\ \/ . /\ \ ~"S ,. \ NX x SCENES AND THOUGHTS EUROPE. BY GEORGE H. CALVERT. NEW YOKK G. P. PUTNAM & CO., 10 PARK PLAGE. 1866. ENTERED according to Act of Congress, in the year 1852, oy GEORGE H. CALVERT, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. T. B SMITH, Sterectyper. 216 William PREFACE. CERTAIN classes of books are such favorites, that nearly the whole responsibility of publishing them should be borne by the public. The eagerness with which they are read is a premium on their production. The traveller in foreign lands finds the privacy of his letters and journal encroached upon while writing them, by the thought that they may be turned into " copy " for the printer. To so many others has this happened, that the possibility of its happening to himself cannot be kept out of his mind, spotting, it may be, the candor of his statements. Afterwards, when he Aas been at home long enough for the incidents of his jour- ney to grow by distance of time into reminiscences, what he wrote on the spot comes upon him with unexpected freshness and distinctness. Himself gets information and entertainment from the perusal of his notes, letters and diary. In this state of semi- self-complacency, the public urgently invites him to its broad tables invites him through the kindness wherewith it has loaded so many of his book-blazoned fellow-travellers. He begins to criticise his manuscript ; to shape it by excisions, by additions ; to calculate quantity ; to confer with a popular publisher, who is of course in close league with the public, until at last, he finds that his manuscript has been made away with and in its stead he has proof sheets. His private doings vi PREFACE. and seeings, and thinkings, and feelings, are about to cease to be private and to become public, and himself is to be thrust in every page personally before the world by the printers, notwithstanding his constant endeavor to merge his individuality, and, like modest editors, to multiply and disperse himself by means of the indefinite we. He is in the case to claim the favor that is shown at a feast to a guest especially summoned for the entertainment of the company. The host is the public, whose part it is to bear with his waywardness, to be indulgent towards his short- comings, to overlook his deficiencies. The author of the following little volume scarcely need add, that this claim of the author-guest is strong in proportion as he possesses the one virtue, the rare virtue, of brevity. March, 1846. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAG I THE RHINE BINGEN WIESBADEN 7 CHAPTER II. HEIDELBERG SUNSET PRUSSIAN SOLDIERY 11 CHAPTER III. THE NECKAR STUTTGARDT ULM NAPOLEON 14 CHAPTER IV. LAKE OF CONSTANCE SWITZERLAND LAKE OF THUN THE YUNGFRAU LAUTERBRUNNEN THE WENGERN ALP 19 CHAPTER V. MOUNTAINEERS ISOLATION PRACTICAL ART MAN'S AGENTS PRINCES AND PRIESTS SACERDOTAL DESPOTISM CATHOLICISM JESUITISM CONCLUSIONS 23 CHAPTER VI. Swiss REPUBLIC BADEN-BADEN THE NUN PEACE-CONGRESS IN FRANK- FORT 31 CONTENTS. CHAPTER VII. PAGE STAGE-COACH AND CAR CONSERVATISM GERMAN BURGHER AND POSTILION PRIMARY EDUCATION IN GERMANY ... . 37 CHAPTER VIII. MARBURGH MONUMENT RAILROAD TO CASSEL CASSEL TO DRESDEN . 42 CHAPTER IX. A DAY IN DRESDEN 47 CHAPTER X. WEIMAR CEMETERY SCHILLER'S STUDY GALL AND GOETHE CRANIUM OF SCHILLER WEIMAR'S HIGH INHABITANTS 55 CHAPTER XI. EISENACH THE WARTBURG LUTHER 64 CHAPTER XII. WHO FOLLOWED LlITHER RACES COLOR CHRISTIANITY PROTESTANTS AND CATHOLICS ENGLISH AND SPANISH AMERICA CONVERSIONS TO ROMANISM RELIGION . . . . . . . . .72 CHAPTER XIII. SUPPER-TABLE AT THE " HALF- MOON" IN EISENACH ANNADALE GRIMM'S TALES MIGRATION WESTWARD . . . . . . .88 CHAPTER XIV. GlESSEN LlEBIG MARIEXBERti PfilESNITZ THE RHINE . 95 CONTENTS. v CHAPTER XV. PAGE COLOGNE DUSSELDORF ARTISTS LEUTZE'S WASHINGTON FREILIGRATH 99 CHAPTER, XVI. CLEANLINESS BELGIAN PROSPERITY STATISTICS 104 CHAPTER XVII. FRANCE DEMOCRACY BONAPARTE Louis PHILLIPE Louis BONAPARTE . 110 CHAPTER XVIII. A DAY IN PARIS 119 CHAPTER XIX. A WALK IN THE LOUVRE 151 CHAPTER XX. FRAGMENTS 164 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. CHAPTER I. THE RHINE BINGEN WIESBADEN. To be taken up by a steamboat on the Rhine is always a lively incident. Out from her level path to the pier the strenuous gay boat glides with a grace that captivates the traveller, like the smiling welcome of a beautiful hostess. On the morning of Monday the 22d of July, 1850, there was a fog on the river, so that the Goethe, due at Boppart at half-past one, did not arrive from Coblenz till past two. Seated on the quay with cheerful company, we escaped the vacuum which, to the idle as well as to the busy, ever comes with waiting. To be ushered of a sudden, hungry, upon the scene of a repast that has been, with the fragments of good cheer strewn around, is not a happy beginning. When we got on board dinner was over. Under the awning, at the long, narrow tables, with tall, empty Rhenish bottles in the midst, a medley of nations were chatting German, French, English, with the volubility and complacency of satisfied appetites. Man is the creature of food. To be well fed is the first con- dition of thriving manhood. Let the others take rank as they may, this is the basis. The British tar was right, who, on seeing the beef destined for an American man-of-war, exclaimed, " D 'em, no wonder they fight so." Let Europe look to it. The twenty-five millions of the United States take in daily as much 8 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. nutriment as almost double the number of any other Christian feeders. Not that the Americans are overfed : the Europeans are fearfully underfed. John Bull is getting puzzled and alarmed at the pace at which Jonathan is " going ahead." Let him be- think him, that while to his millions roast beef is a tradition or a festival, to ours it or its equivalent is a daily smoking reality. Democracy and t( a good bellyful" go together. The which takes precedence as cause, we will not now stop to determine. Our well-being depends primarily upon what we eat. Nature ordains that man should feed well, plenteously, variously. To mortify the flesh, except to counterbalance a surfeit, is a sacrilege and an impertinence. Reflections like these come up, without forcing, from an empty stomach into the brain of a man waiting for his dinner. I had not talked three minutes with my neighbor at the table before he brought in California. Neither the resumption of pay- ment by defaulting States, nor the feats of the Mexican war, have raised us in European esteem so much as the possession of Cali- fornia. Virtue with the Romans meant courage, it now means cash. If men were not hypocrites they would call the Rothschilds the most virtuous family in Europe. California is in everybody's thought and mouth. Gold ! gold ! Protean potentate, flexible omnipotence, gentle conqueror what can it, what can it not ? By giving it, we get peace within and good-will without ; by lending it, gratitude and six per cent. ; by promising it, the service of the strong ; by spending it, profit or pleasure ; by hoarding it, we have the more of it, and by having it we are masters of most that the world prizes. He who speaks contemptuously of gold is a dissembler or a simpleton. The Rhine, fatted by the maternal glaciers of Switzerland, rushes down resistless, like a headlong herd of buffaloes on a prairie. But we drive steadily up, and heed not his torrent, taming his counter-flood to our will with the wizard hand of BINGEN. 9 Genius. How divine, to wrest from the great heart of Nature o pregnant secret, and endow the world with a new force, immeas- urable, infinite. The boats on the Rhine have good fitting names, but not one of them the best and fittest, the name of Fulton. I look up, and above the modern landscape, still cresting his vine- mantled hill, a stern old ruin paints his jagged outline on the sunny sky, and brags of the past, like some weather-beaten grand, papa. At the water's edge the blackened broken wall fences in part the compact little town, from whose midst rises the bulky church, triste, heavy, unsightly from without ; triste, chill, prosaic within ; where mechanical priests still drive their huck- stering trade, selling what they have not earned, and cannot possess without earning, fuddling the green imaginations with doctrinal strong-waters, compressing the expansive intellect, paralyzing the vivid soul, frightening to subject, enlarging them- selves to belittle the multitude, whom they darken where they should enlighten ; thus blaspheming while they affect to pray. The churches that arose under the inspiration of Beauty, the which it is a joy and an exaltation to behold, are as rare as are the spiritually-entitled priests, whom it is a privilege to hear. As you stand on the heights in its rear, Bingen smiles up to you, enwreathed with vineyards, Bacchanal Bingen. The precious, petted vines, just now in their pride of leaf and fresh luxuriance of new juicy shoots, press up to the walls, and over them into the town itself. Opposite, Rudesheim piles its fruitful terraces, and a little further is Geisenheim, and beyond Johanis- berg, inspiring, names, that stand high and highest on the scroll that the traveller pores over with daily renewed zest. All around is one green wine- promising abundance. The happiest eyes that from the deck of the boat gazed upon the warm, expanded landscape between Bingen and Biberich, were those of a German, naturalized in the United States, and revisit- ing, after ten years' absence, his native Germany. The man 1* 10 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. seemed to feel for the first, time, in all its fulness, the sweet strength of his new ties. The joy of rebeholding the land of his birth disclosed to him the intensity of his love for the -land of his adoption. Of what " we" had and did in America he spoke with the glow of one who had been raised to a new dignity. As watching the mellow shifting landscape, we talked of America, his countenance beamed with a compound delight. Through the present enjoyment shone the deeper satisfaction of thoughts that were busied with his new home. There, in democratic America, he had been reborn and rebaptized. He was conscious that he had become a larger, abler man than he could have been in Ger- many. He could not conceal his happiness, that he had ex- changed a home that was so dear to him for one that was still dearer. Wiesbaden owes its summer life to two poisons, its boiling mineral spring, and its ravenous roulette-tables. Early in the morning, round the " Koch-Brunnen" (boiling spring) a motley crowd of pallid dupes cool their smoking glasses to below the scalding point, credulously abiding the sulphurous self-infliction of repeated seething draughts. In the evening, a denser throng encircle in eager morbid silence the gaming-tables, where rich and poor, men and women, sick and well, fascinated by the gloat- ing eye of Mammon, throw their tens and thousands into the monster's maw. On one of the few days that we stopped at Wiesbaben, a rich banker lost in a single evening four thousand pounds sterling. I was told of another player whose eyebrows turned white in a few days after continued heavy losses. These crowded summer resorts represent the pursuit of pleasure under difficulties. SB CHAPTER II. HEIDELBERG SUXSET PRUSSIAN SOLDI ER Y. COULD a man be said to have travelled from Dan to Beersbeba, who had compassed the space between the two by steam ? Trav- elling implies effort, a concurrent locomotive activity, and a self, guidance on the part of the traveller. Once in a railroad car, he is passive, subordinated, without will or authority, with but even a tatter of personality left to him, in the shape of his ticket. He doesn't travel, he is transported, and is hurriedly thrust out on the platform of a station, just as though, instead of being a bag of electrified capillaries, he were but a bag of oats. In this way we came in a few hours from Wiesbaden to Heidelberg. The beautiful structures of man's making rise from the earth like a favored growth out of it. They are adopted by Nature. The sun rejoices to shine on them. The Castle of Heidelberg we reached in time to behold it by a sunset of American gorgeous- ness. The rosy atmosphere deepened the expression of the beau- tiful inward facade which stood again before us, ever young and fresh. Perennial youth is not a fable, or a futile longing: it is the gift of Genius to its handiwork, and is the touchstone of Art. But a work of genuine art is not only young itself, it makes you young. To revisit it, annihilates time. The intervening years are bridged over by a rainbow. Through time-rents and vacant casements the rich horizontal beams fell with a glow of celestial gladness. From the terrace, 12 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. the town beneath, with the valley and plain that stretched far away towards the burning west, lay in a blissful tranquillity. Alas ! only to the outward eye, bribed by the purple opulence of light. In this seeming Paradise the ubiquitous Serpent is at work, and here is neither bliss nor peace, but in their stead, unrest, misery. This magnificent leave-taking between Sun and Earth, this illuminated farewell, this broad parting look of love, which lights up the countenance of the responsive Earth with an intense flush of beauty, how many see it or share it, of the tens of thou- sands there below, on whom it falls ? In torpid imbecility, in exasperated conflict, they lie and writhe there, with senses closed to the eloquent heavenly message. This beauty, which is for them, they cannot claim ; this magnificence of nature, they are too poor to accept. The few who, by fortune or spiritual effort, possess freedom enough to enjoy, revel on such spectacles, and in them escape from the omnivorous evil around, their imagina- tions purged by this transfiguring light. Only for a moment they escape, for the ghastly realities can be but momentarily laid. Not as the evanescent demons of a dream do these come, but as the abiding terrors that leap upon the awakening criminal. So begirt are we by implacable hostilities ; self-doomed to have every joy shadowed by a sorrow, every love dogged by a hate, every pos- session haunted by a fear. Descending into the town, we came upon squads of Prussian soldiery. Whenever I meet these mechanized men, these soul- informed machines, these man-shaped irresponsibilities, I feel saddened, humiliated, insulted. Plainer than words they say to me, speak not, think not, act not. In their presence I am ut- terly quenched. I feel myself supplanted, and in my place a musket. In their speechless tramp there is somethimg terrific. This steeled silence controls my speech : this noiseless move- ment paralyzes my will. The European armies hang on the nations, a monstrous idle- STANDING ARMIES. 13 ness, a universal polluting scab. In them are condensed into one vast blight the seven plagues of Egypt. Like the " frogs," they " come upon the people, into their houses, their bed-chambers, their ovens, their kneading-troughs." How this picture fits them in all its traits. Look at those knots of lounging dirty soldiers : they swarm and buzz over the whole land, like the " lice and flies," only more befouling than these. Are they not " sores and blains" on the people, a moral and physical corruption, and a drain upon their strength? "The fire that ran along on the ground" what could realize it more vividly than the march of armies, smiting like the " hail" as they pass, both man and beast, and herb and tree, and eating like the " locusts" the fruits of the earth and every green thing. In the crowning " Plague of Dark- ness," the likeness is the most palpable. Standing armies are the very fomenters of darkness. Their office is to propagate night and make men sleep on. They are coarse, brutalizing Force, in contrast and conflict with the subtle, humanizing, liberating power of the intellect and heart of man. They are a million-mouthed extinguisher plied ceaselessly by the hand of Despotism, to crush out the light so fast as it jets up. They exist to enforce man's law against God's law, to be the jailers of thought, the execu- tioners of freedom. CHAPTER III. THE NECKAR STUTTGARDT ULM NAPOLEON. GOING up the valley of the Neckar, one runs over with im- practicable desires, and their tantalizing importunity is an index of the overflowing abundance of its beauties. How many sites that one longs to halt at for a day ; how many hills that one would climb, to compass a wider enjoyment. But we must be at Heilbron in time to dine, before taking the railroad to Stiitt- gardt. To no one is dinner a more important item in the day's account than to your traveller. Stiittgardt is a " Residenz." A " Residenz" is a German town, lifted into consequence from its being chosen by the sov- ereign of a petty dominion for the residence of his petty self and his petty court. In the body-politic of Germany, these reiterated capitals assume to be ganglia, or nervous centres, whence politi- cal vitality (so much as there may be) is diffused through the lit- tle circle upon each dependant. They are absorbents rather, and of a wen-like turgescence, seeing that they suck in, as well of spiritual force as of material substance, more than they impart. Here, in a small theatre, is performed, without interlude, the serio- comedy of Kingship, wherein Usurpation brazens it out by a pre- scription of impudence, and Servility is so low that it knows not its own lowness ; where the emptiest actors play often the highest parts ; and where the audience is terribly out at elbows, being forced to forego, most of them, even some of the necessaries of a NAPOLEON. 15 meagre household, to furnish the gilded trappings of the perform- ers. To an American, there is no more astonishing feature in European existence, than the patience of the people. Their for- bearance is to me a daily marvel. Railroads lay open the landscapes of a country ; they take to the valleys. At Geislingen, between Stiittgardt and Ulm, there is one of rare beauty, which, before you issue out of its upper end, narrows to a gorge, where the ascent achieved being of several hundred feet, the delight of the traveller is redoubled by admira- tion of man's mechanical art. With noiseless ease the heavy train rolls up the valley. True power is so unostentatious. I know not a clearer image, at once of might and beneficence than a silent shower, that slakes the thirst of half a continent. Wit- nessing it, one wonders at the large facility of Nature. A great idea or discovery, offspring of the prolific brain of man, works and fertilizes with a like breadth and bounty. Ulm is historical. It is one of the many Continental towns branded with notoriety by the fatal hand of Napoleon. It was here, in 1805, while Europe awaited with breathless intentness his descent upon England, that Napoleon, sped by his demoniacal in- stincts, having rapidly traversed France from Boulogne to Stras- burg, suddenly faced the astounded Austrians, cut in two their force, and by the capture of sixty thousand men at Ulm, opened the campaign, which in a few weeks was to end with the victory of Austerlitz. What grasping thoughts now swelled that vivid brain, making even the new diadem too small for it. As on the daily outspread chart the sure eye of the General tracked the marches of the ene- my, the Imperial glance ranged far beyond the lines of a cam- paign, and kindling with dark power, devoured land after land on the broad map of Europe. Between him and his hope, no majes- tic figure of Justice, no tearful countenance of Humanity uprose to rebuke his desires. The higher his eminence, the less he felt 16 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. the wants of his fellows. As he ascended, he put away from him more and more the nobler attributes of man's nature ; until, at the culmination of his path, he had become an icy ambition-mas- tered inhumanity, illuminated by intellect. He was now rapidly mounting. From the height gained by the victory at Ulm, his horizon widened of a sudden. Into the future he glared with exultation. The foes before him he felt were his ^prey. He strode on to clutch them. Munich he entered as a deliverer. Elated with conquest, exalted by Bavarian homage, flushed with ambitious visions, the new Emperor seized in his audacious thought a boundless sovereignty. A courier arrives from the west. What brings he ? A tremor seizes Napoleon's frame. His face is livid. His lurid eye rolls, as though tortured by the brain behind it. Fled are those gigantic visions. Far away from the Austrian are his thoughts. He writhes with anger and hate. In his hand is the report of the battle of Trafalgar. Napoleon has himself said, that but for the obstinate resistance of Sir Sidney Smith at Acre, the course of history had been changed. From the beginning to the end of his career he was baffled by the sturdy Islanders. This was part of his "Destiny." At Acre ; at the Nile ; at Trafalgar ; at Copenhagen, where their seizure of the Danish fleet, disconcerted again his plans, and poured gall into the brimming cup of his German triumphs ; in Spain, where he boasted that he would drive that Sepoy (Wei- lington) into the Atlantic. At the high tides of his affairs came ever this adverse potency to make an ebb in his fortunes. When his fortunes had waned, it was England that gave, at Waterloo, the finishing blow, and then bound the Imperial Upstart to a far rock in the tropical ocean, there to be slowly devoured by the vulture of his own sensations. This strength to master the giant, England drew from her free- dom. The Continental States were all Despotisms. One after the other they fell before democratized France. Napoleon, a ENGLAND, RUSSIA. 