ago. The hall is two hundred and forty-five feet long, with a magnificent dome in the center, under which stands the statue of Charles V., of Carrara marble, surrounded by twelve other monarchs of the house of Hapsburg. The walls are of variegated marble richly ornamented with gold, and the ceiling and dome are covered with brilliant fresco-paintings. The library numbers three hundred thousand volumes and sixteen thousand manuscripts, which are kept in walnut cases gilded and adorned with medallions. The rich and harmonious effect of the whole can not easily be imagined. It is exceedingly appropriate that a hall of such splendor should be used to hold a library. The pomp of a palace may seem hollow and vain, for it is but the dwelling of a man; but no building can be too magnificent for the hundreds of great and immortal spirits to dwell in who have visited earth during thirty centuries.
Among other curiosities preserved in the collection, we were shown a brass plate containing one of the records of the Roman Senate made one hundred and eighty years before Christ, Greek manuscripts of the fifth and sixth centuries, and a volume of Psalms printed on parchment in the year 1457 by Faust and Schoeffer, the inventors of printing. There were also Mexican manuscripts presented by Cortez, the prayer-book of Hildegard, wife of Charlemagne, in letters of gold, the signature of San Carlo Borromeo, and a Greek Testament of the thirteenth century which had been used by Erasmus in making his, translation and contains notes in his own hand. The most interesting article was the "Jerusalem Delivered" of Tasso, in the poet's own hand, with his erasures and corrections.
The chapel of St. Augustine contains one of the best works of Canova—the monument of the Grand Duchess Maria Christina of Sachsen-Teschen. It is a pyramid of gray marble, twenty-eight feet high, with an opening in the side representing the entrance to a sepulcher. A female figure personating Virtue bears in an urn to the grave the ashes of the departed, attended by two children with torches. The figure of Compassion follows, leading an aged beggar to the tomb of his benefactor, and a little child with its hands folded. On the lower step rests a mourning genius beside a sleeping lion, and a bas-relief on the pyramid above represents an angel carrying Christina's image, surrounded with the emblem of eternity, to heaven. A spirit of deep sorrow, which is touchingly portrayed in the countenance of the old man, pervades the whole group.
While we looked at it the organ breathed out a slow, mournful strain which harmonized so fully with the expression of the figures that we seemed to be listening to the requiem of the one they mourned. The combined effect of music and sculpture thus united in their deep pathos was such that I could have sat down and wept. It was not from sadness at the death of a benevolent tho unknown individual, but the feeling of grief, of perfect, unmingled sorrow, so powerfully represented, came to the heart like an echo of its own emotion and carried it away with irresistible influence. Travelers have described the same feeling while listening to the "Miserere" in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. Canova could not have chiselled the monument without tears.
One of the most interesting objects in Vienna is the imperial armory. We were admitted through tickets previously procured from the armory direction; as there was already one large company within, we were told to wait in the court till our turn came. Around the wall, on the inside, is suspended the enormous chain which the Turks stretched across the Danube at Buda in the year 1529 to obstruct the navigation. It has eight thousand links and is nearly a mile in length. The court is filled with cannon of all shapes and sizes, many of which were conquered from other nations. I saw a great many which were cast during the French Revolution, with the words "Liberté! Egalité!" upon them, and a number of others bearing the simple letter "N."....
The first wing contains banners used in the French Revolution, and liberty-trees with the red cap, the armor of Rudolph of Hapsburg, Maximilian, I., the emperor Charles V., and the hat, sword and order of Marshal Schwarzenberg. Some of the halls represent a fortification, with walls, ditches and embankments, made of muskets and swords. A long room in the second wing contains an encampment in which twelve or fifteen large tents are formed in like manner. There was also exhibited the armor of a dwarf king of Bohemia and Hungary who died a gray-headed old man in his twentieth year, the sword of Marlborough, the coat of Gustavus Adolphus, pierced in the breast and back with the bullet which killed him at Lützen, the armor of the old Bohemian princess Libussa, and that of the amazon Wlaska, with a steel vizor made to fit the features of her face.
The last wing was the most remarkable. Here we saw the helm and breastplate of Attila, king of the Huns, which once glanced at the head of his myriads of wild hordes before the walls of Rome; the armor of Count Stahremberg, who commanded Vienna during the Turkish siege in 1529, and the holy banner of Mohammed, taken at that time from the grand vizier, together with the steel harness of John Sobieski of Poland, who rescued Vienna from the Turkish troops under Kara Mustapha; the hat, sword and breastplate of Godfrey of Bouillon, the crusader-king of Jerusalem, with the banners of the cross the crusaders had borne to Palestine and the standard they captured from the Turks on the walls of the Holy City. I felt all my boyish enthusiasm for the romantic age of the crusaders revive as I looked on the torn and moldering banners which once waved on the hills of Judea, or perhaps followed the sword of the Lion-Heart through the fight on the field of Ascalon. What tales could they not tell, those old standards cut and shivered by spear and lance! What brave hands have carried them through the storm of battle, what dying eyes have looked upward to the cross on the folds as the last prayer was breathed for the rescue of the holy sepulcher.