Not far from Coblenz, and past the island of Nonnenwerth, is the old tenth-century castle of Sayn, which stood until the Thirty Years' War, and below it, quiet, comfortable, large, but unpretending, lies the new house of the family of Sayn-Wittgenstein, built in 1848, where, during a stay at Ems, we paid a visit of two days. The family were great Italian travellers, and we had met in Rome more than twenty years before, when the writer and the boys, whom I met again—the one as an officer of the Prussian army, and the other as a Bonn student—were children together. At dinner one evening at this new Sayn house, as we were tasting some Russian dish of soured milk (the mother was a Russian), we reminded each other of our ball on Twelfth Night at Rome, when the youngest of these boys happened to become king "by the grace of the bean," and spent some hours seated in state with gilt-paper crown and red-velvet mantle till he was too sleepy to oversee his subjects' revels any longer; of a day when the pope was to "create" several cardinals, and of the young "king's" unshaken belief that he would have the scarlet hat sent him if he only waited long enough at the window to look out for the messengers, and of his consequent watch all day, seeing the carriages pass and repass and the bustle of a festa go on, till the sunset flushed over St. Peter's in the distance, and the disappointment became certain at last. Of not much more manly pastimes did the Bonn student have to tell, for the slitting of noses was then in high favor, and a bit of advice was gravely recounted as having come from a doctor to an obstinate duellist, "not to get his nose cut off a fifth time, as the sewing had got so shaky by repetition that he could not answer for the nose sticking on if touched once more." The house was really beautiful, and furnished with a taste which had something Parisian, and yet also something individual, about it. The parquet floors of inlaid and polished wood used in Germany were here seen to their greatest perfection in some of the rooms; but what most struck me was a Moorish chamber lighted from above—a small, octagon room, with low divans round the walls and an ottoman in the centre, with flowers in concealed pots cunningly introduced into the middle of the cushions, while glass doors, half screened by Oriental-looking drapery, led into a small grotto conservatory with a fountain plashing softly among the tropical plants. There was also a good collection of pictures in a gallery, besides the paintings scattered through the living rooms; but the garden was perhaps as much a gem to its owner's mind as anything in the house, as an "English" garden always is to a foreigner. There, in the late afternoon of that day, came one of the Prussian royal family and paid the mistress of the house an informal friendly visit, taking "five-o'clock tea" in the English fashion, and with a retinue of two or three attendants making the tour of the close-shaven lawns, the firm gravelled walks and the broad and frequent flights of steps that led from one terraced flower-garden to another. These were courtly and educated descendants of terrible scourges of mankind in old days—of Sayns who were simply robbers and highwaymen, levying bloody toll on the Coblenz merchants' caravans, and of Brandenburgs who were famous for their ravages and raids. Times have changed no less than buildings, and the houseful of pictures and treasures is no more unlike the robber-nest destroyed in war by other robbers than the young Bonn student is unlike his rough-and-ready forefathers.
As we push our way down the Rhine we soon come to another such contrast, the little peaceful town of Neuwied, a sanctuary for persecuted Flemings and others of the Low Countries, gathered here by the local sovereign, Count Frederick III. He gave them each a plot of land, built their houses and exempted them from all dues and imposts, besides granting them full freedom of worship; but not for them alone was this boon, for as other wars made other exiles, so were all and every welcome to Neuwied, and the place even now contains Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites and Quakers, all living in peace together. The United Brethren (or Moravians) founded a colony here in 1750. The honesty of these people is proverbial, their simplicity of life is patriarchal, and the artist at least will not object to their manners, for the sake of the pleasing costume of their women, whose white caps look akin to the peaceful, rural background of their life, red and blue bands on these caps respectively distinguishing the married from the unmarried women. The little brook that gives its name to the village runs softly into the Rhine under a rustic bridge and amid murmuring rushes, while beyond it the valley gets narrower, rocks begin to rise over the Rhine-banks, and the scenery after Andernach becomes again what we so admired at Bingen and Bornhofen.