17 child of the Revolution, wielded its fiery vigor to crush the old tyrannies. His own new one he set up in their stead. He cheated France of her revolutionary earnings. In exchange for the gold of political rights, he gave her the gilt copper of military glory. Her people were again effaced before his will. She became a new despotism amid old despotisms. She was shorn of half her new strength. England was the only great nation where the People were for something in the State. Like Austria and Russia, she had made war against Napoleon for self-preservation ; but unlike them she never succumbed to the despot. But for her, they would have been his subordinate fellow-despots. In her the feeling of national independence was kept erect by the breath of freedom. Napoleon, who would that no one had a will but him- self, who hated any and every man's liberty, who strove to centre in himself all political vitality, who sucked the French nation dry of its liberal juices, felt that England, the only home for freedom in Europe, was his most dread foe. He struck at her with his whole might ; but her might, nurtured by liberty, was stronger than his, poisoned by slavery. Thus, his very power became his weakness. In his prosperity, he had absorbed into himself the life-blood of France : in his adversity, he found him- self the head of a corpse. The Emperor of Russia takes the place of Bonaparte in hatred of England. Russia would rule Europe through despotism. Na- tional rivalries are not barriers enough to check her. Austria as a State, has the most to dread from Russia ; and yet they are, through the paramount necessities of despotism, fast allies. In the struggle between regal governments, backed by auto- cratic Russia, and the governed, or more properly the mis- governed, led by France, aristocratic England must back the Peoples. And this, not alone ambitiously to thwart Russian ambition, but from the deep instincts of her national being, whose health and strength spring from the democratic element in her 18 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. Constitution. This makes her the political enemy of Russia and Austria, and at the same time gives her the force to withstand them. The intensity of life and the resources of a nation, are in proportion to the political participation of the people.* Therefore it is, that in Europe, England ranks first in wealth and power. Therefore, the United States, who left behind them in their nest the impure political principles, the monarchical and the aristo- cratic, and carried with them only the pure principle, the demo- cratic have grown with such astounding rapidity, that already, within three generations, in intrinsic resources they take the lead of England, their European mother, and who alone could have been their mother. In this conflict between Peoples and Princes, between Right and Wrong, between Light and Darkness, shall it become necessary for Democratic America to intervene, otherwise than with the daily influence of her principles and her example, let the strongest beware. By the having achieved a larger liberty than has yet been en- joyed, we march in the van of all the nations of the Earth. With us, humanity unfolds itself in broader, deeper strata. Liberty cannot but purify, enlarge, invigorate. It harbors an inevitable, an involuntary virtue. Even martial conquests it transmutes into beneficences. Thus, where we conquer, we emancipate. Our taking possession is not an enthralment, but a deliverance. We cannot subjugate, we must elevate. * So morbid is their condition, that in European States there are two di- vided constituents, the governing and the governed, the privileged and the despoiled. Only to the latter, that is, the laborers, the vile multitude, as M. Thiers calls them, is now applied the generic term, the People. With us there is but one constituent : we are all People. CHAPTER IV. LAKE OF CONSTANCE SWITZERLAND LAKE OF THUN THE YUNGFBAU LAUTERBRUNNEN THE WENGERN ALP. FROM Ulm the railroad carries you in a few hours to Fried- richshafen, on the Lake of Constance. This is one of the best routes for entering Switzerland. You come upon it suddenly. The transition from plain to mountain is across the Lake, whose level expanse magnifies the contrast. You get out of the cars and find yourself in the sublime presence. Just over the clear water, quite near, is the strange land, that leaves the earth and goes up into the air, a land built into the heavens. It looked like a discovery. When the sun shines, travelling in Switzerland is a perpetual festival. Mother Earth holds here a jubilee. She welcomes her children with the laughter of water-falls, the thunder of avalan- ches, the smiles of green valleys, the salutations of towering gran- ite, the gaze of snow-glistened peaks. You share the sublime joy that beams from her countenance. Your soul and senses expand to be in accord with her grandeurs. You are magnified by the magnificence around you. Nature here pours out her generic power in floods. She is in a mood of Titanic revelry. She leaps and shouts. The Earth is heaved up and down in exuberance of beauty, so inundated is matter by creative spirit. On the 18th of August, 1850, the clouds, that for days had darkened the Lake of Thun, and hidden all save the bases of the nearest mountains, lifted their compact curtain of sombre vapor, 20 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE let in light upon the Lake, turned up their broken masses to be dried and whitened by the sun, and re-opened to the grateful eye the far-shining snow-peaks of the Yungfrau. A good day, like a good deed, makes you forget a score of bad ones. At two the little steamboat, with its freight of cheerful tourists, issued from the port of Thun for its afternoon voyage to the east- ern end of the Lake. The deep water, like a deep heart, took in and gave back from its tranquil surface the grandeurs and beau- ties about it. The mountains and the vapory mimicries of them built in the air, painted themselves with the warm light into the depths of the Lake, breaking and beautifying with their images its liquid level. Before us, to the right, the far Blumlis peaks of eternal snow shone whitely among the clouds that they had gathered about them as a foil to their own whiteness. Looking back when half-way up the Lake, the Niessen, that rises from the water's edge a regular pyramid a mile high with a base equal to its height, presented a magnificent spectacle. To one side and round the head of the mountain, an isolated, dark mass of cloud clung with a mysterious, threatening look, as though, blackened by anger, it would wrestle with it as with a foe. The sunbeams behind, that seemed to issue up from the Earth, illuminating one edge of the black cloud, added to the splendor of the effect. A little later the cloud had risen, and shrouding just the peak of the mountain, gave it the aspect of a volcano in travail. The Lake being ten miles long, we landed in an hour, and soon had our faces turned southward towards the Valley of Lau- terbrunnen. From the hot plain of Interlachen, beyond and above the high angle formed by the interlapping green mountains of the narrow valley, the Yungfrau shone a dazzling front of white, clear and palpable, yet dreamy and unreal, from its unearthlike beauty. Of the snowy surface, the eye, from this point, takes in probably a mile square, a wall of solid white two miles up in the air, bounded below l>y the outline of mountains, in the inverted THE YUNGFRAU. 21 angle of which it seems to rest. It was like an abstraction, a sublimated essence of the Earth ; so calm, so pure, out of com- mon reach, up-piercing, predominating. Like a high abstraction too, infolding the condensed substance of truth which it cher- ishes and widely imparts, to the enrichment of many and distant minds those pre-eminent white peaks are inexhaustible fertiliz- ers, sending down from their heavenly elevation food for great rivers. In Nature there is no waste, nothing useless or idle. Everything works. Everything has its life, its purpose, its de- pendence interlocked with its power. The distant flats of Hol- land feel the power of this cold pinnacle of the Yungfrau, which helps to keep full the freighted channel of the Rhine ; while on the rivers that she feeds she is herself dependent, the impalpable exhalations from them, condensed in the upper air, furnishing the snow, which in her sublime strength she sends back in avalan- ches, that give to the torrents, born in her bosom, the volume and speed to hurry to the plain. On her summit the Creative Spirit is enthroned in unspeakable grandeur, and works thence with a ceaseless bounty. We were soon inclosed in the wonderful valley, whose sides are steep fir-clad mountains, or perpendicular planes of bare rock a quarter of a mile high. Down its stony path, the Lutchine, whose source is in the near glaciers, comes shouting fiercely, as it were the bearer of an angry message from the mountains. At the village of Lauterbrunnen, our resting-place for the night, is the brook which falls into the valley over a precipice nine hundred feet high, and thence, from being shivered into spray by the wind and the height of its fall, gets the name of Dustbrook (Staubach). Itself a wonder, it is a type of this val- ley of wonders. From the twilight below, we beheld, over the green mountains, the rosy sunset that bloomed for several min- utes on one of the snowy peaks. It was like a glimpse into a brighter world. 22 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. The next morning at half-past five, my young companion and myself, well mounted, were on our way up the Wengern Alp. The cool clear air gave us a good appetite for a bad breakfast at the inn near the top, which we reached at eight. Now we are face to face with the white giantess, between us a deep, black chasm. We stand a mile above the sea level, and even with us is the snow-line of the Yungfrau. The summit is more than two miles above the sea ; so that we have, right in front and above us, distant from one to two thousand yards, and seeming but a few hundred, a mass of vertical snow more than a mile high, and several in breadth. The eye strives to grow fa- miliar with these sublimities. Far below are all sounds of the common Earth. About us is a sublime silence, so wide and deep, that nothing small can break it ; common noises only scratch its surface ; it is broken by the avalanche. This solid, up-stretch- ing, white immensity ! This mountain-measured distance ! This unearthly silence ! This thunder- voice of the avalanche ! No- thing is ordinary and every-day-like but the sunshine. We heard and saw several avalanches. They look like a fall of water, and sound like a roar of thunder. Over the chasm an eagle is circling. Before noon we were again on the road to Griindelwald. As we advanced we had in view successively, and at times several or all together, the Yungfrau, the Monck, the Eiger, the Welterhorn, the Schreckhorn, and the Finster-Aarhorn the least of them more than 13,000 feet above the sea-level, and the Aarhorn, the highest of the sublime group, over 14,000. What company for a morning ride ! We passed the relics of a forest blasted by avalanches, and far down the descent a patch of snow. At Griindelwald we visited one of the glaciers a huge, creeping, Saurian monster, with its tail high up among the eternal snows, its body prostrate in a rocky gorge, and its head flattened upon the green valley, into which it was spouting turbid water. CHAPTER V. MOUNTAINEERS ISOLATION PRACTICAL ART MAN'S AGENTS PRINCES AND PRIESTS SACERDOTAL DESPOTISM CATHOLICISM JESUITISM CONCLUSIONS. MOUNTAINEERS cannot but be hardy. They have a constant fight with Nature to win a livelihood. The stern, fixed features of their abode limit their being, and give to it a one-sided inten- sity. From these causes they are courageous, independent, with a strong, fond clinging to their home. Witness the Swiss, the Caucasians, the Highlanders of Scotland. At the same time, from being isolated and confined, they are inflexible and station- ary. Dogged, persevering, tough, they are not expansive, not progressive. Isolation withers whether man or community. The first need for human growth is contact. The closer, wider, more varied the contact, the stronger, fuller, straighter will be the growth. Heeren says justly, that a great source of Phenician, Grecian, Roman development was the Mediterranean. Besides its practical facili- ties, a sea acts healthfully on the mind by motion and fluidity, inviting its capabilities, giving it a broad impulse. Here is an immensity, and yet to be compassed, a boundlessness, and yet to be explored. The Swiss want this ever-urgent opportunity of expansion. Their geographical completes their political isolation, their country being withal circumscribed. The very sublimities of their land are practically a hindrance, rather than a further- ance. These awful heights do not lift up, they press down the 24 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. people. These grand glaciers feed the Rhine and the Rhone and the Tessino, for the use of others. The centres of Swiss culture are away from proximity with avalanches and precipices, in the midst of warm arable fields, at Zurich and Geneva, near the frontiers of Germany and France. A rugged, ungenerous soil, inland, cannot rear a strong people. Scotland and New England could not have nurtured so thorough a breed, but for having at their door the land-embracing ocean. Through it, the whole world, open to their enterprise, is made tributary to their invention. For development, nations need the sea. The ancients had the Mediterranean. Since that the earth has grown larger, and nations with it. The Atlantic is now the Mediterranean. Soon all the oceans will form but one Mediter- ranean for all the continents a universal path for intercommuni- cation among all the peoples. With an ever deeper embrace Art encircles her elder sister, Nature ; the two co- working with man for his deliverance. The highest service of practical Art is, to bring men together. For this, greater instruments are needed in the modern enlarged field, than in the ancient confined one. Types, steam, electricity, these are the mighty modern instruments. They are at once the signs and means of elevation. They are cause after having been effect.* They denote moral as well as intellectual activity ; for in productive action there is always virtue. The most selfish workers carry forward undesignedly the common cause. * These great tools are but growths, elongations of the intellect, helps, which in its fulness it contrives for itself. All machines are but man-made fingers, legs, eyes, ears. Thence, the mind that has not swelled to the want of them, cannot use them. What are types or the telescope in the hands of the savage ' And thence, the degree of activity wherewith those tools are plied, marks the rank of nations in the scale of humanity. Pass from the heart of Russia to the heart of England, from the sterile animalism of Africa to the affluent humanity of America. In Africa, types and steam are unknown ; in Russia they are still in embryo ; in England and America, to arrest them for a day, were to arrest and confuse the great currents of life. THE MIND OF MAN. 26 Life is movement. On the earth man is the centre of life. For invigorating, multiplying, beautifying life, all Nature is at his service. At first he uses partially, grossly, passively, only her palpable simple qualities. Compare the tools, and the work done with them, of the savage, with the tools and work of the civilized. The subtler his agents, the larger is man's gain of power. Who can compute what he has gained by steam ? Enter a crowded capital by night, to learn what a centupled flood of light comes from an imponderable substance. What are battering- rams to gunpowder, whose terrible force is in the sudden libera- tion of a gas. Subtler than either, electricity, now our post- man, has a speed which cannot be calculated. Subtlest of all, master of them all, clutching their combined force in its grasp, out-shining the sun, out-running the electric flash, in resources infinite, in power immeasurable, is the mind of man ! the centre, summit and consummation of earthly being, the quintessence of things, the jewel of the world, the citadel of humanity, the final superlative in Nature, the boundless receptacle, the exhaustless source, whither and whence, backward and forward, flow the streams of the multiplex movement which we call the world, the mystic womb of thought, in whose vast depths lie the Past, the Present, the Future, the mighty generator, who on earth gen- erates all the deeds of men, and with man-like shapes peoples the infinite beyond, the dauntless seeker, who on the dread confines of being confronts the Creative Spirit of the Universe, and wres- tles with him for his secrets. This divine fire, who dare wish to quench or control it? The sacrilegious, who would handle this sublime essence as they do gas and steam, who are they 1 They are Princes and Priests. In the beginning, natural superiorities are readily acknowl- edged. By their sympathies not less than by their weaknesses, men yield to guidance. So long as it is guidance and not direc- 2 26 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. tion, so long as real superiority is the condition of leadership, the relation between guides and guided is healthy. But in the im- perfect social organizations, for the elastic play of natural ten- dencies, is soon substituted the rigid pressure of artificial arrange- ments. Men invent laws, instead of discovering them. Then humanity is turned awry. Then in place of impartiality and freedom and natural growth, there is in proportion to the rigidity of the conventional ordinances one-sidedness, compression, tyran- ny. The human-arbitrary takes place of the divine-free. Wil- lingly or not, men have abdicated their native sovereignty ; there is enforced submission ; they are governed, ruled, commanded. Their strength has passed away from them, to be centered in a caste, a class, a family. Above them, in permanent possession, absorbing their wills, controlling their thoughts, ordering their acts, are irresponsible masters, greedy monopolists of power. Scorning men, defying God, jealous, self-seeking, unsympathiz- ing, the first objects of the suspicion, envy, wrath, of these self- constituted, unhallowed leaders, are the men commissioned by Nature to be the guides of humanity. The mission of these is to enlighten, to exalt ; the aim of the former is to domineer over, to possess men. The inspired benefactors, the parents of new thoughts, the revealers and champions of great truths they who are endowed with genius to vivify and enlarge the minds of their fellows, when they have not ended a life of persecution by the cross or the fagot, have mostly lived unacknowledged to die un regretted. Two hundred years ago, a tribunal of Theologians sitting in Rome, pronounced the assertion, that the earth moves, to be not only heretical in religion, but absurd in philosophy ; and to the assertor applied the rack to extort a retraction of this truth, which his genius had revealed in its high communings with God. More presumptuous, more blasphemous than the angry denial of the movement of the earth, is the denial of the movement of the hu- SACERDOTAL DESPOTISM. 