PROMENADE AT WIESBADEN.
LUTHER'S HOUSE AT FRANKFORT.
Schwalbach is another of Wiesbaden's handmaidens—a pleasant, rather quiet spot, from which, if you please, you can follow the Main to the abode of sparkling hock or the vinehills of Hochheim, the property of the church which crowns the heights. This is at the entrance of the Roman-named Taunus Mountains, where there are bathing-places, ruined castles, ancient bridges, plenty of legends, and, above all, dark solemn old chestnut forests. But we have a long way to go, and must not linger on our road to the free imperial city of Frankfort, with its past history and present importance. Here too I have some personal remembrances, though hurried ones. The hotel itself—what a relief such hotels are from the modern ones with electric bells and elevators and fifteen stories!—was an old patrician house ample, roomy, dignified, and each room had some individuality, notwithstanding the needful amount of transformation from its old self. It was a dull, wet day when we arrived, and next morning we went to the cathedral, Pepin's foundation, of which I remember, however, less than of the great hall in the Römer building where the Diets sat and where the "Golden Bull" is still kept—a hall now magnificently and appropriately frescoed with subjects from German history. Then the far-famed Judengasse, a street where the first Rothschild's mother lived till within a score of years ago, and where now, among the dark, crazy tenements, so delightful to the artist's eye, there glitters one of the most gorgeously-adorned synagogues in Europe. A change indeed from the times when Jews were hunted and hooted at in these proud, fanatical cities, which were not above robbing them and making use of them even while they jeered and persecuted! The great place in front of the emperor's hall was the appointed ground for tournaments, and as we lounge on we come to a queer house, with its lowest corner cut away and the oriel window above supported on one massive pillar: from that window tradition says that Luther addressed the people just before starting for Worms to meet the Diet. This other house has a more modern look: it is Goethe's birthplace, the house where the noted housekeeper and accomplished hostess, "Frau Rath"—or "Madam Councilor," as she was called—gathered round her those stately parties that are special to the great free cities of olden trade. Frankfort has not lost her reputation in this line: her merchants and civic functionaries still form an aristocracy, callings as well as fortunes are hereditary, and if some modern elements have crept in, they have not yet superseded the old. The regattas and boating-parties on the Main remind one of the stir on the banks of the Thames between Richmond and Twickenham, where so many "city men" have lovely retired homes; but Frankfort has its Kew Gardens also, where tropical flora, tree-ferns and palms, in immense conservatories, make perpetual summer, while the Zoological Garden and the bands that play there are another point of attraction. Still, I think one more willingly seeks the older parts—the Ashtree Gate, with its machicolated tower and turrets, the only remnants of the fortifications; the old cemetery, where Goethe's mother is buried; and the old bridge over the Main, with the statue of Charlemagne bearing the globe of empire in his hand, which an innocent countryman from the neighboring village of Sachsenhausen mistook for the man who invented the Aeppelwei, a favorite drink of Frankfort. This bridge has another curiosity—a gilt cock on an iron rod, commemorating the usual legend of the "first living thing" sent across to cheat the devil, who had extorted such a promise from the architect. But although the ancient remains are attractive, we must not forget the Bethmann Museum, with its treasure of Dannecker's Ariadne, and the Städel Art Institute, both the legacies of public-spirited merchants to their native town; the Bourse, where a business hardly second to any in London is done; and the memory of so many great minds of modern times—Börne, Brentano, Bettina von Arnim, Feurbach, Savigny, Schlossen, etc. The Roman remains at Oberürzel in the neighborhood ought to have a chapter to themselves, forming as they do a miniature Pompeii, but the Rhine and its best scenery calls us away from its great tributary, and we already begin to feel the witchery which a popular poet has expressed in these lines, supposed to be a warning from a father to a wandering son:
To the Rhine, to the Rhine! go not to the Rhine! My son, I counsel thee well;
For there life is too sweet and too fine, and every breath is a spell.
The nixie calls to thee out of the flood; and if thou her smiles shouldst see,
And the Lorelei, with her pale cold lips, then 'tis all over with thee:
For bewitched and delighted, yet seized with fear,
Thy home is forgotten and mourners weep here.
JOHN WOLFGANG GOETHE.