Chapter VII: Part 7

Lucifer falling from Paradise must have experienced some such contrast as those who exchange the serene evening beauty of the Bay of Naples for the odors, uproar, and confusion of the Mercato. But does not the saying run, “See Naples and die”? And to miss visiting so characteristic a district by night is almost to fail to see “Naples” at all; though it may, perhaps, appear at first glance to assure the “and die.” The quay of Santa Lucia is the only other section that even attempts to rival this in preserving unimpaired the “best” traditions of Neapolitan uproar and picturesque squalor. And it must be remembered that one’s interest in this city is like that felt for a pretty, bright, and amiable child who is, at the same time, a very ragged and dirty one. Life, as it is found in the Mercato, is exuberance _in extenso_; the most complete conception possible of a “much ado about nothing.” It is an irrelevant tumult in which matter-of-fact inconsequences are expressed with an incredibly disproportionate use of shoulders, fingers, and lungs. An inquiry as to the time of day is attended with a violence of gesticulation adequate to convey the emotions of Othello slaying Desdemona; an observation on the weather involves a pounding of the table and a wild flourish of arms like the expiring agony of an octopus. Even work itself seems half play in its accompaniment of romantic posturing, eloquent and profuse gestures, and continual over-bubbling of merriment, quarrels, and song. All this is of the very essence of the Mercato—hopelessly tattered and unkempt, artlessly unconscious of its picturesque rags, and altogether so frankly frowzy and disheveled as to become, upon the whole, positively charming. No one equals the Neapolitan in expressing the full force of the Scotch proverb, “Little gear the less care.”

In appearance the Mercato is a rabbit-warren of tortuous chasms lined with dowdy structures in every advanced stage of decrepitude. Even its lumbering churches of Spanish baroque rather add to than detract from this effect. No money is squandered on upkeep. The cost of initial construction is here like an author’s definitive edition,—final. Little, cramped balconies, innocent of paint, blink under the flapping of reed-made shades, shop signs are illegible from dirt and discoloration, and the weathered house-fronts shed scales of plaster as snakes do skins. The very skies are overcast with clouds of other people’s laundry. Dead walls flame with lurid theatre posters, unless warned off by the “post-no-bills” sign—the familiar “è vietata l’ affissione.” Cheap theatres are completely covered with life-size paintings illustrating scenes from the play for the week. Lottery signs abound. Certain window placards, by their very insistence, eventually become familiar and homelike; as, for instance, the “first floor to let,” the omnipresent “si loca, appartamento grande, 1^o primo,” for which one comes in time to look as for a face from home. Religion contributes a garish and tawdry decorative feature in the little gaudy shrines on street corners and house-fronts, where, in a sort of shadow box covered with glass, candles sputter before painted saints. The government monopolies, salt and tobacco, the Siamese Twins of Italy, are inseparable with their ever-lasting “Sale e Tabacchi” signs and dwell together everywhere on a common and friendly footing, like the owls, snakes, and prairie dogs in Kansas.

Curiosity fairly plunges a man into so promising a field, and Adventure stalks at his elbow. He finds the narrow, squalid streets brimming with a restless, noisy, nervous swarm. Picturesque qualities are brought out in the play of feeble street lamps and the dejected, half-hearted lights of dingy, cavernous shops and eating-places. A _comme il faut_ costume for men appears to be limited to trousers and shirt, with the latter worn open to the belt. The women affect toilettes of a general dirty disarray which their laudable interest in the life around frequently leads them absent-mindedly to arrange in the quasi-retirement of the doorways, the front sill itself being reserved for the popular diversion of combing the hair of their spawn of half-naked children. To traverse an alley and avoid stepping on some rollicking youngster _in puris naturalibus_ is vigorous exercise of the value of a calisthenic drill. Still, it is possible to escape the babies, but scarcely the fakirs and beggars. The fakir has odds and ends of everything to sell and teases for patronage for love of all the saints; one even awaits the Oriental announcement, “In the name of the Prophet, figs!” The beggars, of course, are worse; crawling across your path and dragging themselves after you to display their physical damages, often self-inflicted, in quest of a _soldo_ of sympathy. Express compassion in other than monetary terms and you get it back instanter, along with a dazing assortment of vitriolic maledictions. As the visitor’s patience gives way under the strain, it presently becomes a very pretty question as to whose language is the most horrific, his own or the beggar’s.

Women dodge through the streets carrying great bundles on their heads, and pause from time to time for friendly greetings with frowzy acquaintances tilting out of the upper windows where the laundry hangs. It is from these mysterious upper windows that the housewife in the morning lowers a pail and a bit of money wrapped in a piece of newspaper, and bargains with the leather-lunged _padulano_ when he comes loafing along beside his panniered donkey, crying his wares in that “carrying voice” we all admire in our opera singers. Those are the hours of trying domestic exaction, when the woman who does not care for water in the milk watches the production of the raw material with the cow standing at the doorway, or from the frolicsome goat that nimbly ascends every flight of stairs to the very portal of the combined kitchen and sleeping-room. But just now neighbors are shouting conversations in those same upper windows, or calling down to the women and girls who go shuffling along on the lava pavement below in wooden sabots that look like bath-slippers—if, indeed, one has imagination enough to think of bath-slippers in this vicinity.