27 man mind. The same tribunal still sits in Rome, and to its offi- cials in all quarters of the globe proclaims, that in matters the most vital, his duty to God, his duty to his fellows, judgment shall not unfold itself in the brain of man, but be passively ac- cepted from this tribunal, the privileged fabricator of religious and moral laws. This inhuman, this godless proclamation, it en- deavors to enact by means adapted to the condition of each land ; by the gaol and gibbet in priest-rotten Italy, by gilded so- phistries, by feigned pliancy, by Judas-kisses in Protestant America. Of all despotism, the sacerdotal is the most desolating, both its end and means being the direct subjection of the mind. Irre- sponsible priests are worse enemies of mankind than princes. Hating each other as rival usurpers, with an unchristian hate, they have from necessity mostly leagued together to bemaster the intellect and soul ; believing, that he who could possess himself of the minds of men, would own the treasure of treasures. But the selfish are ever short-sighted. It is seldom given to thieves to enjoy their thefts. When priests have robbed their brother of that which makes him poor indeed, the wealth that he has lost enricheth not the robber ; for, by a deep law of Nature, which decrees the inviolability of the human soul, the moment the mind is invaded it ceases to be a treasure. The contiguous breath of the possessor bedims the splendor of the jewel. Freedom gives the only light by which it sparkles. In subjection, the mind pines and perishes. On itself must it be poised, out of itself draw its life, within itself must be its supreme tribunal. Else it has no spring for elevation, no self-renewing vitality, no self-rectifying force. It languishes, it sickens, it dwindles. But not alone. They who on the holy of holies lay impious hands, the Cains who kill their brothers' souls, they .dwindle with it ; they become little with the littleness they have caused. Look at Spain, at Portugal, at Italy, the People and their Priests. What an intellectual wil- 28 SCENES AND' THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. derness! What children are the People, what wet and dry nurses their pastors ! Rome being the centre of Catholicism, in the upper ranks of the Hierarchy there, an intellectual activity is maintained by the conflict thence directed against Protestantism in the freer coun- tries of Christendom. No correspondent moral activity is visible. On the contrary, being predominant, absolute, irresponsible, liv- ing in isolated grandeur high above the people, the upper clergy in Rome is further than almost any class of men in the world out of the circle of the conditions needed for the growth and nourish- ment of Christian morality, of self-sacrifice and brotherly love. Hence the Prelates in Rome have ever been noted for rapacity, arrogance, ambition, sensuality ; alternating these indulgences, on occasion, as at the present moment, with vindictiveness and cruelty. Follow the Catholic priests to England, or, better still, to the United States. Here, without losing the vices inherent in such a theocracy, they become morally as well as intellectually invigo- rated in the light kindled by Protestantism, to the which they are so unwillingly exposed. They do their best to put out this hated light, feeling that they can never be at home in it, that in the end it must be fatal to them. In Protestant countries priests of Rome always cut somewhat the figure of owls by day. What intellectual force it has, Catholicism owes to Protestant- ism. By Protestantism I do not here mean merely Calvinism, or Anglicanism, or Lutheranism, or any other sectarian ism, but the imperishable spirit of mental freedom which has in all ages burst up through the crust of ecclesiastical usurpation the perennial protest of the soul against spiritual authority the continuous as- sertion of the rights of conscience. This spirit is the moral life of humanity. The Romish Church, striving ever to crush it, has found in this strife a permanent stimulant to intellectual exertion. In the midst of Protestant churches themselves, this same spirit, struggling ever for absolute liberty, rises upi?om a9eeper deep, protesting against priestly dominion, however tempered. Its sub- limest manifestation was against Catholicism through the great Luther, under whose mighty blows the Papacy staggered. In the throes of its despair it gave birth to Jesuitism, which is the offspring of the collision between light and darkness, and which gives evidence in its nature of its monstrous parentage, exhibiting the cold glitter which intellectual light makes on a ground of moral gloom. Jesuitism is henceforth the indispensable armor of Popery. With the advancement of culture the clerical is overtopped by the literary and scientific classes. A vivifying book rarely comes now-a-days from the clergy, Protestant or Catholic. Creeds are not the nurseries of originality. Original minds on their side are prone to interrogate creeds with very little reverence ; and a heart of deep sympathies solves all theological questions in the flame of its love and justice. On the other hand, priests, while arrogating to themselves a spiritual superiority, reflect the moral condition of the population around them. Like man, like master. Thus the priest of Mex- ico fights cocks, and the Cardinal in Rome, and the Anglican Bishop in London play whist. The successors of St. John and St. Peter fighting cocks and playing whist, while Christendom is agasp for want of a vivifying faith ! In all things how effects and causes interplay one upon the other. Some conclusions : That a man should never give permanent or irresponsible power over himself to any other man. That as men are wisely wary of trusting their purses or their persons to others' keeping, much more should they refuse to trust their souls. That to do so, is to abdicate one's manhood. That Nature designs the mind to be developed, not moulded, 30 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. That irresponsible rulers, priestly or princely, must in the main be knaves ; for irresponsibility indurates the conscience. That force is the law of evil, that is, no law, but like all evil, a breach of law. Let us return for a moment to Switzerland, whence we have been floated away on this current of thoughts, which are, how- ever, pertinent to her condition ; for, republic as she is these five hundred years, she too has had her princes and her priests. CHAPTER VI. SWISS REPUBLIC BADEN-BADEN THE NUN PEACE-CONGRESS IN FRANKFORT. FOR the most part in Switzerland, political power was from the first absorbed and retained by a few families. In the greater number of Cantons a majority of the inhabitants had no voice in public affairs. Those in which the whole people participated did not contain one tenth of the entire population. Switzerland, strange as this may sound, has learned democracy from France. Until the French revolutions, especially those of -30 and -48, what between the predominance of aristocratic families or of Ro- man priests, Switzerland was as little progressive as any of her neighbors. She was a Republic with aristocratic institutions a Republic of the bastard Venetian species. But the democratic element was there and recognized, only not developed. Thence, the popular impulse, communicated by France to Europe, if not caught up with more alacrity by the Swiss than by the Germans, found in them a mould fitted to give it at once practical shape. In the coming conflict between Democracy and Despotism, Swit- zerland is destined probably to play a part worthy of her origin. After having been a short time in Switzerland, to be out of it is like resting after work. For the mind that has been weeks on the stretch, heaved up into mountains and furrowed with gorges, the subsiding back to its normal level is a repose. Joy as it was to get into Switzerland, to get out again brought its pleasure. So 32 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. it ever is with healthy enjoyments ; they end naturally, leaving the spirit refreshed for the soberer tenor of its way. From Basle steam hurried us in a few hours to Baden-Ba- den, whose crowd of motley visitors was waging, as at most " fash- ionable watering-places," an hourly battle with ennui. By suc- cessive assaults of dressing, driving, dining, dancing, gossipping, gambling, strolling, they manage to keep Time under ; so that even the professional idler, whose sprightliest companion is his cigar, finds that he can beat " the enemy" day after day, without the trouble of a thought to help him. Then, a Congress of plot- ters against freedom would hardly have assembled more Kings, and Queens, and princes, the very presence of whom, in such abundance, so magnetized to most of the company the common air, that simple breathing was a continuous intoxication, enough of itself to make life delicious. It would be unjust not to partic- ularize, as the chief attraction of Baden-Baden, its green, varied valleys, and the wooded hills that make them. By help of these, a few choice friends and books, with the privilege which need not be despised of cutting at will into the above mentioned arti- ficial stores, a summer might be spent in Baden-Baden in a way that would make one desire to repeat it. From midst the town flights of steps led me, on a Sunday morning, up a steep height, about two hundred feet, to the palace of the Grand Duke. Begilded and bedamasked rooms, empty of paintings or sculpture, were all that there was to see, so I soon passed from the palace to the terrace in front of it. A landscape looks best on Sunday. With the repose of man Nature sympathizes, and in the inward stillness, imparted uncon- sciously to every spirit by the general calm, outward beauty is more faithfully imaged. From the landscape my mind was soon withdrawn, to an object beneath me. Glancing over the terrace-railing almost into the chimneys of the houses below, my eye fell on a female figure in THE NUN. 33 black, pacing round a small garden enclosed by high walls. From the privileged spot where I stood, the walls were no de- fence, at least against masculine vision. The garden was that of a convent, and the figure walking in it was a nun, upon whose privacy I was thus involuntarily intruding. Never once raising her eyes from her book, she walked round and round the enclo- sure in the Sabbath stillness. But what to her was this weekly rest ? She is herself an incessant sabbath, her existence is a con- tinuous stillness. She has set herself apart from her fellows; she would no more know their work-day doings ; she is a volun- tary somnambulist, sleeping while awake ; she walks on the earth a flesh-and- blood phantom. What a fountain of life and love is there dried up ! To cease to be a woman ! The warm currents that gush from a woman's heart, all turned back upon their source ! What an agony ! And yet, could my eyes, that follow the quiet nun in her circumscribed walk, see through her prison into the street behind it, there they might, perchance at this very moment, fall on a sister going freely whither she listeth, and yet, enclosed within a circle more circumscribed a thousand fold than any that stones can build, the circle built by public reprobation. Not with downcast lids doth she walk, but with a bold stare that would out-look the scorn she awaits. No Sabbath stillness is for her, her life is a continuous orgie. No cold phantom is she, she has smothered her soul in its flesh. Not arrested and stag- nant are the currents of her woman's heart, infected at their spring, they flow foul and fast. Not apart has she set herself from her fellows, she is thrust out from among them. Her mother knows her no more, nor her father, nor her brother, nor her sister. In exchange for the joys of daughter, wife, mother, woman, she has shame and lust. Great God ! What a tragedy she is. To her agony all that the poor nun has suffered is beati- tude. Follow now, in your thought, the two back to their child- hood, their sweet chirping innocence. Two dewy buds are they, 34 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. exhaling from their folded hearts a richer perfume with each ma- turing month, two beaming cherubs, that have left their wings behind them, eager to bless and to be blest, and with power to replume themselves from the joys and bounties of an earthly life. In a few short years what a distortion ! The one is a withered, fruitless, branchless stem ; the other, an unsexed monster, whose touch is poisonous. Can such things be, and men still smile and make merry ? To many of its members, society is a Saturn that eats his children a fiend, that scourges men out of their hu- manity, and then mocks at their fall. A nun, like a suicide, is a reproach to Christianity : a harlot is a judgment on civilization. In the last days of August, we found ourselves again in Frankfort, at the heels of the Peace-Congress. Arms can't free a people ; ideas only can do that. But at cer- tain stages of the liberating work of ideas, arms have to clear the track for their further march. Otherwise they would be first stopt, and then stifled by gross obstructions. Arms may thus be the instruments of ideas, impure instruments, but the best, on occasions, that an impure world affords. Threatened with drown- ing, would you be nice in the means of extrication ? Freedom has always used arms ; without them she would have been crushed. If honest men should all turn members of the non- resistance society, the rogues would soon have the upper hand. What can a Peace-Congress do against wolves ? Put your preachings into practice in face of a bear. Without compunction or a moment's theoretical cogitation, the meekest zealot of you all, would meet Bruin's hug with the thrust of a bowie-knife. There may be a time when even a bowie-knife can do good ser- vice. But a bear is a beast forever inaccessible to thought, which is the parent of freedom and peace. What if you were set upon by a foot-pad, who first wounds you with a pistol-shot, and then rushes forward to rob you, or to finish you with a poignard ? PEACE-CONGRESS. 35 Could you keep your finger off a trigger, or, if you had none, help cursing your stars that you were unarmed. There is but one way of dealing with a murderous assailant. " He who slays with the sword, he shall perish by the sword." The text clearly applies to him, and not to you. Upon him you have fulfilled it, and there an end. The two millions of soldiers that garrison the continent of Europe, are but legalized foot-pads. They hold bayonets to the throats of the nations, while kings and popes, and their minions, rob their souls and their pockets, and their lives. It is brute force, compelling the mind in its lowest as well as its highest needs, crippling it in all its means. Freedom of speaking, of printing, of meeting, of going and coming, of buying, of selling, of associating, all are curtailed, hampered, or suppressed. Every right of manhood is maimed or crushed. Against such violence what defence is there 1 Incalculably more effective arms than pistols, even against pistols themselves, are thoughts when you can use them. And at this moment, in the face of artillery and the hangman, they are used with an efficiency that startles the gods of gunpowder. Were the conflict confined to civilized Europe, it might be brought to an end without bloodshed. Vienna and Berlin, and even bemitred Rome would soon capitulate to the fiery assaults of all-conquering thought. But semi-barbarous Russia, who fears freedom and proscribes ideas, puts herself at the head of the brute cause, and gives it her million of muskets. Here is a bear that, under pretence of love for order, would hug freedom to death. And shall Freedom, in this strait, not thrust the sword, not pull the trigger ? Let the Peace-Congress address itself to the Emperor of Rus- sia. He is the chief, nay, the only obstacle to peace in Europe. With an unchristian infidelity the Emperor of Russia puts his trust in the despotism of muskets. With his brute force he up- 36 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. holds the regal governments of the Continent, the which, being dead, can only be upheld by brute force. At Paris and Rome, as well as at Vienna and Berlin, Russian policy rules. But for her, Freedom, the nursery of peace, would be already founded on the ruins of Austrian despotism, and her cause be triumphant in Germany. The logical place for the next Peace-Congress is Warsaw. The Despots have divined, that peace can only be the fruit of freedom. Thence they regard the Peace-Congress as a Freedom- Congress. It is a Freedom-Congress. But can it devise how, in the actual array of hostilities, freedom can triumph without a temporary alliance with gunpowder ? Most of its members are, I suspect, of one mind with three American delegates whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Switzerland on their way to Frankfort, whose tongues warmed at the talk of a universal armed uprising of the Peoples against the tyrants that degrade and despoil them. CHAPTER VII. STAGE-COACH AND CAR CONSERVATISM GERMAN BURGHER AND POSTILION PRIMARY EDUCATION IN GERMANY. AMONG agreeable contrasts cannot be classed that between a steam-driven car and a German stage-coach. On the railroad from Frankfort to Cassel, there was, in 1850, between Friedberg and Giessen, a chasm which we were three hours in getting over by coach. What a good thing is a McAdam road ! It deserves the point of admiration. Wherewith then shall we point the sen- tence that tells of the railroad ? To pass from the one to the other is like poverty after affluence, like a good whistler after Jenny Lind, like beer after Burgundy. How we grapple to us what we once get possession of. Who would give up the railroad or the newspaper ? Ask the freshman to go back to the school- room. A progress takes hold of us like the growing fibre of our frame : it enfolds our life. To go back, is against nature. Our lot is, to go forward. Let Conservatives bethink them. Our moral life is as slug- gish as the "Royal Mail." Only twenty years ago the mail's ten miles an hour was very fast. 'Twas the most that turnpike and coach could do. Who then talked of twenty miles the hour, not to speak of fifty, was a dangerous innovator or an impractical Utopian. The ten miles is the most can be got out of the old Church and the old State. We want a new Church, as different from the old one as iron and steam are from horse-flesh and gran- 88 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. ite. Who dare say " Halt/' to the moral man ? Why should I doubt that we may have a belief so inspiring, that our social con- dition shall, like locomotive speed, rise from ten to fifty. Are we only mechanical ? Can we reform roads and not institutions ? Are no more discoveries to be made in the upper sphere ? Have we read to the end of the book of life, that we turn back the leaves to the first chapters again ? In the presence of miraculous man, and the mighty Providence above him, who dare define his possibilities ? Ye think yourselves believers, and ye believe only in the dead and the dying. The Barbarian believes naught but tradition and what he sees. Ye bandage your vision with his limitations : ye forego the right of reason, which bids ye look be- fore as well as after. Talk to the Barbarian of the railroad and the electric telegraph ; he will laugh at you, if he does not frown. Talk we to you of methods whereby evil shall be exorcised and good made to prevail like sunshine, of harmonies that shall con- vert human labor into a life-long joy, of conditions that shall ful- fil your daily prayer, " thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," ye laugh or frown. Ye civilized bar- barians, ye believing skeptics, upon ye be this triple malediction ; ye shall sail without the compass, travel without steam, and read never a printed page. By my side on the top of the coach, was an average sample of a German Burgher, stout and kindly, intelligent and acces- sible. It did me good to hear him curse all kings, particularly his own of Prussia. Not that as a democrat I need to be forti- fied in my political creed by this verbal pulling down of monar- chies ; or, that as a man I take delight in hearing a fellow-man, even a king, abused. It was as evidence, such as I have had much of in the past few weeks, of the emancipation of German feeling from the thraldom of regal prestige, that I listened with pleasure to my neighbor's king-cursing fluency. No " divinity doth hedge a king" any more in Germany. In the Frankfort PROLETARIANS. 