The scenery of the Rhine begins to lose its distinctive features as we near Bonn: plains replace rocks, and the waters flow more sluggishly. Bonn is alive enough: its antiquities of Roman date are forgotten in its essentially modern bustle, for the heart of its prosperity is of very recent date, the university having been founded only in 1777, and after the troubles of the Revolution reorganized in 1818. It has grown with a giant growth, and has reckoned among its professors Niebuhr, Schlegel, Arndt, Dahlmann, Johann Müller, Ritschl, Kinkel, Simrock and other less world-famous but marvellous specialists. Then there is the memory of Beethoven, the honor of the town, which is his birthplace and has put up a monument to him, and the last modern element that has effaced the old recollections—the numerous English colony—not to mention the rich foreigners whom perhaps the university, perhaps the scenery, and perhaps the heedless fashion that sets in a tide now toward this place, now toward that, have drawn to the new Bonn. Poppelsdorf Castle, now the museum of natural history, and the fine groves and gardens attached to it, now a public promenade, have the brisk, business-like look of a "live" place: the building, it is true, is modern, having been built in 1715. But if we are obstinate enough to search for signs of the days when archbishops ruled instead of dukes and kings, we shall find old remains, the cathedral of course included, and nowhere a more curious one than the Kreuzberg, a place of pilgrimage, where the church of 1627 has replaced an old wood-shrine: its rich gateway was intended to represent the front of Pontius Pilate's palace at Jerusalem, and on it are frescoes of the various scenes of the Passion. Within this thirty marble steps lead up into a vestibule in imitation of the Scala Santa in Rome, and pilgrims went up these stairs only on their knees. The vaults used until lately to contain a quantity of dried or mummied bodies of Servite monks (that order once had a convent here), reminding one of the ghastly Capuchin crypts in Rome, in Syracuse and in Malta. This neighborhood is rich in pilgrimage-shrines and legends, and Simrock has preserved a tale of the Devil which is a little out of the common run. He and the Wind, it is said, once went by a certain Jesuit church in company, and the former begged the latter to wait a moment for him, as he had some business within. The Devil never reappeared, and the Wind is still blowing perpetually round the building, waiting and calling in vain. The old myth of Barbarossa waiting in his cave, his beard grown round and round the stone table on which he leans his sleepy head, which in another form meets us in the Mosel Valley, repeats itself in Wolfsberg, not far from Siegburg, near Bonn. I wonder whether the English anglers and oarsmen, and the pretty girls ready to flirt with the students and give away the prizes at an archery-meeting or a regatta, ever think of these musty old legends looked up by scholars out of convent chronicles and peasants' fireside talk? The difference between past and present is not greater or more startling than is their likeness, the groundwork of human nature being the same for ever. Especially in these old lands, how like the life of to-day to that of hundreds of years ago in all that makes life real and intense! The same thing in a mould of other shape, the same thoughts in a speech a little varied, the same motives under a dress a little less natural and crude—even the same pleasures in a great degree, for the wine-flask played fully as great a part in old German times as it does now.
"Holy Cologne" seems at first an impersonation of the olden time, but its busy wharves, crowded shipping and tall warehouses tell us another tale. Indeed, Cologne is more rich than holy, and its commercial reputation is quite as old as its religious one. The country around is flat and uninteresting, but Cologne merchants have made Brühl a little paradise in spite of this; and their country-houses of all styles, with balconies, verandas, porches, piazzas, English shrubbery and flower-gardens, conservatories and gay boats, lawns and statues, make even the monotonous banks of the sluggish Rhine beautiful in spite of Nature. Then comes a reminder of old times—the towers and fortifications, which are still standing, though now turned into public gardens and drives that stretch out both on the river and the land side; but the former, Am Thürmchen, forming a sort of parapeted quay, crossed by massive battlemented gateways, is the most fashionable and commands the best views. The trees almost hide the shipping, as their predecessors no doubt did eighteen hundred years ago and more, when the Ubier tribe of barbarians, a commercial as well as warlike people, undertook to ferry over the whole of Cæsar's army to the right bank of the Rhine in their own boats. The quays swarm now with hotels, and these in summer swarm with strangers from all countries—pilgrims of Art and Nature, if no longer of religion—and the old town becomes in their eyes less a solid, real city with a long history than a museum opened for their special behoof. And indeed these German places seem to take kindly to this part, for they rival each other in modern amusements and gauds set out to lure the light-minded. Music-halls