Restless activity prevails. The most unnatural things are the statues, chiefly because they do not move. One catches glimpses of them now and then in the niches of the motley-marbled churches,—churches of memories grave and gay, of Boccaccio’s first glimpse of Fiammetta, or the slaying of the young fisherman-tribune, Masaniello, whom Salvator Rosa delighted to paint. There is buying and selling, eating and drinking. There are fruit stands and lemonade stalls and macaroni stores and dejected little shops with festoons of vegetables pendent from the smoky ceilings over whose home-painted counters weary women await custom with babies in their arms. A brisk demand prevails for the famous cheese-flavored biscuit called “pizza,” set with little powdered fish, and those who desire can have a slice of devilfish-tentacle for a _soldo_, which the purchaser dips in the kettle of hot water and devours on the spot. Should this latter fare disagree with any one, there will be access on the morrow to the miracle-working “La Bruna”—the picture of the Virgin in the church of St. Mary of the Carmine—which every child in Naples knows was painted by St. Luke; and if that should fail, there is still the liquefying blood of St. Januarius in the inner shrine of the cathedral.

Happily, the senses are more than four; and when seeing, smelling, tasting, and feeling fail from over-exertion in the Mercato, still hearing remains, so that one may study the Sicilian-like prattle of the Neapolitan in all its ramifications from a whisper to a shriek. The character of the man is expressed along with it; and thus one observes that while a Piedmontese may be steady and industrious, a Venetian gossipy and artistic, a Tuscan reserved and frugal, and a Roman proud and lordly, the Neapolitan is merry, loquacious, generous, quarrelsome, superstitious, and, too frequently, vicious. Thus the Mafia flourishes with him, and the Camorra, an unbegrudged possession, is wholly his own. His _vendetta_ may, perhaps, be mildly defended on the ground that it is, at least, only a personal affair, and certainly less foolish and reprehensible than the perennial jealousy of an entire people, as, for example, the ancient feud between Florence and Siena, where an inherited antagonism is still devoutly cherished and the old battle of Montaperti refought with fury every morning. The Neapolitan had rather spend that time on the lottery, dream his lucky numbers, look them up in his dream-book, and go to the Saturday afternoon drawings with a fresh and stimulating interest in life.

It is a nice question whether the Mercato loves singing best, or eating—when it can get it. At night one inclines to the latter view. There is a prodigious hubbub around all the open-air cooking-stoves and in every smoky _trattoria_ and family eating-place. One would scarcely hazard an opinion as to the number of bowls of macaroni, quantities of _polenta_, and whole nations of snails and frogs that are being devoured between appreciative gestures and puffs of cigarettes, and washed down unctiously with _minestra_ soup and watery wines. But as all these good people have probably breakfasted solely on dry bread and black coffee, no one would think of begrudging them the delight they are taking in dining so gayly and at so modest an outlay. If stricter economy becomes necessary later, they will patronize the charity “kitchens,” where soup, vegetables, meat, and wine are supplied at cost, or perhaps some friend will give them a voucher and they will be able to get it all for nothing.

So far as economy is concerned, they know all there is to be learned on the subject. Several families of them will live in a single room; and when that room is the damp, foul cellar they call _fondaco_, it is something one does not care to think of a second time. When they indulge in street-car riding they never neglect to take the middle seats, because they are the cheapest. They know all about the market for restaurant scraps and cigar stumps, where quotations are governed by length.

Their extraordinary generosity to one another in times of distress is almost proverbial. Misery both fascinates and touches them, perhaps because it is never very far from their own doors. One morning I shouldered my way into the middle of a strangely silent crowd and found there a weeping crockery vender whose entire stock in trade had been demolished by some mishap. It meant his temporary ruin, as could be seen from the faces of the painfully silent and sympathetic audience. The peddler seemed utterly stunned by his misfortune and lay on the ground with his face in his arms. How touching it was to see the little cup that some one had significantly set beside him, and to know that every copper-piece that fell into it came from Poverty’s Very Self, and bore the message, “It’s hard, poor fellow; we know how hard; but here’s a little something—try again.”

But, as Thomas Hardy’s peasants say, it is time to go “home-along.” Emerging from the noisy congestion of the Mercato the quiet and cool of the water front is rather more than refreshing. The shipping along the Strada Nuova stands out stately and picturesque, silvered toward the moon and black in the dense shadows. Harbor lights sparkle brightly under the solemn eye of the _molo_ lighthouse. The military pier points a long, black finger warningly toward Vesuvius. Along the Strada del Piliero one has pleasant choice of viewing on the left the animated steamer piers and the secure anchorage where the great ships for Marseilles and the Orient tug mildly at their hawsers, or seeing on the right the ceaseless activity of swarming little streets, some glowing in arbors of colored lights in celebration of a neighborhood _festa_ and others observing a milder form of the same noisy programme we have just forsaken. On the broad Piazza del Municipio the massive and heavy-towered Castello Nuovo rears a sombre and storied front; and farther along we pass the vast gray bulk of the famous Teatro San Carlo and the lofty crossed-arcade of the Galleria Umberto I, and skirting the corner of the Royal Palace enter the broad and brilliant Piazza del Publiscito.

Contrasts again! What a different crowd from that of the poor Mercato. Here is a groomed and well-conducted multitude that has come out to enjoy its coffee and cigarettes as it listens to the band in the pavilion on the western side or the open-air melodrama in that on the east. And what a change in surroundings! Palaces and splendid churches and public buildings, now. Solemn effigies of departed kings stare stonily down from niches in the moonlit façades. A fringe of dark-eyed boys lounges in indolent content around the coping of a fountain. Hundreds of chairs and tables throng the open space, and we gladly rest on one of them and experiment with Nocera and lemon juice, preparatory to a good-night stroll up the Toledo. Enthusiasm prevails here, too. Familiar melodies from the old operas are welcomed with storms of applause and shouts of “Bravo” or “Bis”; whereupon the conductor bows profound gratification and selects the music for the next number with a face glowing with pride. Politeness abounds. The air is gracious with “grazie,” and like expressions of courtesy. Ask a light for your cigar, and the Neapolitan raises his hat and thanks you, supplies the match, raises his hat and thanks you again, though all the while he has been doing the service. Indeed, he seems capable of expressing more civility by a touch of the hat than we can by completely doffing ours. One looks about and concludes that the women are not particularly pretty and that good dressing is a lost art with them. The men, as a rule, impress one more favorably; though they are perversely inclined to spoil their good looks by waxing their mustaches to a needle-point and trimming their long beards square, like bas-reliefs of Assyrian kings.

