Before this quarter of the Black Forest was inhabited, the source of the Danube might have suggested some of those sublime images which Armstrong has so finely described; at present the contrast is most striking. The Spring appears in a capacious Stone Basin upon the front of a Ducal palace, with a pleasure-ground opposite; then, passing under the pavement, takes the form of a little, clear, bright, black, vigorous rill, barely wide enough to tempt the agility of a child five years old to leap over it,—and, entering the Garden, it joins, after a course of a few hundred yards, a Stream much more considerable than itself. The copiousness of the Spring at Doneschingen must have procured for it the honour of being named the Source of the Danube.—W. W. 1822.
"Monday, 31st July.—... We drew towards the town of Villingen, a foreign-looking place standing in the descent, and lifting up its metallic dome-like spires, without the accompaniment of a single tree.... The Church with its two-fold spire glittered in the hot sunshine, like pewter in a melting state. Our guide had told us that near this place the Danube took its rise; but not so.... At Doneschingen changed horses again. Here we laved in the water which flowed from the source of the majestic Danube, a little, clear, bright, black rill, that issuing from a capacious stone fountain, into which it springs, crosses the road, and glides rapidly along the side of a beautiful pleasure-ground.... We washed, drank, and luxuriated in the cool and pure waters of this rill, unwilling to quit what we were not again to see—a reality very different from the stately Danube, so long an image to the imagination." (Mrs. Wordsworth's Journal.)
"Tuesday, 1st August. Villingen.—The landlord seemed to entertain high ideas of this his native place—its modern improvements in gardens and its former grandeur—and told us that one of his servants should conduct us to the palace, the gardens, the baths, and last of all, though most the object of our curiosity, to the source of the Danube....
"But I seem to have forgotten the source of the Danube, which truly was 'another'[HL] Danube after we had seen it; or, more properly speaking, after we had seen the moor-land country surrounding the Town of Doneschingen, where we knew we should meet with the source of that famous river; and it is not only there (in that Hollow wild without grandeur), but actually within the walls of the Duke's courts adjoining the trim flower garden. The bountiful spring is received by a large square stone basin, and thence flows through the gardens in a narrow stream like a vigorous mill-race. Had an active boy been by our side he would have over-leapt it. That streamlet, after the course of a few hundred yards, falls into the bed of the united rivers the P—— and the P—— which take their rise in the moorish hills seen on the right in the road from Villingen, and which we looked upon from the gardens at the same time that we saw the new-born streamlet (called the source of the Danube) gush into their channel. I suppose it must be the remarkable strength of the spring which has caused it to be dignified with its title; for certainly those other two streams (united a little above the gardens) are the primary sources (of this branch at least) of the Danube." (From Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, vol. i.)
What Dorothy Wordsworth mentions in reference to the Danube occurs in many other rivers; e.g. the source of the Clyde, in Scotland, is a tiny burn in Lanarkshire, which, after a short moorland course, falls (near Elvanfoot) into the large stream of the Daur—the latter having come down for many miles from the Lead Hills district. The P—— and P—— is probably a mistake for B—— and B——. The mountain torrent of the Bregé in the Schwartzwald is joined by the Bregach, and when the stream receives the waters from the spring in the Castle Garden of Doneschingen it becomes the Danube.—Ed.
VARIANTS:
[490] 1822.
But in the note to the poem the reading is "light."