As one approaches Heidelberg, the bed of the Necker, strewn with rocks, widens. One sees the wharf of the town and the town itself, which wears a pleasant mien. The back-ground of the whole picture ends in a tall earthly horizon: it seems to bar the stream.
A red-brick triumphal arch marks the entrance to Heidelberg. To the left, on a hill, stand the ruins of a medieval castle. Apart from their picturesque effect and some popular traditions, the remains of the Gothic period interest only the nations whose work they are. Does a Frenchman trouble his head about the lords Palatine, the princesses Palatine, plump, white and blue-eyed though they may have been? One forgets them for St. Geneviève of Brabant[25]. Those modern ruins have nothing in common with modern nations, excepting their outward aspect of Christianity and their feudal character.
It is different, leaving out the sun, with the monuments of Greece and Italy; these belong to all nations: they commence their history; their inscriptions are written in languages known to all civilized men. The ruins even of renovated Italy possess a general interest, because they are stamped with the seal of the arts and the arts come within the public domain of society. A fresco by Domenichino[26] or Titian that becomes obliterated, a palace by Michael Angelo or Palladio[27] that crumbles throw the genius of all the centuries into mourning.
At Heidelberg, they show a tun of inordinate proportions, a drunkards' Coliseum in ruins: at least no Christian has lost his life in that amphitheatre of the Vespasians of the Rhine; his reason, yes: that is no great loss.
At the outlet of Heidelberg, the hills to the right and left of the Necker fall away, and one enters upon a plain. A winding embankment, raised a few feet above the level of the corn-fields, is delineated between two rows of cherry-trees harshly treated by the wind and of walnut-trees "often by the wayfarers attacked[28]."
At the entrance to Mannheim, one drives through hop-vines, whose long, dry props were as yet decorated to only one third of their height by the climbing creeper. Julian the Apostate wrote a pretty epigram against beer; the Abbé de La Bletterie[29] imitated it with some elegance:
Tu n'es qu'un faux Bacchus ...
J'en atteste le véritable.
. . . . . . .
Que le Gaulois, pressé d'une soif éternelle
Au défaut de la grappe ait recours aux épis,
De Cérès qu'il vante le fils:
Vive le fils de Semèle[30].
A few orchards, some walks shaded by willow-trees of all sizes form a verdant suburb to Mannheim. The houses in the town have often only one storey above the ground-floor. The main street is wide and planted with trees in the middle: one more down-fallen city. I do not like false gold, and so I did not want any Mannheim gold; but I certainly have "Toulouse gold[31]," to judge by the disasters of my life: yet who has more than I respected the Temple of Apollo?
3 and 4 June 1833.
I crossed the Rhine at two o'clock in the afternoon. At the moment of passing, a steam-boat came up stream. What would Cæsar have said if he had met such a machine while he was building his bridge?