It is nearly nine o’clock. I settle for my drink, leave the usual centesimi with the bowing waiter, and plunge into the Broadway of Naples, the renowned Toledo. Its map-name is Via Roma, but the “Toledo” it has been for ages and as such it will remain to many Neapolitans to the end of time. It is a busy and peculiar street. Rows of raised awnings in two long, converging lines dress the feet of tall, dark buildings that are studded with shallow iron balconies filled with pots of flowers. It is comparatively narrow and with sadly straitened sidewalks, but no street in Naples is so long or so continually used; if it is followed, through all its changes of names, it will carry one past the Museo and away up to the very doors of the summer palace at Capodimonte, running due north all the way. Shops of all descriptions line it, and it is thronged to the overflow of the sidewalks and the hysterical abuse of distracted cabmen in the middle of the street. One thinks of Paris when he sees the newspaper kiosks and the many bright little stands decked out with fruit and gay trifles. The shops satisfy any taste and any purse, for it is the common gathering-ground of Naples.

It is vastly diverting to step aside and take note of the varieties of people that troop along this brilliant highway. One sees jaunty naval cadets from Leghorn; street dandies in white duck and tilted Panamas; delivery boys in long blue blouses; tattered and bare-headed bootblacks, with sleeves rolled up in business fashion; _artisti_ in greasy coats; minor government officials in spectacles and rusty black, trying to be rakish on four hundred dollars a year; sub-lieutenants, with their month’s thirty dollars in hand, off to lose it at cards at some _circolo_; swarthy _contadini_, the farmer “Rubes” of Italy, having disposed of their poultry and their wives’ straw plaiting, are here “doing the town”; groups of impoverished laborers from near-by estates, lamenting with despairing gestures the impending failure of the olive crop and charging it to ghosts and the evil eye; venders of coral and tortoise shell; resplendent Carabinieri in pairs, fanning themselves with their picturesque chapeaux; thrifty policemen pursuing street peddlers, with an eye to a per centum of the fines; heroic school-ma’ams, trying to forget that their miserable one hundred and fifty dollars per annum is not likely to save them from such distress as De Amicis tells of in his impressive “Romanzo d’ un Mestro”; that odd military _rara avis_, the Bersagliero, pruning his glossy feathers and looking quite equal to a trot to Posilipo and back; rioting students, still unreconciled to having been “ploughed” at the recent examinations, or having failed of the coveted _laurea_ degree when, frock-coated and nervous, they discussed their theses unsuccessfully before the jury of examiners; the pompous syndic of some commune; priests in black cassocks and fuzzy, broad-brimmed hats; some prefect returning from a many-coursed dinner, intent upon political _coups_ when the Government’s candidates come up for election; and, most dejected and dangerous of all, the unemployed men of education, the _spostati_, who will hunt government jobs while there is any hope and then turn Socialists in Lombardy or Camorristi in Naples.

All along the way the soda fountains are sputtering and the “American Bars” bustling. Bookstores fascinate here, as everywhere, and shining leather volumes cry out for attention in the names of D’Annunzio, De Amicis, Verga, and Fogazzaro. “Il Trionfo della Morta” lifts its slimy head on every counter, side by side with the breezy Neapolitan stories of Signora Serao. I always look curiously, but so far unsuccessfully, to find a single bookstore window that does not contain that national family table ornament, the “I Promessi Sposi” of Manzoni—the man for whom Verdi composed the immortal Requiem Mass.

The Toledo tide runs northward for twenty blocks or so from where we entered it, swings around the marble statue of Dante in the poet’s piazza, and sets south again. At nine o’clock it begins to diverge into the Strada di Chiaja, where there is music and promenading until midnight.

Detecting this hint of the hour, I hail a venerable, loose-jointed cab and bargain to be taken to my great, sepulchral, marble-floored room on the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele. Now, cabs are cheap in Naples—after you have paid a penalty of extortion for the first few days’ experience; the real expense concerns the tailor as much as the cabman, in wear and tear to clothing, trying to keep on the seat as you bounce along over these volcanic-block pavements. This evening the cabman starts the usual trouble by demanding threefold the legal fare, and as we work it down to the tariff rate he insults me pleasantly and volubly, and I try to do as well by him. At length we arrive at a quasi-satisfactory basis; he shrugs contemptuous acceptance of my terms and I relax to the point of conceding that his ponies are only a little worse-groomed than the average and have, as far as I can see, all the mountainous brass fixtures prescribed by custom, along with the coral horn that will save me from the evil eye. So in I clamber. There is an infantry volley of whip-cracking and a burst of wild invective at the obstructing crowd and my head snaps back with sufficient force to keep me quiet to the journey’s end.

On the pleasant little balcony of my room I dare not linger long to-night. Well I know the busy programme of the departure on the morrow. There will be a hurried stop for one last hasty look into the Museo, with my luggage on the waiting cab outside; then, at my urgent “Fa presto,” some reckless Jehu will rattle me over the stones to the station; I will go down into my pocket again, in the old familiar way, for seventy centesimi and an additional _pourboire_ to the cabby; and twenty more for the spry old porter who will shoulder my grips into the smoker; and the conductor will blow a horn, and the station bell will ring, and the engineer will blow a whistle,—in their rare Italian manner,—and the wheels will begin to squeak and groan, and I shall be off for Rome.