Andernach is the Rocky Gate of the Rhine, and if its scenery were not enough, its history, dating from Roman times, would make it interesting. However, of its relics we can only mention, en passant, the parish church with its four towers, all of tufa, the dungeons under the council-house, significantly called the "Jews' bath," and the old sixteenth-century contrivances for loading Rhine-boats with the millstones in which the town still drives a fair trade. At the mouth of the Brohl we meet the volcanic region again, and farther up the valley through which this stream winds come upon the retired little watering-place of Tönnistein, a favorite goal of the Dutch, with its steel waters; and Wassenach, with what we may well call its dust-baths, stretching for miles inland, up hills full of old craters, and leaving us only at the entrance of the beech-woods that have grown up in these cauldron-like valleys and fringe the blue Laachersee, the lake of legends and of fairies. One of these Schlegel has versified, the "Lay of the Sunken Castle," with the piteous tale of the spirits imprisoned; and Simrock tells us in rhyme of the merman who sits waiting for a mortal bride; while Wolfgang Müller sings of the "Castle under the Lake," where at night ghostly torches are lighted and ghostly revels held, the story of which so fascinates the fisherman's boy who has heard of these doings from his grandmother that as he watches the enchanted waters one night his fancy plays him a cruel trick, and he plunges in to join the revellers and learn the truth. Local tradition says that Count Henry II. and his wife Adelaide, walking here by night, saw the whole lake lighted up from within in uncanny fashion, and founded a monastery in order to counteract the spell. This deserted but scarcely-ruined building still exists, and contains the grave of the founder: the twelfth-century decoration, rich and detailed, is almost whole in the oldest part of the monastery. The far-famed German tale of Genovefa of Brabant is here localized, and Henry's son Siegfried assigned to the princess as a husband, while the neighboring grotto of Hochstein is shown as her place of refuge. On our way back to the Rocky Gate we pass through the singular little town of Niedermendig, an hour's distance from the lake—a place built wholly of dark gray lava, standing in a region where lava-ridges seam the earth like the bones of antediluvian monsters, but are made more profitable by being quarried into millstones. There is something here that brings part of Wales to the remembrance of the few who have seen those dreary slate-villages—dark, damp, but naked, for moss and weeds do not thrive on this dampness as they do on the decay of other stones—which dot the moorlands of Wales. The fences are slate; the gateposts are slate; the stiles are of slate; the very "sticks" up which the climbing roses are trained are of slate; churches, schools, houses, stables, are all of one dark iron-blue shade; floors and roofs are alike; hearth-stones and threshold-stones and grave-stones, all of the same material. It is curious and depressing. This volcanic region of the Rhine, however, has so many unexpected beauties strewn pell-mell in the midst of stony barrenness that it also bears some likeness to Naples and Ischia, where beauty of color, and even of vegetation, alternate surprisingly with tracts of parched and rocky wilderness pierced with holes whence gas and steam are always rising.
Sinzig, on the left bank of the last gorge of the Rhine, besides its legend of Constantine has a convent said to have been built by the empress Helena; and in this convent a mummied body of a long-dead monk, canonized by popular tradition, and remarkable for the journey to Paris which his body took and returned from unharmed in the days of Napoleon I. On the opposite shore, not much lower down, is another of the numberless pilgrimage-chapels with which the Rhine abounds, and the old city of Linz, with an authentic history dating from the ninth century, telling of an independence of any but nominal authority for some time, and at last of a transfer of the lordship of the old town from the Sayns to the archbishops of Cologne. This supremacy had to be kept up by the "strong hand," of which the ruined fortress is now the only reminder; but there is a more beautiful monument of old days and usages in the thirteenth-century church of St. Martin, not badly restored, where the stained-glass windows are genuinely mediæval, as well as the fresco on gold ground representing the "Seven Joys of Mary," painted in 1463. Just above Remagen lies the Victoria-berg, named after the crown-princess of Prussia, the princess-royal of England, and this is the evening resort of weary Remageners—a lovely public garden, with skilfully-managed vistas, and a "Victoria temple," placed so as to command the five prettiest views up and down the stream, as well as over the woodland behind the town. Let not the classic name of "temple" deceive us, however, for this is a genuine German arbor, picturesque and comfortable, with a conical roof of stately and rustic pillars, seats and balustrade rising from the steep bank on which the "lookout" is perched. The winding Ahr, coming from the tufa-plateau of the Eifel and watering a pretty valley full of old castles and churches, rolls its waters into the Rhine in this neighborhood, and in summer no trip is so pleasant to the citizens of Bonn and Cologne, and indeed to many tourists if they have time to breathe. But in winter the scenery is worthy of the New World. The dark rocks and narrow slits of valleys piled with snow and crusted with ice, the locked waterfalls and caves with portcullises of icicles let down across their mouths, make a pendant for the splendid and little-known scenery of American mountains in January. By one of the castles, a ruin belonging to the Steins of Nassau, poetically called Landskröne, or the "Land's Crown," from its beautiful situation on a basalt hill, is a perfectly-preserved chapel perched