Chapter II: Preface

WITH the younger class of my readers this work has had the good fortune to find especial favour; perhaps because it is in itself a collection of the thoughts and sentiments that constitute the Romance of youth. It has little to do with the positive truths of our actual life, and does not pretend to deal with the larger passions and more stirring interests of our kind. It is but an episode out of the graver epic of human destinies. It requires no explanation of its purpose, and no analysis of its story; the one is evident, the other simple,--the first seeks but to illustrate visible nature through the poetry of the affections; the other is but the narrative of the most real of mortal sorrows, which the Author attempts to take out of the region of pain by various accessories from the Ideal. The connecting tale itself is but the string that binds into a garland the wild-flowers cast upon a grave.

The descriptions of the Rhine have been considered by Germans sufficiently faithful to render this tribute to their land and their legends one of the popular guide-books along the course it illustrates,--especially to such tourists as wish not only to take in with the eye the inventory of the river, but to seize the peculiar spirit which invests the wave and the bank with a beauty that can only be made visible by reflection. He little comprehends the true charm of the Rhine who gazes on the vines on the hill-tops without a thought of the imaginary world with which their recesses have been peopled by the graceful credulity of old; who surveys the steep ruins that overshadow the water, untouched by one lesson from the pensive morality of Time. Everywhere around us is the evidence of perished opinions and departed races; everywhere around us, also, the rejoicing fertility of unconquerable Nature, and the calm progress of Man himself through the infinite cycles of decay. He who would judge adequately of a landscape must regard it not only with the painter’s eye, but with the poet’s. The feelings which the sight of any scene in Nature conveys to the mind--more especially of any scene on which history or fiction has left its trace--must depend upon our sympathy with those associations which make up what may be called the spiritual character of the spot. If indifferent to those associations, we should see only hedgerows and ploughed land in the battle-field of Bannockburn; and the traveller would but look on a dreary waste, whether he stood amidst the piles of the Druid on Salisbury plain, or trod his bewildered way over the broad expanse on which the Chaldaean first learned to number the stars.

To the former editions of this tale was prefixed a poem on “The Ideal,” which had all the worst faults of the author’s earliest compositions in verse. The present poem (with the exception of a very few lines) has been entirely rewritten, and has at least the comparative merit of being less vague in the thought, and less unpolished in the diction, than that which it replaces.

CONTENTS.

THE IDEAL WORLD

THE PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE

CHAPTER I.
In which the Reader is Introduced to Queen Nymphalin

CHAPTER II.
The Lovers

CHAPTER III.
Feelings

CHAPTER IV.
The Maid of Malines

CHAPTER V.
Rotterdam.--The Character of the Dutch.--Their Resemblance to the
Germans.--A Dispute between Vane and Trevylyan, after the manner of the
ancient Novelists, as to which is preferable, the Life of Action, or the
Life of Repose.--Trevylyan’s Contrast between Literary Ambition and the
Ambition of Public Life

CHAPTER VI.
Gorcum.--The Tour of the Virtues: a Philosopher’s Tale

CHAPTER VII.
Cologne.--The Traces of the Roman Yoke.--The Church of St.
Maria.--Trevylyan’s Reflections on the Monastic Life.--The Tomb of the
Three Kings.--An Evening Excursion on the Rhine

CHAPTER VIII.
The Soul in Purgatory; or, Love Stronger than Death

CHAPTER IX.
The Scenery of the Rhine analogous to the German Literary Genius.--The
Drachenfels

CHAPTER X.
The Legend of Roland.--The Adventures of Nymphalin on the Island of
Nonnewerth.--Her Song.--The Decay of the Fairy-Faith in England

CHAPTER XI.
Wherein the Reader is made Spectator with the English Fairies of the
Scenes and Beings that are beneath the Earth

CHAPTER XII.
The Wooing of Master Fox

CHAPTER XIII.
The Tomb of a Father of Many Children

CHAPTER XIV.
The Fairy’s Cave, and the Fairy’s Wish

CHAPTER XV.
The Banks of the Rhine.--From the Drachenfels to Brohl.--An Incident that
suffices in this Tale for an Epoch

CHAPTER XVI.
Gertrude.--The Excursion to Hammerstein.--Thoughts

CHAPTER XVII.
Letter from Trevylyan to -----

CHAPTER XVIII.
Coblentz.--Excursion to the Mountains of Taunus; Roman Tower in the
Valley of Ehrenbreitstein.--Travel, its Pleasures estimated differently
by the Young and the Old.--The Student of Heidelberg: his Criticisms on
German Literature

CHAPTER XIX.
The Fallen Star; or, the History of a False Religion

CHAPTER XX.
Glenhausen.--The Power of Love in Sanctified Places.--A Portrait of
Frederick Barbarossa.--The Ambition of Men finds no adequate Sympathy in
Women

CHAPTER XXI.
View of Ehrenbreitstein.--A New Alarm in Gertrude’s Health.--Trarbach

CHAPTER XXII.
The Double Life.--Trevylyan’s Fate.--Sorrow the Parent of
Fame.--Niederlahnstein.--Dreams

CHAPTER XXIII.
The Life of Dreams

CHAPTER XXIV.
The Brothers

CHAPTER XXV.
The Immortality of the Soul.--A Common Incident not before Described.
--Trevylyan and Gertrude

CHAPTER XXVI.
In which the Reader will learn how the Fairies were received by the
Sovereigns of the Mines.--The Complaint of the Last of the Fauns.--The
Red Huntsman.--The Storm.--Death

CHAPTER XXVII.
Thurmberg.--A Storm upon the Rhine.--The Ruins of Rheinfels.--Peril
Unfelt by Love.--The Echo of the Lurlei-berg.--St. Goar.--Kaub,
Gutenfels, and Pfalzgrafenstein.--A certain Vastness of Mind in the First
Hermits.--The Scenery of the Rhine to Bacharach

CHAPTER XXVIII.
The Voyage to Bingen.--The Simple Incidents in this Tale Excused.--The
Situation and Character of Gertrude.--The Conversation of the Lovers in
the Tempest.--A Fact Contradicted.--Thoughts occasioned by a Madhouse
amongst the most Beautiful Landscapes of the Rhine

CHAPTER XXIX.
Ellfeld.--Mayence.--Heidelberg.--A Conversation between Vane and the
German Student.--The Ruins of the Castle of Heidelberg and its Solitary
Habitant

CHAPTER XXX.
No Part of the Earth really Solitary.--The Song of the Fairies.--The
Sacred Spot.--The Witch of the Evil Winds.--The Spell and the Duty of the
Fairies

CHAPTER XXXI.
Gertrude and Trevylyan, when the former is awakened to the Approach of
Death

CHAPTER XXXII.
A Spot to be Buried in