And that is why a cigar lacks its usual solace on my balcony to-night; the last I am to smoke in Good Night to this fascinating city. The subdued hum of cheery, happy revelry, mingled with music and song, drifts up from the bright squares and animated streets. The minutes multiply as I dwell over the varying phases of old Vesuvius, or gaze long and lingeringly over the star-lit Bay and all the romantic playground of these grown-up children. One cannot bring himself to say a definite farewell to this beautiful Region of Revisitors. With a yearning hope of returning some other day, he moderates it to a heartfelt Good Night and a tentative “till we meet again”:—

“A rivederci, Napoli! Benedicite e buon riposo!”

HEIDELBERG

9 P.M. TO 10 P.M.

There stands an ancient castle
On yonder mountain height,
Where, fenced with door and portal,
Once tarried steed and knight.

But gone are door and portal,
And all is hushed and still;
O’er ruined wall and rafter
I clamber as I will.
GOETHE’S “Castle on the Mountain.”

When the sun has gone down behind the Blue Alsatian Mountains and the last stain of color has faded from the skies of the Rhenish plain, when clock tower has answered clock tower and evening bell responded to evening bell from the mountain streams and mill wheels of the Odenwald to the busy squares of Mannheim, then the quiet and gentle valley of the Neckar takes on a peculiar peace and glory that is exquisite and marvelous, and Heidelberg and its lordly ruins seem set in a veritable fairy-ring of delicate charm and beauty. So tranquil and lovely is this region in the early evening that even the latest comer soon feels a comforting sense of having turned aside from out of the rush and fever of life into a singularly placid and protected corner of earth, a hushed and happy Vale of Tempe. This sense of rest and seclusion is one of Heidelberg’s strongest appeals—and her appeals, though few, are all emphatic. For there are no “sights” here, the castle excepted. The quaint old town is friendly and genial, though not more so than many others of this comfortable German father-land; nor is the serene Neckar so exceptional as to occasion pilgrimage.

Heidelberg’s appeals are to the mind, the heart, and the senses: the mind is inspired by her impressive achievements in learning; the heart is touched by her tragic history; and the senses are spellbound by the exceptional charm of her natural beauty. She is never so fair as in the early evening. With the soft fall of night each blemish fades away, and what remains to see and feel is altogether rare and lovely.

When the valley clocks are booming nine with muffled strokes it is delightful to be up in the castle’s ruins, lounging on the Great Balcony of the crumbling Friedrich Palace, with a broad coping for a seat and the rustling ivy of the hollow walls for a pillow. Behind and about one is the vast, ruddy wreckage of the knightly halls and towers of this far-famed “Alhambra of Germany,” and fluttering plains of tree-tops are billowing upward on every hand to the dark heights of the Königsstuhl. On the opposite side of the valley, across the river, dense forests of oak and chestnut glitter in the moonlight, sweeping aloft to the summit of the storied Saints’ Mountain. Just below our balcony the clustered spires and steep roofs of the huddled old town house their fifty thousand happy people between the wooded hillsides and the shimmering Neckar that bands the middle distance, on its placid Rhine journey, like a silver ribbon on a velvet cloak. In its bright waters hills and trees are luminously mirrored, along with the inky, motionless shadows of its bridges and the sober reflections of shuttered house-fronts along its verge.

In the dewy coolness and still of evening the guardian oaks breathe a recurrent lullaby—now softly agitated, now as hushed and ghostly and motionless as the hills in which they are rooted; and one understands how such a soothing environment could have softened even the impetuous, fiery, war-loving young Körner to indite so gentle a benediction as his beautiful “Good Night”:—

“Good night!
To each weary, toilworn wight,
Now the day so sweetly closes,
Every aching brow reposes
Peacefully till morning light.
Good night.

“Home to rest!
Close the eye and calm the breast;
Stillness through the streets is stealing,
And the watchman’s horn is pealing,
And the Night calls softly ‘Haste!
Home to rest!’”

Up in the castle ruins one is seldom alone before midnight, and not even then if the melancholy spectre of Rupert’s Tower is disposed to walk abroad. In the early evening the good people of Heidelberg, kindliest and most contented of Germans, stroll with vast delight under the lindens of the castle gardens, and groups of careless students loiter merrily along the terraces, adding bright touches of color with their peaked caps and broad corps ribbons. Bits of song and bursts of laughter give a homely suggestion of habitation to these staring walls; one could fancy the dead-and-gone old nobles at wassail again, with minstrels in the banquet hall, and Perkeo, the jester, whispering jokes in the ear of the Count Palatine.

“Under the tree-tops,” sang Goethe, “is quiet now.” There is a low sad sound of night breeze in the ivy; a swallow darts through a paneless window; a bat zig-zags among the echoing arches of a tower. Like phantom sentinels the stone statues of the old electors stand white and impressive in niches on the palace fronts. Fragrance of flowers drifts in from the castle gardens and the delicate plash of falling water comes from a terrace fountain. The lamps of the city rim the river below, and villas beyond the farther bank are marked by tiny dots of lights in the purple of the groves behind Neuenheim. Across the Neckar-cut gulf of shadow the chestnut-crowned summit of the Heiligenberg stares down solemnly at us, and not all the songs of its blithest nightingales can banish thoughts of its ancient Roman sacrifices nor divert the credulous from vigils over the blue grave lights around the Benedictine cloister where they buried the sainted Abbot of Hirschau. Up through the dark billows of this tree-top ocean rises a strain of Wagner’s music from some cheery, hidden woodland inn—and under the magic spell of the night one could fancy the golden-haired Siegfried approaching on a new Rhine Journey, following the winding Neckar up the broad Rhenish plain; the Tarnhelm is at his belt, the World-Warder Ring on his finger, and the moonlight flashes dreadfully from the glittering blade of “Nothung” as the hero’s horn winds note of arrival under the walls of our stout castle!