89 Assembly, two years ago, an orator said bitingly of his country- men, " A German without a prince, is like a dog without a mas- ter." He could not and would not have said it, if it had not already begun to cease to be true. In these two years the Ger- mans have not made progress simply, they have made a leap. They have, in opinions and convictions, leapt clean out of prince- dom. One is astonished to hear of and to witness the so rapid and general conversion to democracy. Principles of political liberty and resolves to put them into act, are widely spread and deeply rooted. Among this thoughtful, reading people, the ground was well prepared, and the princes by their perfidy are doing almost better for the growing crop, than could have done those who are to reap. There will be a plentiful harvest ; if it be gathered in blood, the blood be on the heads of the traitors who, having been again trusted, would again rule with the old tyran- nies. In two years what a revulsion ! After the popular victory in 1848, how forgiving, hopeful, magnanimous, trustful, was the whole German race : in 1850, how full of wrath, bitterness, menace. There will be no forgiveness of the past the next time. In the postilion, who from the back of the near wheel-horse conducted our cumbrous vehicle, I had a sample of a German proletarian. Proletarian means a producer of men. The day- laborers of Europe are esteemed, first as workers, who can be bought at about twenty-five cents a day, to do all agricultural and manufacturing work ; and secondly, as breeders, whose function is to keep full the supply of workers. Hence this appellation, which denotes that the masses here are valued as muscle-endowed animals, not as soul-endowed men. Our postilion had been twenty-six years on the road, passing over these same few leagues almost daily ; and yet, of the small neighboring towns or villages, so near that the spires and highest buildings were visible, he. knew the name of scarcely one. His countryman by my side, poured upon him from our elevation, volleys of bitter ridicule. 40 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. The postilion was annoyed, not at being found ignorant, but that he was expected to know such things. In his naivete there was wisdom, as there so often is. His feeling was an unconscious protestation, that personally he was blameless for his ignorance. They are the blamable, who, under pretext of governing, convert a man into a carriage-conducting machine* Much praise has been bestowed on the schools, and on the uni- versality of primary instruction in Germany. For the compara- tive excellence of methods and the breadth of their application, let the praise stand. Good schooling is never a bad thing. Nevertheless, when for twelve hours out of the twenty-four, men are turned into beasts of burden, and can then barely earn the coarsest food and raiment, how much does schooling profit them ? Many of the German peasants are found in mature life, to have forgotten how to read and write. What time or occasion have they to use these high instruments ? To men so belabored, so disfranchised, schooling is almost a mockery. This postilion can read and write. Had he been never taught a letter, but been al- lowed a voice in naming the mayor of his village, and the parson of his church, I warrant he would have known the names of every hamlet we passed ; and this in itself, barren knowledge, would have been the attendant and sign of a productive knowl- edge of men and things, denoting that his understanding had been cultivated by animating contacts, and his heart enlarged by sym- pathies beyond the petty routine of the postilion's duties. Let him vote for his burgomaster, his pastor, and his tax-imposer, and no fear but he will take care that his children be provided with the humanizing media of intercourse, reading, writing, and arith- metic ; and no fear either that they will forget them from want of practice. The mere introduction of the penny-post in England, led tens of thousands of poor people to learn to read and write, just to avail themselves of the facility thus opened of communi- cating with their distant relatives. Open to the laborer the fa- SCHOOLS. 41 cility and necessity of communicating with his neighbors and fellow-men, his political relatives, on their common interests and rights; give him as man the practical education acquired by a manly share in public affairs, and he will be sure to provide, whether by public or private means, for the school-instruction of the boy. But this elevation of the proletarian is the reverse of what European governments desire. CHAPTER VIII. MAKBUKQ MONUMENT KAILKOAD TO CASSEL CASSEL TO DRESDEN. To the traveller on this route, who travels to see, I recommend half a day at Marburg. A prettier site for a small inland town, he will seldom meet with. It stands on the sides of a hill that projects like a sudden promontory into the valley of the Lahn, and whose summit is crowned with the old castle of the Land- graves of Hesse, round which the town gradually built itself in the middle ages. At the outer base of the promontory is the church, pure and simple Gothic, six hundred years old, with double towers, remarkable for its symmetry. The station is a quarter of a mile distant from the town. As you sweep up to it on the curve of the railroad, the castle on the top of the hill, the old town on its sides, the graceful church at its foot, with a valley running back from its northern slope, make a picture so capti- vating, that you rejoice to learn that this is Marburg, where you are to stop. On our way up to the castle, we passed the houses wheroin had lodged Luther and Zwingli, when they met here to discuss transubstantiation. They of course parted without agreeing. To settle a theological question is as easy as to pin a ghost to the wall : they are both so purely within the province of the imagi- nation. In the castle is a chapel, in which Luther preached. I mounted into the plain oaken pulpit, whence the thunderer had launched his church-rending lightnings. INNKEEPER AT MARBURG. 43 The town, partly in shadow, clustered round the protecting castle, the twin, tapering spires, and the soft valley of the Lahn, seen up and down, combine to give a view from the terrace which, in the afternoon especially, is enchanting. As we gazed, a train from Cassel came down the valley. After rushing noisily past in front of us, it shot away in silence to the south, under its white canopy of mist, like a cloud before a hurricane. To " take mine ease in mine inn," the inn must be good. The inn is the traveller's home, and he can't feel at home in it unless it be cleanly and kindly. Mine host and hostess are the wayfarer's father and mother. When he alights they receive him with welcome, good cheer, and a clean bed. These he will find at the " Golden Knight" (zum Goklnen Hitter), in Marburg. Mine host was a good specimen of the German Boniface of a small town portly, thriving, communicative, familiar but re- spectful, a good judge of meat and drink, and sharing fairly with his guests the fruits of his judgment. Twice a year he goes to the Rhine to replenish his cellar. While there he keeps his pal- ate susceptible by abstinence, and surrenders himself to the gus- tative joy which the Rhine offers to the discriminating connois- seur, not until after he has made his purchases. He warmed towards me as he perceived that I drank in with relish his dis- course about the localities where Liebfrauenmilch, Oppenheimer, Niersteiner ripen. As compliment to his publican qualities, and as index of his thrift, he owns a garden on the skirt of the town. His landlordship were incomplete without these few acres within an easy walk of his door, where he rears fruit and esculents, and has a daily pastime for his latter years. I am bound to men- tion, for the truthfulness of my sketch, that at parting the next afternoon, he played me a very unfatherly trick, having after we had paid his bill and set out on foot to the station manifested a hard-hearted indifference whether our luggage arrived in time or not. Had I met him within the ten minutes of excruciating 44 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. suspense caused by his coldness, I should have had difficulty in refraining from paying his unparental insensibility with very un- filial phrases. After exploring the pretty valley that runs back and brings a tributary brook of most limpid water to the Lahn, we ascended a hill across it directly opposite to the town, wishing to get a view from this point, and attracted too by a monument on the summit of the hill. The view is a reward for the ascent to any one who does not find in the walk itself its own reward ; and the monu- ment I would not have missed seeing had the road to it been rug- ged and steep. I defy all the millions of guessers in the United States to divine why this monument was erected. No American imagination could in such a search come near enough to have even " warm" cried to it, as in the game of Hunt the Slipper. After looking round at the panoramic landscape, I turned towards the monu- ment, an obelisk twelve or fourteen feet high, built of freestone. When I had read the inscription. I read it over again. Yes, there could be no mis-reading ; the words were plain, well-cut Ger- man. I am counting perhaps much too largely upon my charac- ter for veracity, in hoping that it will be able to withstand the shock of the reader's incredulity, when I tell him that their pur- port was as follows. A princess of Hesse-Cassel had one fine day walked up to this spot, and enjoyed the views thence. To com- memorate this fact this monument of stone was built by some grateful inhabitants of Marburg. And these good Germans would at times take airs over us on account of African slavery ! I must in justice add that it is a monument of the past, having been raised about thirty years ago. At every station of the road to Cassel on Sunday after- noon, crowds of peasants were assembled to see the steam-wonder. At the snorting monster, fire-souled, and wheel-pawed, they stared as the aboriginal Americans did at the vessels of Columbus. But MOMENTUM OF HUMANITY. 45 not like them with wild wonderment and a dim presentient fear. The white civilizee is within reach of the beneficence of machin- ery for the yellow savage it is an unsparing destroyer, which mows him down the faster in proportion as itself is the stronger. At the flying " locomotive," whose wings, laden with a hundred men, outfly the eagle, the sun-browned sons and daughters of 'abor gazed with an intelligent admiration, as half conscious that t is a harbinger of better days. For the emancipation of man all oowers must co-work j the intellect with its logic and its inven- ions, the soul with its expansive wants, nature with the revela- .ions which she so gladly makes to penetrative genius. Industry must join hands with Christianity, Science with Sentiment, Intel- ligence with Faith. The momentum of humanity must have been already incalculably accelerated by the unfolding of its ca- pacities, ere it can swing itself into a wider orbit. This momen- tum it now has ; and as the train, burthened with its scores of tons, swept with fabulous speed past turretted burgs and stately castles in ruin, it was a symbol of the present eager movement among the foremost nations of Christendom, striding forward with new energy and new hope, leaving behind the old walls and tow- ers of defence, and careering into a sphere of untrammelled free- dom and unvexed enjoyment. At Cassel, the population was all out of doors, in the great streets and in the public walks, as is the continental custom of a Sunday afternoon, the peasantry from the neighborhood flocking in to diversify and thicken the crowd. Puppets, mountebanks, and monkeys were entertaining full-grown men and women. The pleasure of the lower classes in these childish spectacles, is re- flected in the upper, who delight to see them enjoy such coarse emptinesses, it being a sign that they are themselves empty and childish, and therefore governable. To be easily governed is, in the eyes of governors, the highest virtue of a people. I am happy to bear witness that this virtue is here growing weaker and 46 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. weaker. A manly consciousness is awakened in the laborious masses. Thence the multiplication of soldiers, who are the con- stables of tyrants. On these musket-shouldering drones, the people now scowl with feelings anything but childlike. Between Cassel and Dresden lie five or six degrees of longi- tude, and the territories of half a dozen sovereign states. This space, dotted with towns of historic name, has on the map a for- midable look, Cassel lying in the west, and Dresden in the east of Germany. But the wishing-cap of Gothic mythology finds its realization in a railroad ticket. Wish yourself three hundred miles off, and by having in your pocket a printed slip of paper, your wish is in a twinkling fulfilled, even in Germany, where the fiery " Locomotive" has to curb his impatience, and adapt his flight somewhat to the proverbial Teutonic slowness. CHAPTER IX. A DAY IN DRESDEN. DRESDEN, the capital of Saxony, contains 90,000 inhabitants; its collections of works of art have gained for it the title of " the German Florence;" its two unequal parts are united by a broad substantial stone bridge over the Elbe, " built with money raised by the sale of dispensations from the Pope for eating butter and eggs during Lent," &c. 88 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. back or standing. Only, this representation of Washington will not be so high and complete as the other. POWERS left America with a goodly cargo of busts in plaister, carrying them to Italy, there to execute them in marble. With these he opened his studio in Florence. The first that were finished he sent to the public exhibition. All eyes were at once drawn to them. Here was something totally new. Here was a completeness of imitation, a fidelity to nature never before ap- proached, never aimed at by modern sculptors. Even the most delicate blood-vessels, the finest wrinkles, were traceable in the clear marble. Nor did the effect of the whole seem to be there- by marred. People knew not whether their astonishment ought to pass into admiration or censure. The Italian sculptors gath- ered themselves up. This man's Art and theirs were irreconcile- able. They felt, we must crush him, or he will overmaster us. They crowded the next exhibition with their best busts. Powers too was there. In the Tuscan capital, a young American sculptor not merely contended publicly with a host of artists for superiority ; he defied to mortal combat the Italian school in this department of Art as taught by Canova. It was a conflict not for victory solely, but for life. Where would be the triumph, was not long doubtful. Powers' busts grew more and more upon the public eye. The longer they were looked at, the stronger they grew. By the light they shed upon the art of sculpture, the deficiencies of their rivals became for the first time fully apparent. Connoisseurs discovered, that they had hitherto been content with what was flat and lifeless. The principle of the academic style of bust-making, thus sud- denly supplanted, was, to merge the minor details into the larger traits, and to attempt to elevate, to idealize was the phrase, the subject, by preserving only the general form and outline. The result was, that busts were mostly faithless and insipid, their insipidity being generally in proportion to their unfaithfulness. POWERS. Powers made evident, that the finest traits contribute to the indi- viduality of character ; that the slightest divergence from the particularities of form vitiates the expression ; that the only good basis of a bust is the closest adherence to the material form, as^ well in detail as in gross. So much for the groundwork. Hand in hand with this physical fidelity, must go the vital fidelity ; that is, a power to seize life as it plays on that beautiful marvel, the human countenance. From the depth of the soul cornea the expression on the countenance ; only from the depth of a soul flooded with sensibility, can come the power to reproduce this tremulous mystical surface. Nay, this susceptibility is needed for the achievement of the physical fidelity itself. Without it, the lines harden and stiffen under the most acute and precise per- ception. Finally, to this union of accuracy in copying the very mould and shape of the features, with sympathy for the various life that animates them, must be added the sense of the Beauti- ful. This is the decisive gift, that turns the other rich faculties into endowments for Art. The Beautiful underlies the roughest as well as the fairest products of Nature. It is the seed of creation. In all living things this seed bears fruit. In the embryo of each there is a potentiality, so to speak, to be beautiful, not entirely fulfilled in the most perfect developments, not entirely defaced in the most deformed. This spirit of beauty, resplendent at times to the dullest senses, lambent or latent in all living forms, pervading creation, this spirit is the vitality of the Artist. In it he has his being. His inward life is a perpetual yearning for the Beauti- ful ; his outward, an endeavor to grasp and embody its forms ; his happiness is, to minister in its service; his ecstasy, the glimpses he is vouchsafed of its divine splendors. As sympathy with the motions of life is needed, to copy physi- cal forms, so this loving intimacy with the Beautiful is needed, to refine and to guide this sympathy. In short, a lively sense of 90 SCENES AND THOUGH1S IN EUROPE. the Beautiful is requisite, not merely to produce out of the mind an ideal head, an act so seldom really performed, but likewise, to reproduce a living head. He who would copy a countenance must know it. To know a human face, what a multiplex pro- found knowledge ! Not enough is it, to have a shrewd discrimi- nating eye for forms ; not enough, to peer beneath the surface through the shifting expression. To get knowledge of any in- dividual thing, we must start with a general standard. You cannot judge of a man's height, unless you bring with you a generic idea of measures and a notion of manly stature. So of a man's mind, though the process be so much deeper, and so too of his head and face. A preconceived idea of the human countenance in its fullest capability of form and expression, an aboriginal standard must illuminate the vision that aims to take in a complete image of any face. What mind can compass this deep-lying idea, except one made piercing, transparent, " vision- ary," by an intense inborn love of beauty ? Each face is, so to speak, an offshoot from a type ; each is a partial incarnation of an ideal, all ideals springing of course out of the domain of Beauty. It is only by being able to go back to this ideal, which stands again closely linked with the one, final, primeval, perfect idea of the human countenance ; it is only by thus mastering, I may say, the original possibility of each face, that you can fully discern its characteristics, its essential difference from other faces learn why it is as it is and not otherwise. A vivid, elec- tric sensibility to the Beautiful, in active co-operation with the other powers, is the penetrating, magnifying telescope wherewith alone the vision is carried into the primitive fields of being. Thus is every face, even the most mis-shapen, brought within the circle of the Beautiful; cannot be fully seen, cannot be thoroughly known, until it is brought within that circle. Under the homeliest, commonest countenance, there is an inner lamp of unrevealed beauty, casting up at times into the features POWERS. 