on the top of the rock, where, says the legend, the daughter of the besieged lord of the castle once took refuge during a local war. The sacristy has an unusual shape, and is hewn out of the rock itself; and here it was that the maiden sat in safety, the rock closing over the cleft by which she had crept in, and a dove finding its way in every day with a loaf to feed her, while a spring within the cave supplied her with water. Legends have grown over every stone of this poetic land like moss and lichen and rock-fern; and at Beul, a small bathing-place with a real geyser and a very tolerable circle of society, we come across the universal story of a golden treasure sunk in a castle-well and guarded by a giant. The old, world-forgotten town has its hall of justice and all the shell of its antique civic paraphernalia, while at present it is a sleepy, contented, rural place, with country carts and country riders by families crowding it on market-days, and making every yard of the old street a picture such as delights the traveller from cities whose plan is conveniently but not picturesquely that of a chess-board. The baths, like those of Schlangenbad, are in great favor with nervous women, and like that neighborhood too, so has this its miniature Olivet and Calvary, the devout legacy of some unknown crusader, who also founded at Ahrweiler the Franciscan monastery called Calvary Hill. These "calvaries," in many shapes and degrees, are not uncommon in Catholic Germany; "stations of the cross"—sometimes groups of painted figures, life-size, sometimes only small shrines with a framed picture within—mark the distances up the hill, at the top of which is a representation of the crucifixion; and as the agony in the garden is not included in the "stations," there is generally at the foot of the hill an additional shrine in a natural cave or surrounded by artificial rock-work. The prettiest part of the Ahr valley is at and about Walporzheim, which the Düsseldorf artists have, by reason of its famous wine quite as much as of its romantic scenery, chosen for the place of their frequent feasts, half picnic, half masque, when their get-up rivals that of any carnival, not even excepting that of the "Krewe of Komus" or those other displays peculiar to Belgium and Holland of which the late celebration of the "Pacification of Ghent" was an example.
The Rhine once more! and now indeed we shall hardly leave it again, but this is the last part in which we can enjoy the peculiar beauties that make it different from any other river in the world. The Swiss Rhine is a mountain-torrent, the Dutch Rhine a sluggish mud puddle, but the German Rhine is an historic river. Quite as legendary as historic, however; and perhaps that has made its charm in the eyes of foreigners even more than its national associations, dear to the native mind; and here, between Rolandseck, Nonnenwerth and Drachenfels, poetry takes precedence of history, and we do not want the antiquary to come and shatter the legend of Roland of Roncesval's fidelity to the Lady of Drachenfels, even after her vows in Nonnenwerth convent, with his pitiless array of dates and parade of obvious impossibilities. But I pass over the legendary details that make this region so interesting. What will better bear repetition is some description of the scenery lying inland from the shores, the natural Quadrilateral, containing minor mountains, such as the Siebengebirge (or the Seven Hills) and the Bonner Alps, and encircling also the volcanic region between Honnef and Dollendorf. These hills with their step-and-terrace formation were once fortified by Valentinian against the formidable Frankish hordes, and German poetry early began to find scenery in them worthy of its national epic, and so laid the scene of the Saga of Wilkina among these mountains and valleys. Here, above the legends of Roland and Siegfried and the Christian captive, who, exposed to the dragon of the rock, vanquished him by the cross, so that he fell backward and broke his neck, is the solid remembrance of castles built on many of these Rhine-hills, defences and bulwarks of the archbishops of Cologne against the emperors of Germany. But Drachenfels keeps another token of its legend in its dark-red wine, called "dragon's blood." (Could any teetotaller have invented a more significant name?) One has often heard of the unbelieving monk who stumbled at the passage in Scripture which declares that a thousand years are but as one day to the Lord, and the consequent taste of eternity which he was miraculously allowed to enjoy while he wandered off for a quarter of an hour, as he thought, but in reality for three hundred years, following the song of a nightingale. The abbey of Heisterbach claims this as an event recorded in its books, and its beautiful ruins and wide naves with old trees for columns are, so says popular rumor, haunted by another wanderer, an abbot with snow-white beard, who walks the cloisters at night counting the graves of his brethren, and vainly seeking his own, which if he once find his penance will be over. This part of the Rhine was the favorite home of many of the poets who have best sung of the national river: a cluster of townlets recalls no less than five of them to our mind—Unkel, where Freiligrath chose his home; Menzerberg, where Simrock lived; Herresberg, Pfarrins's home; Königswinter, Wolfgang Müller's birthplace; and Oberkassel, that of Gottfried Kinkel. Rhondorf shows us a monument of one of the last robber-lords of Drachenfels, and Honnef a smiling modern settlement, a very Nice of the North, where the climate draws together people of means and leisure, littérateurs, retired merchants and collectors of art-treasures, as well as health-seekers. These little colonies, of which most of the large cities on the Rhine have a copy in miniature, even if it be not a bathing-place, are the places in which to seek for that domestic taste and refinement which some hasty and prejudiced critics have thought fit to deny to the Fatherland.