It is especially at such an hour as this that one realizes how easy it is for the man who thoroughly knows Heidelberg to acknowledge a delightful and lifelong bondage. A large number of the most eminent literati of the world have agreed in this. Goethe ascribed to her “ideal beauty.” Macaulay pronounced her environment “one of the fairest regions of Europe.” The father of German poetry, Martin Opitz, loved her dearly in his student days here, three centuries ago, and wrote affectionately of her all the rest of his life. The prolific Tieck found time between novels to lament the destruction of a few of her oaks. Alois Schreiber turned from his poetry and history to grieve over the loss of a lime-tree. Von Scheffel praised her in prose and verse and hailed her in seven songs of his “Gaudeamus.” La Fontaine could not conceive of more ideal surroundings in which to reunite his “Clara du Plessis” and her devoted “Clairant.” G. P. R. James, in his favorite romance “Heidelberg,” wrought prodigies of sentimentality here with the heroic “Algernon Grey” and the emotional “Agnes.” Matthisson immortalized himself by his “Elegie” in these ruins. All who have read Alexandre Dumas’s dramatic “Crimes Célèbres” will recall the young fanatic, Karl Ludwig Sand, and his assassination of the poet, Kotzebue, in our neighboring city of Mannheim, but they may not have heard of how Kotzebue once said: “If an unhappy individual were to ask me what spot to live in to get rid of the cares and sorrows which pursue him, I should say Heidelberg; and a happy one asks me what spot he would choose to adorn with fresh wreaths the joys of his life, I should still say Heidelberg.”

Goethe loved the Neckar, and scarcely less its famous old bridge. In an interpretative mood he once observed, “The bridge shows itself in such beauty as is perhaps not to be equaled by any other in the world.” And, indeed, it is an easy thing to divide enthusiasm between bridge and river. Nothing is jollier than loafing against the broad balustrades of this solid old veteran, as the students love to do, and lazily take note of the river’s tinted reflections, the ripple and eddy about the piers, the mirroring of the arches in perfect reverse, and watch the deep green shadows of the hills creep out and steal across. Great rafts come downstream laden with the output of the Odenwald and Black Forest, and swift steamers hurry under the massive arches bound upstream for the mountain towns or downward to Mannheim. Ferries ply beside it, fishermen drift beneath it, and throngs of townspeople and countrymen stroll along it, with now and then a be-petticoated peasant girl from the Odenwald whose fair hair is hidden under a huge black coif. How redolent it is of Rhenish life! One lingers beside the great statue of its builder, the old Elector, and gazes with unwearying satisfaction on the strange mediæval gateway, loopholed and portcullised, and wonders where two other such queer round towers can be found with such odd bell-shaped capitals and such slender little spires. Terrible and tragic experiences have befallen this sturdy old hero, and its antique towers are pitted from the riddling of French and Swedish and German bullets. Fire has swept it, cannon shaken it, floods grappled with it, and blood drenched it from shore to shore. Wan processions of famine-stricken people have dragged themselves across its paving-stones, and its gateways have reëchoed with groans and prayers and curses. To-night we see it as defiant as ever, battle-scarred and unshaken, with “head bloody but unbowed,” striding its river with broad and shapely arches—as real a part of Heidelberg as the very hills above it.

One looks down from the castle on the twinkling lights of the cramped old town, and notes how it has ambitiously spread its suburbs even beyond the opposite bank and that its villa-lamps sprinkle their way in the distance toward that little hamlet with the great mouthful of a name,—Handschuhsheim,—in the hills. It is there, could we see it, that the tumbledown hut stands that sheltered Luther when he escaped from the “Tile-Devils” of Worms; at a sight of it one wonders if he did not exclaim here as he did at the Diet: “Here I take my stand. I can do no otherwise. _God help me!_” In Heidelberg itself, the shops of that one long street, Hauptstrasse, send up a wavering, crooked path of softened light, but the more elegant _Anlage_ is discreetly reserved with all its hotels and imposing homes. One distinguishes little at this hour of the peaked tile roofs and faded shutters of the venerable town—the little awninged shops, sombre cafés, _Stuben_, and restaurants; or the excited appearance of an occasional side street that starts with all enthusiasm at the river, loses heart in a block or two, and comes suddenly to a discouraged end in a tangle of trees and forest paths. We only know that Emperor William I canters his bronze steed with its capacious girth along the middle of Ludwigs-Platz right up to the university building where the celebrated professors have their “readings” before their frisky young “Meine Herren”; and that the market-place is probably as shabby and gloomy as usual, and the Kornmarkt subsided again to its customary listlessness since the last of the evening crowds have taken the mountain railroads there for cool trips to the Königsstuhl or the Molkenkur or for a trout dinner at the distant Wolfsbrunnen.