91 gleams of its light. These translucent moments, its truest and best states, the Artist must seize, in order to effect a full like- ness. This is the genuine idealisation. And these states he cannot even perceive without the subtle expansive sense of the Beautiful. The unexampled excellence of Powers's busts was soon ac- knowledged. In this department of Art, the Italian sculptors yielded to him the first place. Thorwaldsen, on coming, astonished, out of Powers's studio, declared that he could not make such busts, that there were none superior to them, ancient or modern. The cry now rose, that Powers could make busts, he could copy nature, but nothing more. This false inference sprang not wholly from jealousy, but in part from the false school of Art long dominant in Italy, where students were taught to study the antique more than Nature ; whereby the perceptions and mental powers became so weakened and sophisticated, that it was no longer felt, what a task, how high and intense it is, truly and vitally to copy Nature. Conceive what is a human counte- nance, the most wonderful work of God that our eyes can come close to ! What an harmonious blending of diverse forms, what a compact constellation of beaming features, what concentrated life, what power, what variety, what unfathomable significance, in that jewelled crown of the body, that transparent earthly tem- ple of the soul ! Adequately to represent this masterpiece of divine workmanship, what a deed ! He who can reproduce it in its full life and truth and character, must be a great Artist ; that is, a re-maker, in a degree, of God's works, a poet, a creator. To copy Nature, forsooth ; the words are very simple : the act is one of deep insight, of noble labor, anything but a superficial work. He who performs it well, co-works with Nature, his mind exalted the while by poetic fervor. Hence none but Artists of the first class have left good portraits. The faculty for the Ideal is then indispensable to the execution 92 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. of a good bust. It is the key-stone which binds the other endow- ments into the beautiful arch, whereby works of human hands grow stronger with time. The basis in plastic Art is always, unerring accuracy in rendering physical forms. Sense of beauty and correctness of drawing, are thus the two extremes of the Artist's means. Between them, and needed to link them in effective union, is fullness of sensibility, to sympathize with and seize the expression of, all the passions and emotions of the soul. These, with imitative talent and manual dexterity, embrace the powers needed as well in the portrait- artist as in him whose sub- jects are inventions. I speak of the plastic Artist without distin- guishing the sculptor from the painter. The difference between them is in the inequality of their endowment with the faculties of form and color ; the sculptor requiring a severer eye for form than the painter, and dispensing with an eye for color. The mo- ment the Artist begins, by the working of his imagination, to compose a subject, then comes into active play the Reason ; the faculty whereby, in every department of work, prosaic as well as poetic, the mind selects and adapts, the faculty whereby the means within reach are picked and arranged for the completest attainment of the end in view. This, it seems to me, is the only power needed in larger measure for the artist who composes groups, than for him who would make the best portrait. It is the completeness of his endowment with all the requisites for sculpture, that stamps Powers with greatness. In the circle of his genial gifts there is no chasm. They are compactly knit together. To his ends they all co-operate smoothly, through that marvellous instrument, the human hand. Such is the precision of his eye, that he who exacts of himself the most faithful con- formity to Nature's measurements, never needs the help of com- passes to attain it. Such his sense of the Beautiful, that he does justice to the most beautiful countenance, and has given a new grace even to draperies. Such his sympathy with life, that with POWERS equal ease he seizes the expressions of all kinds of physiognomies, so that you cannot say that he does men better than women, old better than young ; and hereby, in conjunction with his mimetic talent, he imparts such an elastic look to his marble flesh, that the spiritual essence, wherewith all Nature's living forms are vivified, may be imagined to stream from his finger-ends while he works. Such his manual dexterity, that in twenty hours he can turn out one of these great busts in its unparalleled completeness. And as if nothing should be wanting which could serve in his calling, Nature has bestowed on him a talent, I may call it a genius, for Mechanics, which, had it not been overborne by superior facul- ties, destined to lift him up into the highest field of human labor, would have gained for him a name and living as an inventive and practical machinist. It is now the pliant servant of nobler qualities ; helping him to modelling tools, to facilities and secu- rities for the elevation or removal of clay models, and to other contrivances in the economy of his studio. Powers had not been long established in Florence, ere he set about his first statue, the Eve. This work was planned before he came to Italy. Almost precisely as it stands now embodied in attitude and character, he described to me in America the image he had there evolved in his mind. The figure is above the ave- rage height, undraped and nearly erect. The only support it has from without is a broken stem by the side of the left leg, repre- senting the tree whence the fruit has just been plucked. On this leg is thrown the weight, the other being slightly bent at the knee. The head, inclined to the right, follows the eyes, which are fixed upon the apple, held in the right hand, raised to the level of the breast. The left arm hangs by the side, the left hand holding a twig of the tree with two apples and leaves attached. The hair, parted in the middle and thrown behind the ears, falls in a com- pact mass on the back. Round the outer edge of the circular plot of grass and flowers, which is the sole basis of the statue, 94 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. coils the serpent, who rears his head within a few inches of the right leg, looking up towards the face of Eve. Here, without a fold of drapery to weaken or conceal any of Nature's lineaments, is the mature figure of a woman ; nearly erect, the posture most favorable to beauty and perfectness of proportion ; the body unconsciously arrested in this upright atti- tude by the mind's intentness ; while the deed over which she broods, without disturbing the complete bodily repose, gives occu- pation to each hand and arm, throwing thereby more life as well into them as into the whole figure. Thus intent and tranquil, she stands within the coil of the serpent, whose smooth but fiery folds and crest depict animal fierceness, and contrast deeply with the female humanity above him. Both for moral and physical effect the best moment is chosen, the awful pause between obedi- ence and disobedience. Her fresh feet pressing the flowers of Eden, Eve, still in her innocent nakedness, is fascinated against her purer will, the mother and type of mankind, within whose bosom is ever waging the conflict between good and evil. What fullness combined with what simplicity in this conception, which bespeaks the richest resources of imagination under guidance of the severest purity of taste. How shall I describe the execution ? Knowledge and skill far exceeding mine, would fall short of transmitting through worda an image of this marvel of beauty. The most that the pen can do before a master-piece of the pencil or chisel, is, to give a vivid impression of the effect it makes on the beholder, and a faint one of the master-piece itself. In executing his Eve, Powers has had twenty or thirty models. From one he took an ankle, from another a shoulder, a fragment from the flank of a third ; and so on throughout, extracting his own preconceived image piece by piece out of Nature. From ru?\ a labor even a good Artist would recoil, baffled, disheartened, but a supreme genius does Nature accord such familiar!- I POWERS. 95 ty. With instantaneous discernment his eyes detect where she comes short, and where her subtle spirit of beauty has wrought itself out. He seizes each scrap of perfection, rejects all the rest, and so, out of a score of models, re-compounds one of Na- ture's own originals. Such is the movement on the surface, that the statue has the look of having been wrought from within out- ward. With such truth is rendered the flexible expression im- parted to flesh and blood by the vital workings, that the great internal processes might be inferred from such an exterior. The organs of animal life are at play within that elastic trunk j there is smooth pulsation beneath that healthy rotundity of limb. The capacity and wonderful nature of the human form fill the mind as you gaze at this union of force, lightness, and buoyant grace. In spite of that smooth feminine roundness of mould, such visible power and springiness are in the frame and limbs, that, though now so still, the figure makes you think of Eve as bounding over shrub and rivulet, a dazzling picture of joyous beauty. Then, again, as the eye passes up to the countenance, with its dim ex- pression of mingled thought and emotion, the current of feeling changes, and the human mind, with its wondrous endowments, absorbs for awhile the beholder. But mark ; it is by the power of Beauty that he is wrought upon. Through this, humanity stands ennobled before him. By this, the human form and capa- bility are dilated. This awakens delight, breeds suggestion. By means of this, the effect of the statue is full, various ; its signifi- cance infinite. Take away its beauty, and all is a blank. The statue ceases to be. The head of Eve is a new head. As it is beautiful, it is Gre- cian ; but it recalls no Greek model. Nor Venus, nor Juno, nor Niobe, can claim that she helped to nurse it. Not back to any known form does it carry the mind ; it summons it to compass a new one. It is a fresh emanation from the deep bosom of Art. In form and expression, in feature and contour, in the blending of 96 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. beauties into a radiant unity, it is a new Ideal, as pure as it is inexhaustible. Lightly it springs into its place from the bosom and shoulders. These flow into the trunk and arms, and these again into the lower limbs, with such graceful strength, that the wholeness of the work is the idea that establishes itself among the first upon the mind of the beholder. To the hollow of a foot, to the nail of a finger, every part is finished with the most labo- rious minuteness. Yet, nowhere hardness. From her scattered stores of beauty Nature supplied the details ; with an infallible eye, the Artist culled them, and transferred them with a hand whose firm precision was ever guided by grace. The Natural and the Ideal here blend into one act, their essences interfused for the unfolding of a full blossom of beauty. What terms are left to speak of the Venus of the Tribune ? None stronger are needed than .such as are used in speaking of the Eve of Powers. Let who will cry presumption at him who places them side by side. Art always in the end vindicates her favorite children. The Eve need fear comparison with none of them. The clay model of Eve being finished, Powers's mind is busy with another work, also a single female figure, which he will set about immediately. It will represent a modern Greek captive, exposed in the slave-market of Constantinople. Like Eve, the figure will be without drapery ; like her, it will not fail to be a model of female beauty, though in frame, size, age, character and expression, altogether different. CLEVINGER has been here but a short time, and is zealously at work upon the crowd of busts which he brought with him from America, and several that he has modelled in Florence. Among the former is a fine one of Allston ; among the latter, one of Louis Bonaparte, ex-king of Holland, so admirably executed, that it awakens regret that there is none of equal fidelity extant of the Emperor Napoleon. BROWN AND KELLOGG. 97 Two American painters are established here, who give promise of reaching a high excellence ; BROWN and KELLOGG. Brown devotes himself chiefly to landscapes, for which he displays rare aptitude. He has just finished a view of Florence, admirable in all respects, but chiefly for the truth with which it gives the rich hue of the Italian evening sky. An evidence of his gifts for this department, is the style in which he copies Claude Lorraine, repro- ducing the character, tone, and magical coloring of that great Artist with a fidelity that might impose upon a practised connois- seur. Kellogg, by the progress he has made since he came to Flo- rence, has shown that his ability is equal to his zeal. With an empty purse, and a spirit devoted to Art, he landed in Italy eighteen months since. In that period his genius, through indus- try and judicious study, has developed itself in a way that gives assurance that he will reach a high rank. I will conclude this Florentine chapter with a few chips of " fragments" picked up in that division, which the despotism of nerves over the intellectual as well as the physical man, obliged me to put last in my scale of occupations and pastimes. Among my disappointments are Petrarca and Macchiavelli. I am disappointed in Petrarca that his sonnets are written more out of the head than the heart. They sparkle with poetic fancy, but do not throb with sensibility. In his pleasant little autobiographical memoir, Petrarca ascribes to his love for Laura all that he was and did. For twenty years, it was the breath of mental life to him. Happily he was not of an energetic, glowing nature (his portrait might be taken for that of a woman), or his love would have consumed instead of animating him, or, worse still, would have had perhaps a quick close in success. I am sorry to con. elude, that he was very far from being the most miserable man of his generation. Macchiavelli is not the searching thinker that one unacquainted 98 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. with his works might infer him to be, from his so long sustained reputation. He is a vigorous, accomplished writer ; a clear, nervous narrator. Subtlety in the discussion of points of political expediency, seems to me his highest power. Princes, nobles, and populace, are to him the ultimate elements of humanity. The deep relations of man to man, and of man to God, do not come vividly within his view. He has no thorough insight into the moral resources of man ; he does not transpierce the surface of human selfishness. There is in him no ray of divine illumina- tion, whereby he might discern the absolute. But it is unjust to reproach him with a want which he has in common with most of his brother historians. A just reproach against him is, that in his History he flattered the Medici, and has handed down a misrepresentation of them. From his pages no one would learn that the first Medici were usurpers, successful demagogues. Sismondi and Alfieri counter- act the false report of Macchiavelli, and disclose the long-con- cealed ugliness of these vulgar tyrants. Describing the state of Italy at the death of Lorenzo, and the loss of independence with that of liberty, Sismondi says : " Florence, mastered for three gene- rations by the family of Medici, depraved by their licentiousness, made venal by their wealth, had learnt from them to fear and to obey." The hollowness and worthlessness of Pope Leo X., his prodigality, dissoluteness, and incapacity, are exposed by Sismon- di, who describes as follows Pope Clement VII., another Medici, and the one to whom Macchiavelli, in a fulsome address, dedicated his History of Florence : " Under the pontificate of Leo X., his cousin, when times were prosperous, he acquired the reputation of ability ; but when he came to confront distress not brought about by himself, then his unskilfulness in matters of finance and government, his sordid avarice, his pusillanimity and imprudence, his sudden resolutions and prolonged indecision, rendered him nc* less odious than ridiculous." Sismondi relates, that Lorenzo de THE MEDICI. 99 Medici, being on his death-bed, sent for Savonarola, the celebrated preacher of ecclesiastical reform and devotee to liberty, who had hitherto refused to see Lorenzo, or to show him any respect. Nevertheless, Lorenzo, moved by the fame of Savonarola's elo- quence and sanctity, desired to receive absolution from him. Sa- vonarola did not refuse to him consolations and exhortations, but declared, that absolve him from his sins he could not, unless he gave proof of penitence by repairing as much as in him lay his errors. That he must pardon his enemies, make restitution of his ill-gotten wealth, and restore to his country its liberty. - Lorenzo, not consenting, was denied absolution, and died, says Sismondi, in the possession of despotic power, " mori in possesso della tiran- nide." Lorenzo dei Medici, whose portrait in the gallery here is that of an intellectual sensualist, whose largesses, pecuniary liberali- ties and sensual sumptuosities won for him the equivocal title of " il magnifico," Lorenzo and Leo X. have the fame of being the munificent patrons of Poets and Artists. All the fame they deserve on this score is, that they had taste to appreciate the men of merit who lived in their day. These men were the last off- spring of the antecedent energetic times of liberty. By the re- ceding waves of freedom they had been left upon the barren shore of despotism. What had Leo X. to do with the forming of the emi- nent writers and artists who adorned the age to which the servil- ity of men has given his name ? Patrons of Poets and Artists ! A curse upon patronage. Let it be bestowed upon upholsterers and barbers. Poets and Artists don't want patronage ; what they do want is sympathy. Patronage is narrow, is blind ; its eyes are egotistical ; it is prone to uphold mere talent, mediocrity. Sym- pathy is expansive, keen-sighted, and discerns and confirms genius. Leonardo da Vinci, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, men too great to be patronised, were the children of republican Florence. By 100 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. Democracy, turbulent Democracy, were they nursed into heroic stature. When the basis of her government was the sovereignty of the people, when nobles had to put away their nobility to be admitted to a share in the administration of affairs, then it was that the bosom of Florence was fertile and wide enough to give birth to the men who are the chief glory of modern Italy. Com- pare Florence as she then was, vigorous, manly, erect, produc- tive, with her abject, effeminate, barren state under the Medici. Or contrast the genius generated by democratic Florence with that of aristocratic Venice. Alfieri tells, that he betook himself to writing, because in his miserable age and land he had no scope for action ; and that he remained single because he would not be a breeder of slaves. He utters the despair, to passionate tears, which he felt, when young and deeply moved by the traits of greatness related by Plutarch, to find himself in times and in a country where no great thing could be either said or acted. The feelings here im- plied are the breath of his dramas. In them, a clear nervous understanding gives rapid utterance to wrath, pride, and impetu- ous passion. Though great within his sphere, his nature was not ample and complex enough for the highest tragedy. In his com- position there was too much of passion and too little of high emo- tion. Fully to feel and perceive the awful and pathetic in human conjunctions, a deep fund of sentiment is needed. A condensed tale of passion is not of itself a Tragedy. To dark feelings, re- solves, deeds, emotion must give breadth, and depth, and relief. Passion furnishes crimes, but cannot furnish the kind and degree of horror which should accompany their commission. To give Tragedy the grand compass and sublime significance whereof it is susceptible, it is not enough, that through the storm is visible the majestic figure of Justice : the blackest clouds must be fringed with the light of Hope and Pity ; while through them Religion gives vistas into the Infinite, Beauty keeping watch to repel what ALFIER1. 