On tramp towards the South, we rested on the Sunday in Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg; but there was public
mourning in the city for a death in the ducal family, and the usual Sunday festivities were forbidden. On attending church in the evening I found a large congregation, and the service similar to that of Hamburg. In the afternoon, as there was no military parade or music, over the absence of which the chambermaids of Der Gross-Herzog moaned dolorously, we rambled through the ducal garden, admiring the quaintly-shaped basin in its centre, its numerous statues, and fresh grass. The town was dull and methodical enough, but would have been rejoicing, if it had not been respectfully mournful.
Our next resting-place was Berlin, where we stayed two months; and here, according to our experience, the Sunday afternoon recreations differed only in tone from those of Hamburg, being less boisterous in their gaiety than in the former seaman’s paradise. We never worked on Sunday in Berlin, nor did any of our artizan friends, although there were very pressing orders in the shape of those unvarying German court douceurs, diamond-circled snuff boxes, and insignia of the Red and Black Eagle. Once, we accompanied our principal, by special invitation, to the Hasenheide, to witness the rifle practice, civil and military, among its heather and sandy hollows. Officers and rank and file alike were there; the officer practising with the private’s heavy gewehr, and the private in his turn with the light weapon of his superior in grade. There were some capital shots among them. Thence, on the same day, we waded through the sand to Tegel, to visit the residence and private grounds of Baron Humboldt; and from a mound in his garden beheld the beautifully picturesque view of Lake Tegel, and the distant towers of Spandau. I have been present on the Sunday at a review of the Royal Guard in their striking uniform of black and dazzling white.
Once, we made a river voyage in a huge tub of a boat along the weedy banks of the Spree, under the command of a female captain—a jolly matron, weighing I am afraid to guess how many stone. I am told it was a very plebeian piece of business, but we were very happy notwithstanding. We had a Tafel-lieder party on board, with a due proportion of guitars, and they played and sang all the way to Treptow and back again. Once arrived at our destination, we sat upon the grass, and watched the merry groups around, or sauntered along the margin of the stream, sipping occasionally very inconsiderable quantities of feeble cordials; and when the evening
drew near, we re-embarked, and, under the safe conduct of our female commodore—who was skilled in the difficult navigation of the shallow river—returned soberly home. The environs of Berlin are of no great beauty, the city being built on a sandy plain, with the single eminence of the Kreutzberg, from which it can be viewed with advantage; but in and about the city there are beautiful gardens, private and of royal foundation, and these are invariably open to the public. One happy Sunday afternoon we spent in Charlottenburg, the pleasure-palace of the king; and one other in the noble botanical gardens in the city; while on a fine day the avenue of lime trees, Unter-den-Linden, in its crowd of promenaders, and social groups at the refreshment tables, presented an animated, and, to my mind, a recreative and humanising spectacle. Music was everywhere; and in the theatres, in the display of pyrotechnic eccentricities, or perhaps in ballooning—but that was English—the evening was variously spent. There may be dance-houses and other abominations in Berlin, as in Hamburg, but I never heard of them, and if they existed, more was the pity. For my own part, I was happy in enjoying the moderate pleasures of life in company with the majority of my fellow-workmen, who, I must again say, and insist upon, were not at work, but at rest, on the Sunday. It is true that here, as elsewhere, tailors and boot-makers (master-men) were content to take measures, and receive orders from the workmen, for very little other opportunity presented itself for such necessary service.
A few hours’ whirl on the railway on a Sunday saw us in Leipsic. This was at the Easter festival; and we stayed two months in this Saxon market of the world, embracing in their course the most important of the three great markets in the year. If ever there was a fair opportunity of judging the question of Sunday labour and Sunday rest, it was in Leipsic, at this period. If Sunday work be a necessary consequence of Sunday recreation—an absurd paradox, surely—it would have been exhibited in a commercial town, at a period when all the elements of frivolity, as gathered together at a fair; and all the wants of commerce compressed into a few brief weeks, were brought into co-existence. Yet in no town in Germany did I witness so complete a cessation from labour on the Sunday. There was no question of working. Early in the morning there was, it is true, a domestic market in the great square, highly interesting to a stranger from the number
of curious costumes collected together; the ringletted Polish Jew, old Germans from Altenburg, seeming masqueraders from the mining districts of the Erzgeberge, and country folks from every neighbouring village, who flocked to Leipsic with their wares and edibles. But all this was at an end long before the church service commenced. I have been in the Nicolai-Kirche (remarkable for its lofty roof, upheld by columns in the form of palm trees), and the congregation thronged the whole edifice. And at a smaller church, I was completely wedged in by the standing crowd of unmistakable working people, whose congregational singing was particularly effective. The German Protestant church service is not so long as our own. There are only a few pews in the body of the building; and the major part of the audience stand during the service. I was not so well pleased with one sermon I heard in the English church, for it happened to be the effort of a German preacher; a student in our tongue, whose discourse was indeed intrinsically good, and would have been solemn, if the pauses and emphases had only been in the right places.
I never worked on Sunday in Leipsic, nor was I acquainted with any one who did. The warehouses were strictly closed; and a few booths, with trifling gewgaws, were alone to be seen. The city was at rest. Leipsic has but one theatre, and to this the prices of admission are doubled in fair-time, which placed it out of our reach. Thus we were forced to be content with humbler sources of amusement, and to find recreation, which we readily did, in the beautiful promenades round the city, laid out by Dr. Müller; in country rambles to Breitenfeld, and other old battle-fields; in tracing the winding paths of a thin wood, near the town, wonderful to us from the flakes of wool (baumwolle) which whitened the ground. Or again, among the bands of music and happy crowds which dotted the Rosenthal—a title, by the bye, more fanciful than just, seeing that the vale in question is only a grassy undulating plain. Here we sometimes met the “Herr,” with wife on arm, and exchanged due salutations.
The fair, such as we understand by the name, commenced in the afternoon, and was a scene of much noise and some drollery. The whole town teemed with itinerant musicians, whose violent strains would sometimes burst from the very ground under your feet, as it appeared, issuing as they did from the open mouths of beer and wine-cellars. Quiet coffee-houses there were, in which grave citizens smoked and read; and admirable concerts in saloons, and in the
open air. To one of these latter I was seduced by the mendacious announcement of a certain Wagner of Berlin, that a whole troop of real Moors would perform fantastic tricks before high heaven; and on paying the price of admission, I had to run the gauntlet through a score of black-headed Teutons, who salaamed and grinned as they ushered me into the blank space beyond, containing nothing more interesting than a few tables and chairs, a dumb brass band, and a swarm of hungry waiters. I saw no dance-houses, such as there were in Hamburg; and by nine o’clock the festivities of the day were at an end. The Easter fair lasted some five or six weeks, and at its termination its merriment disappeared. The wandering minstrels wailed their last notes as they departed, and the quiet city was left to its students and the pigeons.