Out of this cramped nest of roofs the shadowy Gothic tower of St. Peter’s Church rises boldly, challenging beholders to forget—if they can—how Jerome of Prague once nailed his theses on its doors and defended them before excited multitudes; calling, besides, on the distant and indifferent to sometimes have a thought of the famous university scholars who lie under the weeping-willows of its churchyard. A neighboring bidder for consideration, the famous Heilig-Geistkirche, thrusts a lofty spire skyward above the dark tree-tops until its weather vane is almost on a level with our feet. There is little need for this ecclesiastic to feel any apprehension on the score of being forgotten, so renowned has it been for half a thousand years as once the foremost cathedral of the Palatinate, celebrated for richness of endowment, extent of revenues, the beauty of its art treasures, and the learning of its prebendaries. As it appeals to us to-night it is as one fallen far from its former high estate, and yet the very eagles that soar over Heidelberg must have enough knowledge of religious controversy to recall its past amusing dilemmas of divided orthodoxy. The stranger in the castle ruins will smile as he thinks of what he has read of the days when both Protestants and Catholics worshiped there at one and the same time, through the effective device of a partition wall thrown up to separate choir from nave. The elaborate Catholic ceremonials of the altar necessitated the reservation of the choir for them, while the Protestants got along very nicely with a pulpit built in the end of the nave. What unusual entertainment might have been contrived by neutrals to the controversy had a brick or two been removed from the partition wall and an ear applied alternately to either service! On one side, _Ave Marias_ and _Pater Nosters_—on the other, hymns of the Lutherans; here, the wailing _Confiteor_ and the penitential breast-beating of _mea culpa_—there, grim scorn of all ritual and ceremony; in the choir, the intoning of versicle and response, reiterations of “_Dominus Vobiscum_” and “_Et cum Spiritu tuo_,” the solemn _Tantum Ergo_, the passionate _Agnus Dei_, and the triple sound of the acolyte’s bell as the Host is elevated above the kneeling, praying throngs—in the nave, a rapt absorption in the new significance of old truths, and lengthy discourses by stern and ascetic expounders; for one congregation, a glittering altar, sacred images, flaming candles, and a jeweled monstrance—stiff pews and a painted pulpit, for the other; for the Catholics, flocks of priests and choir boys, deacons and subdeacons, sumptuously vested in alb and stole and gorgeous chasuble—for the Protestants, one solemn man in black. Neutrals at the dividing wall could have rendered both congregations a service by loosening a brick or two and letting a little incense and beauty pass to the Dissenters’ side, and some word of wisdom concerning a release from dogma get through to the Catholics. Had America’s new policy of church unity existed then, it would have advocated doing away with the wall altogether and finding some compromise for approaching a common God in a common way. Time, the great umpire, has settled the contest as a draw; for the partition wall has come out and the rival camps with it: the present occupants are “Old Catholics”—a sect with which either side has little sympathy and less patience.

The evening lounger in the old castle will doubtless have more than one thought of the famous seat of learning that has, for five and a quarter centuries, invested the name of Heidelberg with so much lustre and glory. He will, of course, have heard it called the “cradle of Germanic science,” and will have been told that of all Germanic universities only those at Prague and Vienna are older than this. He can form some conclusion as to its rich contributions to human knowledge by merely recalling the names of its famous scholars,—Reuchlin, Melanchthon, Ursinus, Voss, Helmholtz, Bunsen, Kuno Fischer, and the rest,—and will gauge its present standing by the acknowledged eminence of its faculties in medicine, law, and philosophy. One thinks of its long eras of philosophic speculation, always deeply earnest if not invariably profitable, and applauds the force of Longfellow’s simile in “Hyperion” when he compared them to roads in our Western forests that are broad and pleasant at first, but eventually dwindle to a squirrel-track and run up a tree. If the loiterer be a Presbyterian, he will want to acknowledge indebtedness to old Ursinus for that celebrated “Heidelberg Catechism” of three hundred and fifty years ago that supplied the Westminster Assembly with a model for the “Shorter Catechism” in use to-day. That the university has survived the destructive rigors of so many fierce wars is perhaps sufficient proof of its vitality and the estimate men have set on its usefulness. Tilly carried off its library and presented it to the Pope, when he conquered Heidelberg in the Thirty Years’ War, but although only a small portion of it has ever been returned it has to-day a half-million volumes and documents, among which are original writings of Martin Luther and manuscripts of the Minnesingers. The pleasant summer semester attracts students here,—being allowed, under the “Freiheit” system, to exchange _alma maters_,—and then one may count up perhaps two thousand scholastic transients in Heidelberg. To many visitors the equipment will appear meagre, for, excepting the main building in Ludwigs-Platz, the library building, medical institution, and botanical gardens, there is little in sight to remind one of its existence. In witness of which there is the popular joke about a new arrival who inquired of a passer-by where the university might be: “Don’t know,” was the reply: “I’m a student myself.”

The presence of the jovial student, however, is too much in evidence at this time of the evening, through distant shouts and songs, to leave any one in doubt about the university being somewhere hereabouts. But when are they _not_ in evidence? At any hour of the day and night you come across them in the cafés, on the streets, loafing on the bridge or up in the castle, or returning or departing on their favorite recreation of walking-trips through the hills. Their smart peaked caps and broad corps ribbons are scenic features of the neighborhood. You wonder when they study, and how much time they ever spend in the private rooms they call their _Wohnungen_. In spite of the appearance of extreme _hauteur_ conveyed by their invariable and ceremonious punctilio these ruddy-faced boys are highly sociable, and take a prodigious delight in smoking, drinking, and singing together. A _Kaffeeconcert_ is entirely to their liking, and even more a jolly _Kegelbahn_ supper in some forest restaurant at the end of a long tramp. Most of all, which is amazing, they relish their stupid _Kneipen_ where every friendly draft of their weak beer is preceded by a challenge to drink, and where the only redeeming feature is the fine singing. Still, at _Commerces_, one hears the time-honored Fox Chorus, “What comes there from the hill.” Even the pet vice of dueling might be mildly defended on the ground that German students have no such athletic contests as their brothers of America and England and that each looks to the sword, in consequence, as an arbiter of courage and prowess—from the _Füchse_ (who are freshmen) to the _Bürschen_ (who are seniors). Granted that the occasional sabre duel is really dangerous, still injuries are trifling in the ordinary encounters _Auf der Mensur_, fought with the thin, basket-hilted Schläger, and preferably on the _Paukboden_ of the famous Hirschgasse tavern up the little valley across the river. Blood apart, it is rather amusing than otherwise to watch the contestants in their pads and goggles, the seconds straddling between them with drawn words, and the callous umpire keeping merry count of the wounds. Few topers and bullies here, but vigorous, wholesome youth.