and beer-gardens, theatres and cafés, illuminated promenades and stalls full of tempting flagons labeled "genuine eau de Cologne," are cunningly arrayed to turn away the mind from the stately antique churches and houses of Cologne. Every one has heard of the cathedral, many have seen it, and more have seen at least photographs of great accuracy, and pictures of it which, if less strict in detail, give it a more lifelike look and include some of its surroundings. The church of St. Gereon, a martyr of the Theban Legion massacred at Cologne to a man for refusing to worship the imperial ensigns, under which no one denied that they had fought like lions, is a massive Romanesque building older than the cathedral, dating from the days of Constantine and Saint Helena. The church of the Holy Apostles is a basilica with rounded apse and four octagon towers, one at each corner of the nave. St. Peter's church, the interior terribly modernized by the Renaissance, has for an altar-piece Rubens's picture of the Crucifixion of Saint Peter. The Gürzenich House, now used for public balls and imperial receptions, is a magnificent fifteenth-century building, adorned with dwarf towers at each corner, a high, carved and stone-roofed niche with statue over the round-arched door, transom windows filled with stained glass, and carvings of shields, animal heads, colonnettes and other devices between and above these windows. The council-house or town-hall has a beautiful colonnade supporting arches, and a quaint nondescript creature whose abyss-like maw opens wide and gapes horribly at the beholder each time the clock strikes. A bas-relief in the hall represents a curious incident in the civic history of the town, the successful struggle of Burgomaster Gryn with a lion, the show and pet of some treacherous nobles who invited Gryn to dinner, and under pretence of showing him their very unusual acquisition, pushed him into the stone recess and closed the gate upon him. The burgomaster thrust his hand and arm, wrapped in his thick cloak, down the animal's throat, while he pierced him through and through with the sword in his other hand. The struggles between Cologne and her archbishops were hot and incessant, much as they were in other ecclesiastical sovereignties. Of these there is no longer a trace in the present, though the might of the burghers exists still, and the city that was once called the kernel of the Hanseatic League, and boasted of its Lorenzo de' Medici in the person of the good and enlightened Matthias Overstolz, has now almost as proud a place among merchants as Hamburg or Frankfort. Before we pass to more modern things let us not forget the shrine of the Three Kings in the cathedral, which is simply a mass of gold and jewelry, in such profusion as to remind one of nothing less than the golden screen studded with uncut gems called the Palla d'Oro at San Marco, directly behind the high altar, and the Golden Frontal of St. Ambrose at Milan—golden altar it might more fitly be named, as each side of the altar is a slab of solid gold, almost hidden by its breastplate of precious stones. The same warrior-archbishop, Conrad of Hochstaden, who, driven from Cologne, transferred his see to Bonn, was the first founder of the cathedral, though in those days of slow and solid building to found was not to finish. The cathedral is not finished even yet. The present scenes in which Cologne shines are many—for instance, its lively market on the Neumarkt, and the country costumes one sees there each week as the stalls and carts, easily drawn by dogs and donkeys, are set up in the square; the parade of the old guard, called the "Sparks of Cologne" from their scarlet uniforms; and the Carnival, a high opportunity for fun and display, and specially seized upon to reproduce historic figures and incidents, such as the half-comic Gecker-Berndchen, a typical figure in red and white, the colors of the town, with a shield in one hand and a wooden sabre in the other, shouting the traditional warning cry, "Geck los Geck elans!" the antique procession of burgher youths and maidens, the latter with large white caps and aprons, and the former in three-cornered hats, black breeches and stockings and thick low shoes. Then follows a fancy ball in the Gürzenich House, in which the lineal descendants of the burgomasters and councillors of old come out in ancient family trappings of black cloth or velvet, stiff white ruff and heavy gold chain from shoulder to shoulder, which their forefathers once wore in earnest. Among the museums and other additions of modern taste is the beautiful botanical garden and large conservatory, where flourish tropical plants in profusion—a thing we find in many even of the secondary German towns.
The Rhine itself is becoming so uninteresting that it is hardly worth while lingering on its banks, and as we get near thrifty Holland the river seems to give itself up wholly to business, for between Cologne and Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) are miles upon miles of manufactories, workshops and mills; warehouses connected with coal-mines; dirty barges blackening the water; iron-works and carpet-mills; cloth and paper-mills and glass-works—a busy region, the modern translation of the myth of gnomes making gold out of dross in the bowels of the earth.