101 is partial or deformed. In Alfieri, these great gifts are not com- mensurate with his power of intellect and passion. Hence, like the French classic dramatists, he is obliged to bind his personages into too narrow a circle. They have not enough of moral liberty. They are not swayed merely, they are tyrannized over by the passions. Hence, they want elasticity and color. They are like hard engravings. Alfieri does not cut deep into character : he gives a clean out- line, but broad flat surfaces without finish ' of parts. It is this throbbing movement in details, which imparts buoyancy and expression. Wanting it, Alfieri is mostly hard. The effect of the whole is imposing, but does not invite or bear close inspection. Hence, though he is clear and rapid, and tells a story vividly, his tragedies are not life-like. In Alfieri there is vigorous rhetoric, sustained vivacity, fervent passion; but no depth of sentiment, no play of a fleet rejoicing imagination, nothing " visionary," and none of the " golden cadence of poe- try." But his heart was full of nobleness. He was a proud, lofty man, severe, but truth-loving and scornful of littleness. He delighted to depict characters that are manly and energetic. He makes them wrathful against tyranny, hardy, urgent for freedom, reclaiming with burning words the lost rights of man, protesting fiercely against oppression. There is in Alfieri a stern virility that contrasts strongly with Italian effeminateness. An indignant frown sits ever on his brow, as if rebuking the passivity of his countrymen. His verse is swollen with wrath. It has the clan- gor of a trumpet that would shame the soft piping of flutes. Above Alfieri, far above him and all other Italian greatness, solitary in the earliness of his rise, ere the modern mind had worked itself open, and still as solitary amidst the after splendors of Italy's fruitfulness, is Dante. Take away any other great Poet or Artist, and in the broad shining rampart wherewith genius has beautified and fortified Italy, there would be a mournful 102 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. chasm. Take away Dante, and you level the Citadel itself, under whose shelter the whole compact cincture has grown into strength and beauty. Three hundred years before Shakspeare, in 1265, was Dante born. His social position secured to him the best schooling. He was taught and eagerly learnt all the crude knowledge of his day. Through the precocious susceptibility of the poetic tempe- rament, he was in love at the age of nine years. This love, as will be with such natures, was wrought into his heart, expanding his young being with beautiful visions and hopes, and making tuneful the poetry within him. It endured with his life, and spi- ritualized his latest inspirations. Soberly he afterwards married another, and was the father of a numerous family. In the stir- ring days of Guelfs and Ghibellines, he became a public leader, made a campaign, was for a while one of the chief magistrates of Florence, her ambassador abroad more than once, and at the age of thirty-six closed his public career in the common Florentine way at that period, namely, by exile. Refusing to be recalled on condition of unmanly concessions, he never again saw his home. For twenty years he was an impoverished, wandering exile, and in his fifty-sixth year breathed his last at Ravenna. But Dante's life is his poem. Therein is the spirit of the mighty man incarnated. The life after earthly death is his theme. What a mould for the thoughts and sympathies of a poet, and what a poet, to fill all the chambers of such a mould ! Man's whole na- ture claims interpretation ; his powers, wants, vices, aspirations, basenesses, grandeurs. The imagination of semi-Christian Italy had strained itself to bring before the sensuous mind of the South an image of the future home of the soul. The supermundane thoughts, fears, hopes of his time, Dante condensed into one vast picture a picture cut as upon adamant with diamond. To en- rich Hell, and Purgatory, and Paradise, he coined his own soul. His very body became transfigured, purged of its flesh, by the DANTE 103 intensity of fiery thought. Gaunt, pale, stern, rapt, his " vi- sionary" eyes glaring under his deep furrowed brow, as he walked the streets of Verona, he heard people whisper, " That is he who has been down into Hell." Down into the depths of his fervent nature he had been, and kept himself lean by brooding over his passions, emotions, hopes, and transmuting the essence of them into everlasting song. Conceive the statuesque grand imagination of Michael Angelo united to the vivid homely particularity of Defoe, making pic- tures out of materials drawn from a heart whose rapturous sym- pathies ranged with Orphean power through the whole gamut of human feeling, from the blackest hate up to the brightest love, and you will understand what is meant by the term Dantesque. In the epitaph for himself, written by Dante and inscribed on his tomb at Ravenna, he says : " I have sung, while traversing them, the abode of God, Phlegethon and the foul pits." Traversing must be taken literally. Dante almost believed that he had tra- versed them, and so does his reader too, such is the control the Poet gains over the reader through his burning intensity and gra- phic picturesqueness. Like the mark of the fierce jagged light- ning upon the black night-cloud are some of his touches, as awful, as fearfully distinct, but not as momentary. In the face of the contrary judgment of such critics as Shelley and Carlyle, I concur in the common opinion, which gives pre- ference to the Inferno over the Purgatorio and Paradiso. Dante's rich nature included the highest and lowest in humanity. With the pure, the calm, the tender, the ethereal, his sympathy was as lively as with the turbulent, the passionate, the gross. But the 'hot contentions of the time, and especially their effect upon him- self, through them an outcast and proud mendicant, forced the latter upon his heart as its unavoidable familiars. All about and within him were plots, ambitions, wraths, chagrins, jealousies, miseries. The times and his own distresses darkened his mood 104 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. to the lurid hue of Hell. Moreover, the happiness of Heaven, the rewards of the spirit, its empyreal joys, can be but faintly pictured by visual corporeal images, the only ones the earthly poet possesses. The thwarted imagination loses itself in a vague, dazzling, golden mist. On the contrary, the trials and agonies of the spirit in Purgatory and Hell, are by such images suitably, forcibly, definitely set forth. The sufferings of the wicked while in the flesh are thereby typified. And this suggests to me, that one bent, as many are, upon detecting Allegory in Dante, might regard the whole poem as one grand Allegory, wherein, under the guise of a picture of the future world, the poet has represented the effect of the feelings in this ; the pangs, for example, of the murderer and glutton in Hell, being but a portraiture, poetically colored, of the actual torments on earth of those who commit murder and gluttony. Finally, in this there is evidence, and is it not conclusive ? of the superiority of the Book of Hell, that in that Book occur the two most celebrated passages in the poem, passages, in which with unsurpassed felicity of diction and versification, the pathetic and terrible are rounded by the spirit of Poetry into pictures, where simplicity, expression, beauty, com- bine to produce effects unrivalled in this kind in the pages of Lite- rature. I refer of course to the stories of Francesca and Ugolino. Dante's work is untranslateable. Not merely because the style, form, and rhythm of every great Poem, being the incarna- tion of inspired thought, you cannot but lacerate the thought in disembodying it ; but because, moreover, much of the elements of its body, the words namely in which the spirit made itself visible, have passed away. To get a faithful English transcript of the great Florentine, we should need a diction of the fourteenth century, moulded by a more fiery and potent genius than Chaucer. Not the thoughts solely, as in every true poem, are so often virgin thoughts ; the words, too, many of them, are virgin words. Their freshness and unworn vigor are there alone in Dante's Italian. DANTE. Of the modern intellectual movement, Dante was the majestic Herald. In his poem, are the mysterious shadows, the glow, the fragrance, the young life-promising splendors of the dawn. The broad day has its strength and its blessings ; but it can give only a faint image of the glories of its birth. The bitter woes of Dante, hard and bitter to the shortening of his life, cannot but give a pang to the reader whom his genius ha? exalted and delighted. He was a life-long sufferer. Early dis- appointed in love ; not blest, it would seem, in his marriage ; foiled as a statesman ; misjudged and relentlessly proscribed by the Florentines, upon whom from the pits of Hell his wrath wreaked itself in a damning line, calling them, " Gente avara, invida, e superba;" a homeless wanderer ; a dependant at courts where, though honored, he could not be valued ; obliged to consort there with buffoons and parasites, he whose great heart was full of honor, and nobleness, and tenderness ; and at last, all his political plans and hopes baffled, closing his mournful days far, far away from home and kin, wasted, sorrow-stricken, broken-hearted. Most sharp, most cruel were his woes. Yet to them perhaps we owe his poem. Had he not been discomfited and exiled, who can say that the mood or the leisure would have been found for such poetry 1 His vicissitudes and woes were the soil to feed and ripen his conceptions. They steeped him in dark experiences, intensified his passions, enriching the imagination that was tasked to people Hell and Purgatory ; while from his own pains he turned with keener joy and lightened pen to the beatitudes of Heaven. But for his sorrows, in his soul would not have been kindled so fierce a fire. Out of the seething gloom of his sublime heart shot forth forked lightnings which still glow, a perennial illumination, to the eyes of men, a beauty, a marvel, a terror. Poor indeed he was in purse ; but what wealth had he not in his bosom ! True, he was a father parted from his children, a proud warm man, eating the bread of cold strangers ; but had he not his genius and 6* 106 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. its bounding offspring for company, and would not a day of such heavenly labor as his outweigh a month, aye, a year of crushed pride ? What though by the world he was misused, received from it little, his own even wrested from him ; was he not the giver, the conscious giver, to the world of riches fineless ? Not six men, since men were, have been blest with such a power of giving. PISA, February, 1843. Here is a wide chasm of time. A goodly space of ground, too, has been gone over. Without much stretching, a volume might be put in between this date and the last. That trouble, however, shall be spared the writer and the reader. Let us see whether in a few pages we cannot whisk ourselves through Switzerland into Germany, and back to Italy. Starting northward from Florence, in the afternoon of June 7th, 1842, in less than an hour we were among the Appenines, over whose barren, billowy surface we rolled on a good road to within a few miles of Bologna, where we arrived the next day at three. The Italian intellect is quick at expedients. With freedom the Italians would be eminently practical. Free people are always practical ; hence, the superiority of the English and Americans in the useful and commodious. From necessity and self-defence, the acute Italians are adepts in the art of deception. Hypocrisy they are taught by their masters, temporal and spiritual ; a sub- stitution of the semblance for the substance being the foundation of civil and religious rule in Italy. The fictions of the Catholic Church are mostly unsuitable to the Arts. Martyrs and emaciated anchorites cannot be subjected to the laws of beauty. The Greek divinities were incarnations of powers, qualities, truths, which, though not the deepest, were shaped by beauty. The Romish saints, with their miracles and macerations, want capability of beauty together with dignity and LEONARDO DA VINCI 107 respectability, and are thence doubly unfit for the handling of Art. The highest genius cannot make them thoroughly effective. In the gallery of Bologna one is often repelled even from the best execution by the offensiveness of the subject. The geniality of Art is shown as much in the selection of subjects as in the treat- ment. One tires of heavy virgins that would be thought to float, and old men on their knees to them, trying to look extasles ; and more still, of the distortions of mental and bodily agony. Leaving Bologna at noon, by Modena and Reggio, we arrived at Parma after dusk, through a country, level, fertile and well tilled. Along the road vines hung in graceful festoons from tree to tree, and peasants were gathering mulberry leaves for silk- worms. After running to the Gallery, just to have a momentary look at the two famous Correggios, we started from Parma at nine in the morning, and coming on rapidly through Piacenza and Lodi, entered Milan just before dark. By the grandeur of the Cathedral we were even more moved than when we first beheld it. Then we explored its populous roof; now we descended into its vaults, peopled too with statues and busts, some of silver to the value of more than a million of francs. About the tomb of St. Charles Borromeo there is gold and silver to the amount of four million francs. Guard it well, Priests. 'Twill be a treasure on that day, which will come, when this people's deep, smothered cry shall end at last in a tri- umphant shout. From the Cathedral we betook ourselves to the barn-like place, which contains Leonardo da Vinci's fresco of the Last Supper. Here is the inspiration of genius. To produce that head of Jesus, what a conception must have been long nursed in the great painter's brain, and with what intense force of will must he have embodied it, to stamp upon human features such pre-eminence, such benignity, such majesty ! With this, the vigor and variety in the superb heads of the apostles, the grace 108 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. and spirit of the grouping, bring the scene before you with such speaking presence, that one sees how pictures can strengthen and keep alive religious belief. By its vivid reality, its beauty and character, this sublime picture proclaims the truth of what it sets forth, and takes the mind captive with its power and its fascination. As we approached Como, we enjoyed much the contact again with mountains. After an early breakfast, June 12th, we were on board the steamboat at seven, to explore the beautiful lake. At nine, about midway, we landed, in order to see and have the views from the Villas Serbelloni, Melzi, and Somariva. The villa Somariva has some fine sculpture by Thorwaldsen and Canova, and a number of Italian and French pictures. The French Ideal is a medium of the human form taken from mea- surement of the antique. The genuine Ideal is attainable only through an earnest loving study of nature, directed by a sure eye and a warm sense of the beautiful. Modern French art has an eccentric look ; whereas, Art should always be concentric, seek- ing, that is, the centre of all forms and expressions, the concen- tration into an individual of the best qualities of many. Hence, high Art looks always tranquil and modest. French Art is apt to have an excited, conceited air. Stopping as we did where the Lake branches, we had followed the advice of a Milanese gentleman, who accosted us in the boat. Had we gone on, we should not have made by a good deal so much of our morning ; for the upper end of the lake has less interest and beauty than the middle. On re-embarking, as the boat returned, between one and two, we renewed conversation with the friendly giver of such good counsel. He had spent his Sunday in a passive enjoyment of the rich soft beauties of the Lake. This was the easy and highest form of worship for a nature like his. He was a man past forty, of rather more lhan middle stature, with a well rnade ; somewhat stout frame, inclined AN EPICUREAN. 109 to fullness. His complexion was of that rich creamy tint, seen oftener in Italy than elsewhere, with blue-black hair and smooth whiskers ; a handsome man, with regular, bold features, that didn't look bold, from the gentleness of his expression ; for his graceful mouth and large white teeth were formed for smiling, and his black eyes were not those glowing Italian orbs, in whose depths so much of good or evil lies sleeping, you know not which, they were shallow, handsome, happy eyes. He ordered coffee, and pressed me to take a cup. After this, he offered me a cigar from his case, and upon my declining that too, he seemed to conclude that I lived a very poor life. For himself, he let not an hour in the day go by, he said, without regaling his body with some or other fragrant stimulant. He urged us, should we revisit Milan, to stop at the hotel where he lodged, whose cuisine and wines he praised with thankful animation. Yet, he was not one of those who spend their mornings in expectation of their dinner. He was too subtle an epicurean for such a dead diurnal vacuity. Though lys dinner was the chief circumstance of his being, still, after his mode, he valued time, and knew how to bridge over the wide gulfs between meals upon pillars constructed of minor enjoy- ments, including among them easy acts of kindness and courtesy. We got back to Como at four, and started immediately for Lugano, our resting-place that night. The Lake of Lugano pleased us even more than that of Como. There is greiter variety in the forms of the mountains. These fairy Lakes, uniting Italy to Switzerland, combine the beauties of both. As you advance from Lugano, the mountains close in upon you, the scenery growing bolder and grander. Through an opening not far from Lugano, we had a clear distant view down into Lake Maggiore, and then we came upon the picturesque old town of Belinzona, flanked with turrets, the turrets flanked with moun. tains. Towards evening we approached the southern sublimity of this pass, a rent in the mountain nearly a mile long, where the 110 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. river Ticino, which till now had this deep gorge all to himself,- has been forced by the engineer to make room for a road, the angry, headlong torrent being thrice crossed and recrossed in the course of the mils. As we emerged from this magnificent pas- sage, the mountains stretched up into Swiss stature, their sides clothed with firs as with a plumage. 'Twas dark when we drove into Airolo, at the foot of the St. Gothard, where good beds awaited us. First through green fields and firs, then rugged wastes, and finally, torrents, snow, and bare rock, up, up, up we went for three or four hours, the steep road making its way zigzag on terraces. The summit of the pass, a scene of cold dreary sterility, is a great geographical centre ; for within a circuit of ten miles are the sources of four of the chief rivers of Europe, the Rhine, the Rhone, the Reuss, and the Ticino. Now we set off in a race with the Reuss, who bounds five thousand feet down the mountain in a series of cataracts, to rush into the Lake of the Four Cantons at Fluellen. We crossed the Devil's Bridge, the northern sublimity of the St. Gothard pass ; and the Pfajfensprung, so called from the tradition of a monk hav- ing leapt from rock to rock, across the torrent, with a maiden in his arms. That's a fine tradition. One cannot but have a kind of respect for the bold amorous monk. He deserved the maiden better than any other monk. The beautiful maiden, for beautiful she could not but be, to inspire a feat so daring, must have been still and passive in the arms of her monastic Hercules ; for had she made herself heavy by scratching and kicking, whilst in mid air over that fearful chasm, I fancy the tradition would have been more tragical. Never was maiden more honorably won by a monk. We passed through Altdorf, TelPs Altdorf, and taking the steamboat at Fluellen, traversed under a serene sky the Lake of the Four Cantons, with its sublime scenery, landing in Lucerne after sun-down. Thus, from dawn to SCENERY. Ill twilight we had crossed one of the grand Alpine passes, and the whole length of the most magnificent Lake in Europe. This was a rich day. The next morning, before starting for Thun, we took time to walk a few steps beyond one of the gates to see the colossal lion, cut in the side of a rock, as designed by Thorwaldsen, in com- memoration of the faithful Swiss, who fell defending the royal family of France in the Tuileries in 1792. By the Emmendale we reached Thun the following day. Here, in this beautiful portal to the sublime scenery of the Bernese Alps, we sat our- selves down in quiet lodgings, by the water's edge, near where the river issues from the lake. In the grandeurs, sublimities, movements of Nature in Switzer- land, the creative energy reveals itself in doings and voices that astound the imagination. Nature seems here more than else- where vivified by the breath of God. Those gigantic piles of riven rock, fixed in sublime ruggedness, proclaim with unwonted emphasis, the awful hand that arrested their upheaving. Those terrific fields of eternal ice, the nourishing mothers of great rivers, tempt the imagination towards the mysterious source of Nature's processes. The common forms and elements of our globe are here exaggerated. Hills and valleys become moun- tains and gorges ; winter dwells on the peaks throughout sum- mer ; streams are obliged to be torrents. Walking in a meadow, you come suddenly on a streamlet, that looks in the grass like a transparent serpent at full speed, it runs with such startling velo- city, as though it had a momentous mysterious mission. The Rivers rush out of the Lakes, as if they had twice the work to do of other rivers. At the end of a month, we quitted Thun, about the middle of July, to return, for the rest of the summer, to the water-cure establishment at Boppart. 