The city is made cheerful by its law and medical students, who drink their lager beer with gusto, sing their staves, and keep up the old university traditions and customs. There are bright clean streets, and many shops that prosper through the college and the host of summer visitors.
Two fine bridges span the Neckar. The older bridge was constructed in 1788, and the new bridge was built about a hundred years later. It connects Heidelberg with Neuenheim.
The old town is curiously elongated, stretching along the riverside. Modern suburbs are extending to-day, to provide for a population numbering about forty thousand.
Unfortunately, very little of old Heidelberg has survived the devastation of wars and conflagrations. Even the churches were despoiled of their monuments by the French soldiery, and scarcely one of the ancient houses remains as a memorial of the Middle Ages.
Climb the hill of Anlagen, and you will reach the church associated with Jerome of Prague, the contemporary of Huss. To the door of this church Jerome affixed his heretical affirmations, and in the graveyard he preached to a vast crowd.
Olympia Morata is buried here. This beautiful and cultured Italian woman was a second Hypatia, who, however, escaped the too common fate of innovating philosophers. She married a German doctor, after a flight from her native land, and lived in Heidelberg, where her lectures were attended by the learned of the town.
NUREMBERG
FEW towns in Europe have preserved so much of the spirit of the Middle Ages as Nuremberg. Its history is pregnant with romance, and its annals of mediæval art are of marked interest. Amsterdam recalls Rembrandt; Antwerp calls to mind Rubens, and with the town of Nuremberg, the student of painting associates its illustrious native, Albert Durer.
The craftsmen of this town were among the most skilful of any European nation during mediæval times. Goldworkers, armourers, clock-makers, and artists in stained glass worked here in the days of the trade guilds. Brass was founded in this city at an early date. Nuremberg was famed, too, for its metalworkers and goldsmiths. It is still a town of industrious artificers.
The architecture of the churches is of the highest Gothic order; the façade of the Rathaus is a noble specimen of late Renaissance work; and the castle and fortifications are feudal structures of much historical interest. There are few towns that can compare with Nuremberg in the charm and variety of its memorials of the past.