Aachen has a double life also, like many Rhine towns: it is the old imperial coronation city, the city of Charlemagne, with a corona of legends about it; and it is also the modern spa, the basket of tempting figs with a concealed asp somewhere within, a centre of fashion, gossip and gambling. How is it that people who profess to fly from the great capitals for the sake of a "little Nature" are so unable to take Nature at her word and confess her delights to be enough for them? They want a change, they say; yet where is the change? The table is the same, high-priced, choice and varied; the society is the same, the gossip is the same, the amusements are the same, the intrigues the same; the costume equally elaborate and expensive; the restless idleness as great and as hungry for excitement: all the artificiality of life is transported bodily into another place, and the only difference lies in the frame of the picture. Exquisites from the capital bring their own world with them, and their humbler imitators scrape together their hard winter's earnings and spend them in making an attempt cavalierly to equal for a short time the tired-out "man of the world" and "woman of fashion." Some come to find matches for sons and daughters; others to put in the thin end of the wedge that is to open a way for them "into society;" others come to flirt; others to increase their business relations; others to out-dress and out-drive social rivals; others to while away the time which it is unfashionable to spend cheaply in the city; others for—shall we say higher? because—political causes: few indeed for health, fewer still for rest. You see the same old wheel go round year after year, with the same faces growing more and more tired and more and more hopeless.
Of Aachen's legendary, historical, romantic side who has not heard?—of the castle of Frankenburg on the outskirts, where Charlemagne's daughter carried her lover Eginhardt through the snow, that their love might not be betrayed by a double track of footsteps; of Charlemagne's palace, where his school, the Palatine, presided over by English Alcuin, was held; and the baths where a hundred men could swim at ease at one time; and Charlemagne's cathedral, of which the present one has preserved only the octagonal apse; of his tomb, where he sat upright after death in imperial robes and on a marble throne (the latter is still shown); of the columns brought from Rome and Ravenna; of the marvellous and colossal corona of wax-lights which hangs by a huge iron chain from the vaulted roof; of the bronze doors of the western gateway, now closed, but whose legend of the Devil is commemorated by the iron figure of a she-wolf with a hole in her breast, and that of a pineapple, supposed to represent her spirit, of which she mourns the loss with open jaws and hanging tongue? The Devil is always cheated in these legends, and one wonders how it was that he did not show more cleverness in making his bargains. The cathedral still claims to possess precious relics—of the Passion, the Holy Winding-sheet, the robe of the Blessed Virgin and the blood-stained cloth in which the body of Saint John the Baptist was wrapped. These involve a yearly pilgrimage from the nearer places, and a great feast every seventh year, when a holy fair is kept up for weeks round the cathedral. There is no better living specimen of the Middle Ages than such gatherings, and no doubt then, as now, there was some undercurrent of worldly excitement mingling with the flow of genuine devotion. Aachen's old cornhouse, the bridge gate and the many houses full of unobtrusive beauties of carving and metal-work lead us by hook and by crook—for the streets are very winding—out on the road to Burtschied, the hot-water town, whose every house has a spring of its own, besides the very gutters running mineral water, and the cooking spring in the open street boiling eggs almost faster than they can be got out again in eatable condition. This is another of the merchant villeggiaturas of Germany; and a good many foreigners also own pretty, fantastic new houses, planted among others of every age from one to eight hundred years.
It is so strange to come upon a purely modern town in this neighborhood that Exefeld strikes us as an anachronism. It is wholly a business place, created by the "dry-goods" manufactures that have grown up there, and are worth twenty million thalers a year to the enterprising owners, who rival French designs and have made a market for their wares in England and America. This is a great foil to old Roman Neuss, with its massive gates, its tower attributed to Drusus—after whom so many bridges and towers on the Rhine are named—and even to Düsseldorf, which, notwithstanding its modern part, twice as large as its old river front, has some beautiful antique pictures to show us, both in the costumes of its market-women, who wear red petticoats with white aprons and flapping caps, and stand laughing and scolding in a high key by their dog-drawn carts, and in its council-house, an early Renaissance building with square, high-roofed turrets overlooking the market-place. In that little house, in a narrow street leading to the market, Heine was born; in that wretched little architectural abortion, the theatre, a critical audience listened to Immermann's works; and in the Kurzenstrasse was born Peter von Cornelius, the restorer of German art. Schadow succeeded him at the head of the Academy, and a new school of painting was firmly established in the old city, which had energy enough left in it to mark out another successful path for itself in trade. The new town is handsome, monotonous, rich and populous, but the galleries and museums somewhat make up for the lack of taste in private architecture. One of the most beautiful of the town's possessions is the old Jacobi house and garden, rescued from sale and disturbance by the patriotic artist-guild, who bought it and gave the garden to the public, while the house where Goethe visited his friend Jacobi became a museum of pictures, panelling, tapestry, native and foreign art-relics, etc., all open to the public. The gardens, with their hidden pools and marble statues, their water-lilies and overarching trees, their glades and lawns, have an Italian look, like some parts of the Villa Borghese near Rome, whose groves of ilexes are famous; but these northern trees are less monumental and more feathery, though the marble gods and goddesses seem quite as much at home among them as among the laurel and the olive.