'Twould have been wiser had we gone to GraefTenberg. Prie5nilz understands his own discovery 112 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. better than any one else, and inspires his own patients with a deeper confidence. At Graeffenberg, moreover, there is moun- tain air and the coldest water. Through the secluded Miinster valley we reached Basle, whence by railroad, post, and steamboat we rapidly descended the Rhine to Boppart. The Rhine suffers at first by being seen when one's vision has just been enlarged and sublimated by Switzerland. The left, the wooded, shore of the Rhine was golden with au- tumnal foliage, the right pale with fading vineyards, when in ihe middle of October we again turned our faces southward. 'Twas eleven o'clock, a chilly moonlight night, when, at the gate of Frankfort, the officer questioned us, " Are you the Duke ? " " No, I am an American." " Oh, then," to the postillion, " drive on." Our former admiration of Dannecker's statue of Ariadne was somewhat qualified, for since we first saw it, our eyes had been strengthened in Italy. The composition is admirable, the attitude graceful ; but the limbs want rounding and expressive finish, and the head is stiff, as mimicry of the antique always is. It being too late to re-enter Italy by the Splugen pass, we bent our course more eastward towards Munich and the Tyrol, through the fine old German towns of Wiirzburg and Augsburg. We might have been present at the festival held to celebrate the com- pletion of the Walhatta, a magnificent temple on the shore of the Danube, erected by the King of Bavaria, in honor of German worth and genius, to be adorned with the statues and busts of Germany's great men, from Arminius to Schiller. When I learnt afterwards that from this temple Luther is to be excluded, I was glad that we had not gone out of our way to see it. Figure to yourself the Apollo of the Vatican with the head purposely taken off, or the Cathedral of Strasburg with the spire demolished, and you will have some notion of the grossness of this outrage. A German Pantheon without Luther ! The grandest national temple MUNICH; THE TYROL. 113 that Architecture could devise, and sculpture adorn with the effi- gies of German greatness, yet left bare of that of Luther, could never be but a fragment. The impertinence of this petty, tran- sitory King, to try to put an affront on the mighty, undying Sove- reign, Luther ! In Munich there is a noble collection of pictures ; but the city, with its fresh new palaces, and churches, and theatres, has a made up look. It seems the work of Dilettantism : it is not a warm growth out of the wants and aspirations of the time. It is as if it had been said: Architecture and Painting are fine things; therefore we will have them. The King of Bavaria, the builder and collector of all this, has been a great " Patron " of the Arts. Latterly his patronage is said to have taken another direction, and he has become a patron of Religion. The one is as proper a subject for patronage as the other. We entered the Tyrol on the 22d of October, after a light fall of snow, which weighed just enough on the fir trees to add a grace to their shapes, and on their dark green foliage sparkled in the sun, like a transparent silver canopy. Tyrolese scenery we saw in its most picturesque aspect. Our road went through Innspruck, the Capital of the Tyrol, lying in a capacious valley encompassed by mountains ; thence over the Bremer through Botzen, historical Trent, and Roveredo. Coming down from the chilly mountains, the sun of Italy was luxurious. What a fascination there is in this warm beautiful land ! We stopped half a day at Verona. Dante and Shakspeare have both been here ; Dante in person, as guest of the Scaligers, Shakspeare in Juliet, that resplendent diamond exhibited by the lightning of a tropical night-storm. Just out of the town they show a huge, rough, open stone coffer, as Juliet's tomb ; and in one of the principal streets, our cicerone pointed to a house which he said was that of the Capulets. Preferring to believe, we made no further inquiries. So, we have seen Juliet's tomb, and the 114 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. house of the Capulets. We saw too the palace of the Scaligers, wherein, at the table of Can-grande, Dante hurled at his host that celebrated sarcasm. One can readily figure the sublime, thought- ful, sorrowful man, sitting silent as was his wont, scornful of the levities and follies of speech around him, and not keeping his scorn out of his great countenance, when, after some coarse sally from a favorite buffoon, the prince, turning to the poet, said, " I wonder that this man, who is a fool, can make himself so agreeable to us all, while you, who are called wise, have not been able to do so." " You would not wonder," answered Dante, " if you knew that friendship comes of similarity of habits and sympathy of souls." At Verona we turned from our southward course, and went off due east to Venice, without halting in Vicensa and Padua, that lay in our path. We rowed in Gondolas, saw Titian's picture of the Assumption, walked over the Rialto, inspected the Arsenal, stood near the Bridge of Sighs, took chocolate in the place of St. Mark, and rowed back in the Lagune to Mestre, whence by Padua and Rovigo we came to Ferrara. From the people a traveller has to do witi on the highways of Europe, he gets much of the caricature of what in the world is called politeness, namely, a smooth lie varnished. A scarcity of post-horses detained us a day in Ferrara, and the bridge over the Po having been swept away by late floods, we had to make a circuit to reach Bologna. The Manuscripts of Tasso and Ariosto in the Library, Ariosto's house and Tasso's prison, beguiled the time in the desolate old town of Ferrara. Off the beaten highways, from which the floods forced us, the people looked fresh and innocent. Wherever strangers throng, there knavery thrives. Hence, on the great routes of Europe, the traveller is constantly vexed and soured by impositions, from the most brazen to the most subtle. From the obsequious inn- keeper to the coarse postillion, he is the victim of the whole class POWERS'S SLAVE 115 with whom he has to deal. Yet he would be very unjust who should thence infer that cheating and lying are habitual with the people among whom by these classes he is so often plagued and wronged. The country between Ferrara and Bologna overflows with population. Under this warm sun, the fertile valley of the Po yields meat, drink and clothing all at once ; silk, vine and grain growing in plenteous crops at the same time in one field. At Florence we found Powers with his model of the Greek Slave nearly finished. What easy power there is in genius ! Here is one of the most difficult tasks of sculpture, a nude fe- male figure, conceived and executed with a perfectness that completely conceals all the labor of thought and hand bestowed upon it. Most worthy to be a daughter of the Eve, this figure is altogether of another type, slender and maidenly. Like Eve, it is a revelation of the symmetry, the inexhaustible grace, the in- finite power and beauty of the human form. What an attitude, how naturally brought about, what a wonderful management of the resources of such limbs for expression ! It is ft figure " To radiate beauty everlastingly." From it one learns what a marvellous work is the human body One feels himself elevated and purified, while contemplating a creation so touching and beautiful. Of this statue a distinguished American clergyman, whom we had the pleasure to meet in Italy, said, that were a hundred libertines to collect round it, attracted by its nudity, they would stand abashed and rebuked in its presence. This is the fourth ideal female head that Powers has produced, and yet there is not between any two of them the slightest re- semblance. Each one is a fresh independent creation. Not to imitate himself evinces in a sculptor even a still greater depth of 116 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. resource than not to imitate the antique. It is proof of a mastery over the human countenance. Its elements and constituents Powers carries in his brain. This is the genuine creative energy. Greenough was absent in America, and his studio was closed. Clevinger was at work at the model of his Indian, his first ideal effort.* Pisa, famous for its leaning tower and its University, which has able professors, is, for one who wants quiet, a pleasant place to spend three months of winter. The Arno, flowing through it from east to west, for nearly a mile in a gentle curve, cuts the town into two parts, united by three bridges. Our front windows look out upon the river and its western bridge, and from one in the rear there is a view of the long jagged outline of the distant Appenines running towards Genoa, the highest peaks covered with snow. Our walks along the Lung-Arno carry us daily by the palace of Byron, the memory of whom does not seem to be much cherished by the Italians here. On the 22d of February we found ourselves in lively, dirty, commercial Leghorn, which vulgar cacophonous dissyllable is in- tended to be a rendering into English of the melodious Italian name of this town, which is Livorno. That the Mediterranean well deserves its reputation of being a very ugly sea in winter we had sickening proof. In a stout French steamboat we were two nights and a day, instead of one night, in getting from Leg- horn to Civita Vecchia. FRIDAY, February 24th, 1843. We cast anchor in the small harbor of Civita Vecchia at seven, * The last time I saw Clevinger, he was standing before this work, with his frank, manly countenance animated by the pleasure and intentness of the labor. In the budding of his fame, he -was cut off, a loss to his family, his friends, his country. APPROACH TO ROME. 117 landed at eight, and at ten set off for Rome. For several miles the road ran along the sea shore, through a desolate but not barren country, with scarce a sign of population. A few massive frag- ments of a bridge from the hands of the Romans, gave a sudden interest to the deserted region, and kept our minds awake until three o'clock, when, still eleven miles distant from Rome, we came in sight of St. Peter's, which drew us towards it with such force, that we wondered at the languor of the postillion, who drove his dull hacks as if at the end of our journey there were nothing but a supper and a snug hostelrie. We soon lost sight of St. Peter's. The fields, and this is not strictly part of the Campagna, still looked dreary and abandoned. Up to the very walls of the ancient mistress of the world, and the present spiritual mistress of many millions more than the Caesars ever swayed, the land seems as if it had long lain under a maledic- tion. At last, towards sundown, after an ascent, whence we overlooked the " Eternal City," the Cupola of St. Peter's filled our eyes of a sudden, and seemingly within a stone's throw of us. Descending again, we entered Rome by a gate near the Church, and, escorted by a horseman, whose casque led one to imagine him a mimic knight of Pharsalia, we drove close by the gigantic colonnade that encloses the court of St. Peter's, crossed the Tiber by the Bridge of Adrian, and after several turns through narrow streets, drove up to the temple of Marcus Aurelius An- toninus, with its front of fluted marble columns, under which we passed into the interior and there halted. J Twas the Custom House, whence a dollar having quickly obtained for us release from the delay and vexation of search, we drove at dusk through the Corso to the Hotel de ? Europe in the Piazza di Spagna. Here we spent the evening in planning, and in trying to think ourselves into a full consciousness that we were in Rome. SATURDAY, Feb. 25th. Before breakfast I took my first walk in Rome up the broad 118 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. stairway from the Piazza di Spagna to the Pincian Hill ; but the atmosphere was hazy. Later, I walked down the Corso, whose Palaces look wealth and luxury. A Palace without political power, what is it but a gilded Prison, where refined sensuality strives to beguile the intellect in its servitude ! A scarlet gilt coach rolled by, with gorgeous trappings and three footmen in flaunting liveries crowded together on the foot-board behind ; an exhibition, which shows manhood most disgustingly bemasked, and is an unchristian ostentation of the mastery of man over man. 'Twas the coach of a Cardinal ! of one who assumes to be the pre-elect interpreter of the invisible God ! of one whom millions believe to be among the most divinely-enlightened expositors of the self-denying Jesus' words ! Truly, God rights the wrong in our little world by general laws and stoops not to an individual ; else, it were neither unreasonable nor profane to expect that the sleek horses of this silken-robed priest might refuse to carry him to the altar, raised to him, who declared it to be hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Possibly he is self-deluded ; for so great is the power of man upon man, that the world-wide and time-heaped belief in his sanctity may have persuaded even himself, that between his life and his doctrine there is no wide- gaping inconsistency. Some too, being stronger in religious sentiment than in intellect, are blinded, under the bandage o*' custom, to the monstrous imposture. But many a one, having capacity for and opportunities of culture, must be the conscious worshipper of ambition and the knowing denier of the Holy, and nis life therefore what I leave each reader to name for himself. This is a gala-day in Rome, being one of the last of the Car- nival. At two we drove to the Corso, where we fell into a double file of carriages going in opposite directions. The Corso is the principal street of modern Rome, about a mile long, proud with palaces, columns, and open squares. Out of most of the nume- rous windows streamed long crimson silk hangings. At short THE FORUM. 119 intervals were dragoons as a mounted police. The street was thronged with people, many in masks and fantastic costumes ; the windows were crowded with gaily dressed spectators. But the chief source of animation to the gay scene, is the practice of throwing bonbons and boquets from carriage to carriage, or in or out of the windows, or from or at the pedestrians, a general interchange in short of missile greetings. Most of the bonbons are of clay, or paste and flowers, and hence can be dealt out pro- fusely without much cost. You assail whom you please, and wire masks are worn by those who are careful of their eyes. 'Tis an occasion when the adult lay aside their maturity and put on childhood again, and, as among children, there is the fullest freedom and equality. We knew not a soul in the throng, and dealt our handfuls of powdered pills into carriages and windows, and received them in turn, with as much glee as if we had been harlequins in a pantomime. We came in towards six. SUNDAY, Feb. 26th. We drove first to the Forum. Here then had been the centre of the Roman world ! There before you is a door of the ancient Capitol ! A few straggling columns and arches stand up still manfully against time. You think 'tis something to find your- self face to face with what has heard the voice of Cicero and the Gracchi, to shake hands, as it were, across a gulf of twenty cen- turies, with the cotemporaries of the Scipios ; when you learn that all that you behold are relics of the Imperial epoch. They showed us too the walls and two columns of a temple of Romulus with a door of well- wrought bronze. Although one likes to be- lieve on such occasions, we had to turn incredulous from these, and settled our minds again into positive faith before the arch of Titus, which stands at the end of the Forum opposite the Capitol, and is enriched with sculpture illustrating the destruction of Jerusalem, in commemoration of which it was erected to the 120 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. Emperor Titus. Passing under this, which Jews to this day will not do, we drove down the Via Sacra to the Colosseum, near which is the arch of Constantine. Conceive of an elliptical Theatre with stone seats all round rising row back of row, to hold one hundred thousand spectators, who came in and out with- out delay or confusion through seventy inlets. Here in this vast arena may be said to have been represented the conflict between paganism and Christianity. Here were slaughtered tens of thou- sands of Christians, thrown to wild beasts as the most grateful spectacle to the Roman populace. The arena itself is now a Christian temple, sanctified by the blood of the faith-sustained victims. From the Colosseum we went to the Church of St. John of the Lateran, where, if what they tell you were true, are preserved the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul. We were shown too what the exhibiting priest said is the table on which Jesus took the last supper with the apostles. This with other relics is declared to have been brought from Jerusalem by Helen, the mother of Con- stantine. This is the oldest church in Europe, and is called the mother of all others. In the afternoon we drove to St. Peter's. I had not imagined the entrance to be so colossal. Before passing the immense por- tal, I was filled with wonder, which was not diminished by the view within. It is a symbol of the power and hopes of man. What a majestic work of human hands ! All its magnificent details are swallowed in its immensity. The one all-absorbing idea is vastness. ONDAY, Feb. 27th. Our first visit to-day was to Crawford's studio. His Orpheus is here reputed a statue of high merit. The conception is at once simple and rich. The attitude is well adapted to display life and grace, the long line from the hindmost foot to the end of THE CENCI. 121 the curved arm, being one of the finest sweeps the human body can present. The act of protecting the eyes with the hand, im- parts life as well by the shadow it casts on the countenance as by its characteristic propriety. The large fabulous-looking heads of the music-subdued Cerberus sleep well, and the group takes at once such hold of the imagination, that their expression seems that of involuntary sleep. 'Tis in itself a great merit in a work of art to make the mind of the beholder assist its effect. The selection of the subject and the execution are equally happy, and denote the genial Artist. We went next to Thorwaldsen's studio. Here I was somewhat disappointed.* At the Barberini Palace we saw the Beatrice Cenci of Guido. People go to see it on account of her most awful story ; and the story is not fully told to one who has not seen the picture. Guido was wrought up to his highest power of execution. The face is of the most beautiful, and through this beauty streams the bewil- dered soul, telling the terrific tale. It looks like a picture after which the artist had taken a long rest. It is wonderful. We next went hastily through the Doria Gallery, one of the richest private collections in the world. TUESDAY, Feb. 28th. After breakfast I walked to the Minerva church to see the funeral ceremony for a Cardinal. In the square before the church was the Pope's carriage with six horses, and a score of the scarlet carriages of the Cardinals. The interior of the church was hung with black and gold. The body of the deceased Car- dinal lay in state, in the centre of the nave, on a broad bulky couch raised about ten feet. Around it at some distance were burning purple candles. The music of the service was solemn and well executed, in part by castrati. The Pope descended from his throne, and, supported on either side by a Cardinal, and at * Jt will be seen that this first impression was afterwards removed. 