In the churchyard of Cleversulzbach lies buried, since the 2d of May, 1802, the mother of Schiller. Prof. Dr. E. Mörika, when he was preacher there, erected a simple stone cross over the grave, and with his own hands engraved upon it the words, "Schiller's Mother." On the famous 10th of November, 1859, woman's hand decorated the grave with flowers, and put a laurel wreath upon the cross; and in the hour when great cities with festal processions and banquets and oratory and jubilant song offered their homage to the son, a few persons gathered around the grave of the mother, and in the silence there planted a linden-tree; for in stillness thus, while she lived, had his mother done her part, lovingly and with faith, to unfold and consecrate the genius of Friedrich Schiller.
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A NOOK OF THE NORTH.
Adventurous travellers, who penetrated into Canada during the late visit of the Sovereign-Apparent of that colony, have furnished the public, through the daily press, with minute and more or less faithful descriptions of places upon the grand routes, Quebec and Montreal have been done by them to a hair; Kingston and another wicked place made notorious for bad manners; Toronto, Hamilton, and London of the West photographed with a camera of maximum dimensions. Upon the two great railroad-lines by which Canada is now traversed,—the Grand Trunk and the Great Western,—there is hardly a station which has not been mentioned by the reporters, either for the loyal manner in which it was decorated to do honor to the youthful Prince, or for the rather inhospitable display of certain objectionable symbols by the people around.
But neither in Canada nor elsewhere is it upon the grand routes that glimpses can be had of interior life and character. Primitive simplicity is altogether incompatible with railroads. The boy who resides near a station is quite an old man, compared with any average boy taken from the sequestered clearings ten miles back: he may be a worse kind of boy, or he may be a better, but he isn't the same kind, at any rate. Of girls it is more difficult to speak with confidence in the present era,—hooped skirts having pretty nearly assimilated them everywhere; but I have noticed that they are less ingenuous along railroads than in secluded districts, and their parents more suspicious,—a fact which makes railroad-vicinities inferior places to dwell in, compared to those that are rural and remote from the demoralizing influences of up and down trains.
I do not aver that the railroad is devoid of a kind of poetry of its own,—the same kind of sentiment, nearly, that resides about anvils and smelting-furnaces in the Hartz Mountains and in the great coal-districts: an infernal kind of sentiment, for the most part, being inseparable from burning fiery furnaces and grime; as in "Fridolin," and in the "Song of the Bell," and in the "Forging of the Anchor." Once, particularly, in travelling by rail, did I experience the mysterious glamour that seems to hang round iron more than about any other metal. It was past midnight; and on waking up after a sleep of some hours, I found myself alone in the long car, which had come to a stand-still while I slept. The stillness of the night was broken at intervals by a short, loud boom, as of an iron bell ringing up some terrible domestic from the incomprehensible unseen. On looking out of the window, I saw by some dim lamp-light that we were alone in an immense iron hall; we, I say, for there was a ponderous, grimy being darkly visible to me, whose gigantic shadow made terrible gestures upon the walls and among the great iron girders of the roof, as he moved slowly along the train, striking the wheels with a heavy sledge-hammer as he went. Of course there was nothing unusual in such a proceeding, the object of which was, probably, to ascertain something connected with the condition of the rolling stock; but there was a kind of awful poetry in the toll of the iron bell, which ran, and reverberated, and tingled among the iron ribs in the building, making them all sing as if they were things of flesh and blood, with plenty of iron in the latter, which is reckoned to be conducive to robust health.
But the romance of rolling stock has yet to be disengaged, and the inspired conductor or bardic baggage-master destined to do that is yet in the shell. May he long remain there!
Off the track some ten or twenty miles, though, almost anywhere, some of the materials, at least, for good, regular poetry of the old-fashioned kind are to be found. A mill, for instance, with a wooden wheel,—no demoralizing iron about it, in fact, except what cannot well be dispensed with, in view of wear and tear. A white cottage, where the miller dwells serene; mossy roof, red brick chimney, and no lightning-rod or any other iron, being the principal features of the serene miller's abode. Cherries, in that tranquil person's garden, that are nearly ripe, and roses of a delicate red,—but none so ripe or so red as the lips and cheeks of the serene miller's daughter, who trips across the little wooden foot-bridge over the mill-stream, singing a birdy kind of song as she goes. She is clad in a black velvet bodice and russet skirt, and has no iron about her of any description, unless, indeed, it is in her blood,—where it ought to be. The breath of kine waiting to be relieved of their honest milk, which is a good, solid kind of fluid in such places, and meanders about the land with great freedom in company with honey. All these things will be very scarce in the world by-and-by, on which account it seems to be a judicious thing to go off the track a little, now and then, if only to "say that we have seen them."
In following the graphic narratives of the Prince of Wales's tour, the mind naturally wandered away to places not visited by him, although within easy distance of his fore-ordered course. It is well that there are places left to talk about! Let us conjure up a few old reminiscences of one,—a silent, primitive little nook of the North, within an hour's ride of Quebec, but too insignificant a spot for the coveted distinction of a royal visit. Crowned heads, then, will have the goodness to transfer their attention, and skip to the next article.
The nook to which I refer is Lorette, in Lower or French Canada, where it is commonly called Jeune Lorette, to distinguish it from Ancienne Lorette,—a less interesting place, distant from it about four miles.