There is something to be seen in the church itself as well as from the top of the tower. It is a singularly beautiful specimen of Gothic architecture of the fifteenth century. The great height of the nave, with the light and graceful form of the columns and arches, produce an admirable effect, to which the high altar, the carved stone pulpit, and the large organ do no violence. It is one of those buildings you could linger in for hours, contemplating now its fair proportions, now the old tombs and monuments, and quaint devices of the sculptor's art. Below the floor at the eastern end is an underground chapel, a century older than the church itself, hewn out of the solid rock. Preaching is held in it once a year. The attendant will make you aware in the dim light of a spring that simmers gently up and fills a basin scooped in the solid stone of the floor.
The church of the Holy Cross in the Nicolai suburb is remarkable as having been built, and with a sepulchre, after the original at Jerusalem by a burgomaster of Görlitz, who travelled twice to Jerusalem, in 1465 and in 1476, to procure the necessary plans and measurements for the work. There is a singularity about the sepulchre: it is always either too long or too short for any corpse that may be brought to it, and yet appears large enough for a Hercules.
The town possesses two good libraries, each containing about twenty thousand volumes. In the Rathsbibliothek you may see rare manuscripts, among them the Sachsenspiegel; and a book which purports to have been printed before the invention of printing, bearing date 1400! The other library belongs to the Society for the Promotion of Science, who have besides a good collection of maps, fossils, minerals, and philosophical instruments. Perhaps here in England writers and scholars in provincial towns will some day be able to resort to libraries and museums as easily as in the small towns of Germany. Many an English student would be thankful to find in his native town even one such library as those at Görlitz.
The train from Breslau kept good time. It dropped me at Loebau, where there is a church in which service is performed in the Wendish tongue. From hence a branch line runs to Zittau. I stopped half way at Herrnhut, the head-quarters of the Moravians: a place I had long wished to see.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Head-Quarters of the Moravians—Good Buildings—Quiet, Cleanliness, and Order—A Gottesdienst—The Church—Simplicity—The Ribbons—A Requiem—The Service—God's-Field—The Tombs—Suggestive Inscriptions—Tombs of the Zinzendorfs—The Pavilion—The Panorama—The Herrnhuters' Work—An Informing Guide—No Merry Voices—The Heinrichsberg—Pretty Grounds—The First Tree—An Old Wife's Gossip—Evening Service—A Contrast—The Sisters' House—A Stroll at Sunset—The Night Watch.
I had seen the Moravian colony at Zeist near Utrecht, and was prepared for a similar order of things at Herrnhut. A short distance from the station along the high road to Zittau, and you come to a well-built, quiet street, rising up a gentle ascent, where, strange sight in Saxony, the footways are paved with broad stone slabs. Farther on you come to a broad opening, where two other main streets run off, and here the inn, Gemeinlogis, and the principal buildings are situate, all substantially built of brick. Everywhere the same quietness, neatness, and cleanliness, the same good paving, set off in places by rows and groups of trees, and hornbeam hedges.
The innkeeper—or steward as he may be called, for he is a paid servant of the brotherhood—told me there would be a Gottesdienst (God's service) at three o'clock, and suggested my occupying the interval with the newspapers that lay on the table. There was the Görlitzer Anzeiger, published three times a week, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, four good quarto pages, for fifteen pence a quarter; and equally cheap the Zittauische Wochentliche Nachrichten. But I preferred a stroll through the village and into the spacious gardens, which, teeming with fruit, flowers, and vegetables, stretch away to the south, and unite with the pleasure-walks in the bordering wood.
At three I went to the church. Outside no pains have been taken to give it an ecclesiastical look; inside it contains a spacious hall, large enough to contain the whole community, with a gallery at each end, and on the floor two divisions of open seats made of unpainted fir placed opposite a dais along the wall. Whatever is painted is white—white walls, white panelling, white curtains to the windows, and a white organ. Something Quaker-like in appearance and arrangement. But when a number of women came in together wearing coloured cap-ribbons, passing broad and full under the chin, a lively contrast was opposed to the prevailing sobriety of aspect. The colours denote age and condition. The unmarried sisters put on cherry-red at sixteen, and change it after eighteen for pink. The married wear dark blue, and the widows white. Many a pretty, beaming face was there among them, yet sedate withal.
The choir assembled on each side of a piano placed in the opening between the benches, for the organ was undergoing a course of repair. No practical jokes among them, as in the cathedral on the Hradschin; but all sedate too. Presently came in from the door on the left five dignified-looking sisters, and took their seats on one half of the dais; then seven brethren, among whom a bishop or two, from the door on the right, to the other half; and their leader, a tall man of handsome, intelligent countenance, to the central seat at the desk.