The outlook from the Grand Balcony is upon a sea of foliage so vast as completely to surround castle, gardens, and terraces and convert them into just such an enchanted island as springs so naturally out of the pages of the “Arabian Nights.” Evidences of sorcery and magic multiply as we make the rounds of our fortress, for voices and music come up out of the tremulous green depths, and companion isles emerge in the moonlit distance, but lifted far above us and set on prodigious wave-shoulders of steadily increasing height. The loftiest of these rocks we know to be famous Königsstuhl, a name they have vainly been trying to change to Kaisersstuhl since the visit of Emperor Francis of Austria, a hundred years ago, and Emperor Alexander of Russia. From this eyrie perch one looks abroad by day on a very considerable portion of the wide, wide world, and the distance covered is only limited by the imagination of the observer. Then the Neckar valley is at one’s feet, and a little farther off is the Rhine, and away yonder are the Haardt Mountains and the sombre edges of the Black Forest. The faint blur on the southwestern horizon is said to be Speyer, where the followers of the Reformation were first called “Protestants,” and the lofty pinnacle of the cathedral, rising above the tombs of its imperial dead, quickens thoughts of that “mellifluous doctor” whose writings were “a river of Paradise,” the crusade preacher, St. Bernard, to whom the Madonna is credited with having revealed herself in that very church. Our mortal eyes may confirm the identity of this much from the Königsstuhl’s observation tower, but we can only envy the miraculous vision of those who see the spire of the Strassburg Cathedral, sixty miles away. Doubtless they could distinguish the identical tree of the famous Odenwald rhyme:—

“There stands a tree in the Odenwald,
With many a bough so green,
’Neath which my own true love and I
A thousand joys have seen.”

Another of the companion isles of this moonlit, tree-top ocean is the popular Molkenkur, a modern “whey-cure,” that flourishes on the princely site of the earliest stronghold of this whole region. To those who are strolling its broad terrace and reflecting, perhaps, upon the tragic history of the place, seven centuries roll back and Barbarossa’s brother, the savage Conrad of Hohenstaufen, climbs the forest trail with archers and spearmen, returning to his mountain retreat from a robber raid along the Rhine. And perhaps the visitor fancies he even hears the roar of that historic explosion that rained the wreckage of old Conrad’s fortress on town and river, or sees the blinding lightning stroke that crumbled this dread stronghold into a stalking-ground for the shuddering phantoms of winter fireside legends.

Reflections that penetrate still farther back into the gloaming of local tradition will precede Conrad’s fortress with the temple of the enchantress Jetta; and could we distinguish in the distance the rock where the cozy inn of the Wolfsbrunnen perches and serves its rare dinners of mountain trout, we should see the very spot where the wolf slew Jetta in judgment of the Goddess Hertha, who was properly indignant that her priestess should have fallen in love with a mortal.

The nearer waters of the billowy forest-sea that ripples around the ruined castle walls contain in their dark, cool depths a picturesque tangle of woodland paths and romantic walks, thickets of fragrant flowers, a shattered arch half cloaked with ivy, and many a pleasant wayside café opened to the sky and gay with its little German band. For those who emerge from the shadows and come up like Undines into the moonlight that streams in a silver mist on terrace and garden, as fair a picture reveals itself as can be seen in any part of our world. Here are lakes and grottoes and fountains and statues, all flecked with the heavy shadows of lindens and beeches. Here are crumbling towers and vine-mantled turrets and shattered, moss-grown arch and cornice. Even lovelier to-day are these gardens and scarcely less celebrated than three hundred years ago when old Solomon de Caus, architect and engineer of the Counts Palatine and first prophet of the power of steam, “leveled the mountain-tops and filled up the valleys” (as he has recorded in a Latin inscription in one of the older grottoes), and built these “plantations” and made them the haunts of singing birds, and filled them with orange-trees and rare exotic plants, and ornamented them with statues and with fountains that made music as they played. The ruined castle is embraced and enfolded in these beautiful gardens as an ailing child by its mother’s arms. The ravages of fire and war have scarred and wrecked it beyond man’s redemption, but the sturdy walls still oppose their twenty-foot masonry to the attacks of Time as stubbornly as did the great Wrent Tower when it defied the powder blasts of the detested Count Mélac and his devastating Frenchmen.

As the hour of ten draws near, we return through the vaulted passage from the Great Balcony and enter the grass-grown central courtyard. Outside the façades were grim and bleak and built to meet an enemy’s blows, but toward the courtyard the castle turned faces of ornament and beauty. One feels at once the force of the saying that this is not the ruin of a castle, but of an epoch. It slowly flowered through the five hundred years that Heidelberg was the capital of the Palatinate, and all the development of those intervening times is expressed in its varying architecture. Pomp and circumstance are written big across it, for its masters and builders were counts and princes, kings and emperors. One feels the love and pride they took in these deserted palaces, now masterless. In the pale moonlight whole rows of effigies of the illustrious dead stand boldly forth in niches of the hollow, staring walls, and medallion heads peer curiously out of pediment recesses, and history and allegory find expression in lifelike statue and carven bust. Delicate arabesques and fanciful conceits wreathe themselves in stones of portal and cornice, and the armorial chequers of Bavaria and the Lion of the Palatinate oppose the lordly Eagle of the Empire. Time has modulated the discordant keys of architecture of divergent periods into a common and mellow harmony, so that the first rude stones laid by old Rudolph seem a consistent part of an assemblage that includes that finest example of Renaissance architecture in all Germany—Otto-Heinrich’s wonderful ruddy palace set with its yellow statues. One thinks of Prague and the battle of the White Hill as he sees the ill-starred Frederick’s massive contribution, and wonders why this beautiful realm could not have enticed him from playing that tragic rôle of “Winter King.” Frederick’s palace looms impressively by night; in its varied architecture and majestic effigies of the House of Wittelsbach one feels the propriety of having here a comprehensive levy upon the building-knowledge of all previous time as an adequate and appropriate expression of the catholic culture of the lords of the Palatinate.

And, indeed, one reflects, there was need for both strength and beauty to a fortress that was to play so momentous a rôle in the fierce dissensions of its time. In that dungeon a pope once lay a prisoner; in this chamber Huss found refuge; in yonder chapel Luther has preached, and all the foremost spiritual lords of the hour. This courtyard has echoed with shouts for the Emperor Sigismund when he tarried here _en route_ to play that perfidious part at the Council of Constance, and has rocked with wild applause as “Wicked Fritz,” returning in triumph from the battlefield of Seckenheim, marched in his captive princes. These staring walls have blazed with royal fêtes—in the hush and desolation of to-night one feels a deep sadness in contrasting the ominous silence that pervades them now with the splendor and uproar that vitalized them when a princess was wedded in this crumbling chapel; when Emperor Maximilian came up from his coronation at Frankfort; when the foremost figure of his era, Emperor Charles V, and his sallow little son who was later Phillip II, feasted and reveled here for days at a time.

We look up at the Gothic balconies, and it seems as though we could almost see some early lord of this stronghold peering down through painted windows at the athletic sports of his hardy sons; and a certain unreality takes phantom form and substance, and the sentinel figures descend solemnly from their niches as a train of valorous knights and pages issues from Otto-Heinrich’s broad portal with music and laughter; there is the scrape and tread of mailed feet and the shouts of a gallant company as fair-haired women in shimmering silks and high-peaked headdresses award prizes of the tourney to kneeling men in glittering armor; and the trumpets sound and the torches flare and the noble retinue sweeps into the great banquet hall, while the “merry councilor” who brings up the rear makes us a profound and mocking bow as the door is closed—and we are alone with the statues in the moonlight.

The empty, silent courtyard is spectral and sad; it is an hour for reverie, for apprehension. The pale silver of the moon whitens into phantom-life two sides and a corner; the rest is a deep, hushed shadow. A cushion of ivy stirs in the faint night air; a bat flashes over a shattered cornice; a stone detaches itself exhaustedly and falls with a tinkle of sand, waking a protest of little echoes.

One steals away silently, resigning ward of all this senile decay to faithful Perkeo, who, in wooden effigy, still companions his huge empty tuns in the darkness of the cellars—the little, red-haired, faithful jester who alone remains constant to his master, of all the army of attendants that thronged these palaces for half a thousand years.

We pass the old stone-canopied well whose columns once were Charlemagne’s, pass the ponderous clock tower and the moat bridge, and enter the fragrant gardens as the valley bells sound ten and the purple mists are rising from the Neckar.

It is impossible to escape a feeling of profound melancholy. Where now are the powerful princes whose rusted swords may not strike back were I to raise a hand of destruction against the halls they reared and loved and guarded with such might? “The fate of every man,” said the Koran, “have We bound about his neck.”

It is depressing to think that such glory, power, and beauty as once were here should have flourished so wonderfully and come to so little. Was all this magnificence created merely for destruction? Could nothing less suffice grim Time to build him an eyrie for bats and swallows? Was Von Matthisson right in the judgment he expressed in the sad and sympathetic “Elegie” he penned in these ruins, and must we conclude with him that temporal glory is but ashes and that the darkness of the grave adorns impartially the proud brow of the world ruler and the trembling head that shakes above the pilgrim’s staff?

“Hoheit, Ehre, Macht und Ruhm sind eitel!
Eines weltgebieters stolze Scheitel
Und ein zitternd Haupt am Pilgerstab
Deckt mit einer Dunkelheit das Grab!”

INTERLAKEN

10 P.M. TO 11 P.M.

THE top of the evening at brisk and bracing Interlaken is certainly ten o’clock. Vigorous, vitalizing air breathes down on the lush meadows from towering Alpine snowfields, and languor and ennui fall away from her dispirited summer idlers and a refreshing life interest reasserts itself. It is then one may see the deep, flowered lawns that front the great hotels of the broad Höheweg pleasantly thronged with animated guests, modishly and immaculately groomed; and each little street and quiet lane has its quota of vivacious strollers who prefer the keen night air and the inspiring mountain-prospect to the conventional attractions of the brilliant Kursaal or the round of mild social diversions that is in progress in the hotel apartments. Then, too, there is a certain subdued note of expectancy in the air, for this is the little village’s fête hour; and almost as the valley clocks are striking the hour the celebration is heralded with a burst of rockets from the open field of the Höhenmatte, in the centre of the town, and there is a general rush of chattering guests to see the display and to exhibit prodigious approval. All are aware of the fact that this is merely an expression, in terms of Swiss thrift, of the appreciation the seventy-five hundred villagers feel for the lucrative presence of thousands of guests, and yet it admirably serves as a mid-break in the evening’s diversions. There is little enough to the celebration, to be sure, excepting the exaggerated importance such an event always assumes to isolated summer people, but you would think it was a pyrotechnic marvel, to judge by the enthusiasm.