7 122 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. tended by other ecclesiastical dignitaries, went to the front of the couch and pronounced absolution upon the deceased. He then walked twice round the body, throwing up incense towards it out of a golden censer. His pontifical robe was crimson and gold. He evidently performed the service with emotion. The whole spectacle was imposing and luxurious. The gorgeous couch and habiliments of the deceased, the rich and various robes, the pur- ple candles, the sumptuous solemn hangings, the incense and the mellow music, compounded a refined feast for the senses. Such ceremonies can speak but feebly to the soul. In the crowd that filled the large church, there was observable some curiosity, and a quiet air of enjoyment, but very little devotion. After the ser- vice, as the Pope's carriage on leaving the square passed close by me, an elderly man at my side dropped suddenly on his knees, shouting " Santo Padre, la benedizione," which the Pope gave as his horses went off in a trot, and of which I too, from my position, had a share. In the afternoon we hired seats in the Corso, to see the last day of the Carnival. The Italians, disciplined by Church and State, know how to run wild on such an occasion without grossness or disorder. People all shouting and fooling, and no coarse extrava- gances or interruptions of good humor. At sunset the street was cleared in the centre, and half a dozen horses started at one end, without riders, to race to the other. After this, the evening ended with the entertainment of the ?nocolo, which is a thin wax lighted taper, wherewith one half the crowd provide themselves, while the others, with handkerchiefs and similar weapons, strike at them to put them out. This makes an illumination of the whole street, and keeps up a constant noisy combat. Thousands of people in masks and fantastic costumes. WEDNESDAY, March 1st, 1843 If priests were raised nearer to God by distinguishing them" ASH-WEDNESDAY. 123 selves from their fellow-men through the means of gorgeous gar- niture and pompous ceremony, the exhibition we this morning witnessed at the Sistine Chapel would have been solemn and inspiring. Up flight after flight of the broad gently ascending stairway of St. Peter's, we reached the celebrated Chapel. Seated on the pontifical throne, on one side of the altar at the further extremity of the Chapel, under Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, was the Pope. On his head was a lofty mitre of silver tissue, and his stole was of crimson and gold. To his right, on an ele- vated broad ottoman that ran along the wall of the Chapel and crossed it about the middle, were ranged more than twenty Car- dinals in robes of light purple silk and gold. Around the Pope was a crowd of ministering Prelates, and at the foot of each Car- dinal sat, in a picturesque dress, an attendant, apparently a priest, who aided him to change his robe, an operation that was performed more than once during the long service. The folio missal, out of which the Pope read, was held before him ; when he approached the altar from his throne his robe was held up ; and in the same way one of the attendant prelates removed and replaced several times his mitre. Part of the service consisted in kissing his foot, a ceremony which was performed by about a hundred bishops and prelates in various ecclesiastical costumes. This being the first day of Lent, Ash- Wednesday, the benediction of the ashes is given always by the Pope, and on the heads of those who have the privilege of kissing his toe (Cardinals don't go lower than the knee) he lays a pinch of the consecrated ashes. When I look back to the whole spectacle, though only after the lapse of a few hours, I seem to have been present at some bar- baric pageant. The character of the exhibition overbears my knowledge of its purport, and I could doubt that I have witnessed a Christian ritual. Afterwards in passing over Monte Cavallo, we came suddenly upon the colossal statues by Phidias and Praxiteles. 'Twas a 124 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. rich surprise. Like St. Peter's and the Colosseum they sur- passed my expectation. Their heroic forms stood out against the sky like majestic apparitions come to testify to the glories of old Greece. In the afternoon we went to Gibson's studio, where we were pleased both with the artist and his works. THURSDAY, March 2d. First to the Capitol, built, under the direction of Michael Angelo, on the foundation of the ancient. Innumerable fragments and statues. In the Colossal River-God in the Court, the grace and slumbering power of the large recumbent figure are remark, able. According to our custom at the first visit, we went hastily through the gallery, only pausing before the dying Gladiator. Here, as in all master-pieces of Art, is the intense infusion of the will of the Artist into his work. This is the inscrutable power of genius. Thence to the Church of Santa Maria Majore, the nave of which is supported by thirty-six beautiful columns, taken from a temple of Juno. Modern Rome is doubly enriched out of the spoils of ancient. In the afternoon we drove to the Vatican. What a wilderness of marble ! You walk, I was about to say, for miles through avenues of sculpture. Of the Apollo, Laocoon, and Antinous, I can say nothing to-day, except that great statues lose much in casts. What an edifice ! Drove to the Villa Borghese. FRIDAY, March 3d. Our first stage to-day in our daily travel over Rome was at the baths of Caracalla, one of the most emphatic testimonials of Roman magnificence. The ruins, consisting now of little else than the outer and dividing walls, cover several acres. Sixteen hundred persons could bathe at a time. Besides the baths, there were ] CHURCHES OF ROME. 125 halls for games and for sculpture, and here have been dug up several masterpieces. Here and there a piece of the lofty roof is preserved, and we ascended to the top of one of the halls, whence there is a good view of a large section of the region of ruins. Except in the Fora and Arches, one sees nowhere columns among the ruins. These, as well as nearly all marble in whatever shape, being too precious to be left to adorn the massive remnants of Pagan Rome, have been taken to beautify the Churches and Palaces of her Christian heir. From the baths of Caracalla we went along the Appian way, passing the tomb of the Scipios, and under the arch of Drusus, to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, a large massive round tower, the largest monument ever raised to a woman. Thence to the Columbarium or tomb of the household of the Caesars. The name is derived from the resemblance of the structure to a pigeon-house, as well in its general form as in that of the little semi-circular receptacles for the ashes. In the afternoon we visited among other churches that of Santa Maria Degli Angeli, formerly the Baths of Diocletian, which was adapted to the shape and purpose of a church by Michael Angelo. A grand one it is with its immense pillars of Egyptian granite. As according to Roman Catholic usage, several masses are performed in one morning to as many different congregations, a given number of inhabitants would require as Catholics a much smaller number of churches than it would being Protestant. But were the whole people of Rome to assemble at worship, at the same hour, in as many churches as would be needed for easy accommodation, even then, nine tenths of them would be empty. For three or four centuries the population has been at no time more numerous than it is now, and seldom so numerous ; and owing to civil and foreign wars previous to the fifteenth century, and to the seventy years' absence of the Papal Court, it has 126 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. probably not been greater than at present since the downfall of the Empire. So that there always have been ten times as many churches as are needed. Rome has a population of about one hundred and sixty thousand souls, and counts over three hundred churches. With thirty, all her people would have ample room for worship. Had half of the thought, labor, and money, wasted in building, adorning and preserving the others, been bestowed upon schools and seminaries, there would have been not less re- ligion, and far more mental culture and morality ; and Rome might now be really the intellectual and spiritual capital of the world, instead of being the centre of a decrepid form of Chris- tianity, to which she clings chiefly by the material ties that bind men to an ecclesiastical system which embosoms high places of worldly eminence. Nothing is shallower than carpingly to point out how commu- nities or individuals might be better than they are. The above estimate is not made in a spirit of barren detraction ; it shows into what extravagant abuses of God's best gifts man is prone to run. There is at any rate comfort in the evidence here pre- sented, if such were wanting, of great spiritual vitality in human nature. Part of the gross misdirection thereof may be ascribed to the mental darkness during many of the first ages of Christian Europe, and part to the selfishness necessarily inhe- rent in a body constituted like the Roman Catholic priesthood. The darkness has been greatly diminished, and individual inde- pendence has been sufficiently developed not to abide much longer corporate usurpations, civil or ecclesiastical. There may be hope, that through this natural fund of spirituality, under healthier development and clearer guidance, humanity will go on righting itself more and more, and that under its influence even Rome shall be rejuvenated, and cease to be the hoary juggler, that out of the spiritual wants of man wheedles raiment of gold for her own body and mansions of marble. M. ANGELO'S MOSES. 127 Drove out to Mount Sacer, and afterwards to the Pincian. Saturday, March 4th. Rain every day. Among the curiosities we this morning inspected in the library of the Vatican, were a collection of cameos and other small antiques dug up in Rome; several of the bronze plates whereon were inscribed the de- crees of the Senate, but of the fallen Senate under the Empe- rors ; specimens of Giotto and Cimabue ; manuscript of Cicero's Treatise on the Republic, made in the fifth century, and written over by St. Augustine, with a treatise on the Psalms ; manuscript of Petrarch ; illuminated edition of the Divina Comedia ; papy- rus. To us as well as to the Pope it is a convenience that St. Peter's and the Vatican are cheek by cheek. On coming out of the library we entered the great church to enjoy its beautiful vastness. In the afternoon we went to see Michael Angelo's colossal statue of Moses in the church of St. Peter in chains, a beautiful church (the interior I mean) with twenty fluted Parian columns. Here are preserved, 'tis said, the chains of St. Peter. The Moses is a great masterpiece. It justifies the sublime lines of the sonnet it inspired to Zappi : Questi e Mose quando scendea del monte, E gran parte del Nume avea nel Volto.* Power and thought are stamped on the brow ; the nose breathes the breath of a concentrated giant ; an intellectual smile sits on the large oriental mouth, which looks apt to utter words of com- fort or command ; the long, thick, folded beard bespeaks vigor, and gives grandeur to the countenance ; and the eyes, of which, contrary to the usage of high sculpture, the pupils are marked, * This is Moses when he came down from the mountain, And had in his countenance a great part of the Deity. 128 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. absolutely sparkle. The figure is seated, with however one foot drawn back, as if ready to rise, an attitude correspondent to the life and fire of the countenance. From this grand work one learns what a mighty soul was in Michael Angelo. In the sacristy is a beautiful head by Guido, representing Hope, as rapt and still as an angel listening to the music of Heaven. In this church was held under the Emperor Constan- tine, as says an inscription in it, a council, which condemned Arian and other schismatics, and burnt their books. We next visited St. Martin on the Hill, also constructed with columns from an ancient temple. Through the church we descended into a vault below where had been Imperial baths, and afterwards a ohurch of the early Christians before Constantine. Adjoining this venerable spot was an opening that led into the catacombs, where the persecuted Christians used to conceal themselves. On slabs m the upper church were inscribed the names of many martyrs w ose tombs had been found below ; among them those of several /*opes. Thence towards sunset, we went to the church of the Jesuits, laden, like so many others, with pictures and marbles and sparkling altars, and sepulchral monuments. The grand altar just finished cost upwards of one hundred thousand dollars. On one side of the church a thin sallow Jesuit in a dark robe and cap was preaching to about a hundred per- sons, chiefly of th. poorer class. I regretted that I had not come in time to hear n, re of his sermon, for a purer pronunciation and sweeter voice 1 never listened to. His elocution too was good and his gesticulation graceful, and his matter and manner were naif and unjesuitlike. He told his auditors that what the holy Virgin required of them, especially now during Lent, was to examine their souls, and if they found them spotted with sins to free themselves therefrom by a full confession, and if not, to betake themselves more and more to the zealous cultivation of the virtues. There was a sincerity, simplicity and sweetness ST. PETER'S. 129 in the feeling and utterance of this young man, that were most fascinating. When he had finished, he glided away into the recesses of the dim church like an apparition. SUNDAY, March 5th. To-day we remitted our labors. Late in the morning I walked up the stairway of the Trinity of the Mount to the gar- den of the Villa Medici ; and afterwards to Monte Cavallo to behold again the two colossal Greek Statues. They must be seen early or late, for at other hours the sky dazzles the sight as you attempt to look up at them. In the afternoon we drove to St. Peter's. Its immensity enlarges at each repeated beholding. 'Tis so light, the interior I mean, so illuminated, that it looks as though it had been poised from above, and not built upward from an earthly foundation. In one section of it is a series of confessionals, dedicated to the various languages of Europe. In each sat a priest ready to listen to and shrive in the tongue inscribed over his portal. Vespers at four. The voices were fine, but the music, not being sacred, was not effective in a church. One hears at times in music cadences of such expression, that they seem about to utter a revelation ; and then they fade of a sudden into common melody, as though the earthly medium were incompetent to transmit the heavenly voice. We drove afterward to the Pincian Hill in a cold north wind. MONDAY, March 6th. Walked before breakfast to Monte Cavallo. Our first stage after breakfast was to the house of Nero, over which were built, in part, the Baths of Titus. This is one of the best preserved bits of old Rome. The walls of brick are from three to five feet thick, the rooms nearly forty high. On some of the ceilings and walls are distinct specimens of Arabesque. Thence to look at the holy staircase of the Lateran, said to be of the house of Pontius Pilate. The feelings that would arise on standing before 7* 130 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. such an object is checked by doubt that will come up as to its authenticity. No one is permitted to mount the stairs except on his knees ; and being of stone, they are kept covered with wood to preserve them from being worn out. In the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, founded by St. Helen, the mother of Con- stantine, is preserved, 'tis said, the cross of one of the thieves crucified with Jesus. In the Gallery of the Colonna Palace we saw this morning several fine portraits and a beautiful St. Agnes, by Guido, with that heavenward look he delighted to paint, and painted so well. In the magnificent Hall of the Palace we were shown the por- trait of the Colonna who commanded at Lepanto., In the after- noon we went for the second time to the Vatican. How the most beautiful things teach you to admire them ! Genius, which is by its essence original, embodies its idea, the totality whereof even the most genial sympathy cannot at first take in. By repetition the whole spirit of the creation is imbibed, and only then does the mind receive the full image of what it beholds, learning thus, by a necessary process, from beauty itself to appreciate its quality. Thus the Apollo will go on growing into our vision until we can, if not entirely, yet deeply enjoy its inexhaustible beauty. On coming out of the Vatican we walked again into St. Peter's. Are its proportions perfect and its colors all in unison, or is it its vastness that tones down all the constituents to harmony ? It fills me always with delight and wonder. Towards sunset we drove to the church of St. Peter, in Monto- rio, whence, from the terrace, is a sweeping view of Rome. We looked down over the " Eternal City." Directly in front, and east of us about a mile, was the majestic Colosseum. Between us and the Tiber was the Camp of Porsenna. To the left, beyond the Tiber, was once the Campus Martius, now the most thickly peopled quarter of modern Rome. An epitome of a large portion of the world's history lay at our feet. There stood the THE PANTHEON. 131 Capitol of the Republic, and beyond, the ruins of the Palace of the Caesars, and all about us were the Palaces and Churches of their papal heir. Back of the Church is the Fontana Paolina, built of stone from the Forum of Nerva, by Pope Paul V., a Borghese. The water gushes out through five apertures in volume enough for a Swiss cascade. TUESDAY, March 7th. We drove out this morning to the Villa Parnphili, the grounds of which, having a circumference of four miles, are the most extensive of the Roman villas. Here are stately umbrella-shaped pines. Fields of grass, thickly studded with flowers, verified what had hitherto been to me a poetic fiction. From the top of the house is a wide noble prospect. Returning, we drove through part of the Jews' quarter to the Square of Navona, the largest in Rome, in ancient times a race-course, now a vegetable market. In the afternoon we went to the Pantheon, the best preserved remnant of ancient Rome, built by Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, as the great Hall of the public baths by him established, afterwards converted into a temple to Jupiter, then to all the Gods, whence its name, and as early as the seventh century consecrated a Christian Church, under the name of St. Mary of the Martyrs, by Pope Boniface IV., who buried under the chief altar twenty- eight wagon loads of relics of the martyrs. The light (and rain) comes in through a wide circle left open at the top of the dome. The pavement is of porphyry. Here Raphael is buried,. We drove afterwards to the villa Borghese, crowded with ancient marble, among which is a long series of busts of Roman Empe- rors in " antique red." The heads are nearly all of one type, and denote the energetic, practical character of the Romans. The statue of Pauline, one of the treasures of the villa, is the most beau- tiful work I have seen of Canova. Returning, we saw near the gate some rich Italian faces. Italy reminds one at times of a 132 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. beautiful Guido Magdalen, her tearful countenance upturned towards heaven, so lovely in her affliction, such subdued passion in her luxurious features, such hope in her lucent eyes. WKDNKSDAY, March 8th. We spent most of the morning in the studios of sculptors, and the afternoon in churches. What a multiplication of the human form in marble ! The Churches are peopled with statues brown with age, and in the studios they dazzle you with youthful white- ness. To describe in verse the surface of a man's mind is not to write poetry ; nor is the imitation of the human body the exercise of a fine Art. The Sculptor's function is to concentrate in one body the beauty and character of many. When he does this he creates, and until he creates, he is not up to his vocation. Nature is not always beautiful, but at the bottom of all her phenomena is the spirit of beauty. Her essence is beauty, and this essence the worker with the chisel must extract and then embody, else is he a barren Artist. We saw this morning Guido's Aurora. Here is a subject most apt for pictorial representation. The idea has sufficient intensity to irradiate the whole body. In few large compositions is there soul enough in the thought to animate the members ; or if there be fire, there is lack of beauty. Here the idea, the parent of the whole work, is both strong and beautiful, and the execution being correspondent, the effect is complete. Afterwards, in the Minerva Church, we saw a statue of Christ, by Michael Angelo. It wants character and beauty. The subject is not suited to Michael Angelo's genius. THURSDAY, March 9th. We visited this morning the studio of Wolf, a German sculptor of reputation. A sweet dancing girl and a graceful Diana attracted us most. The foreign Artists in Italy seem well nigh AN ENGLISH SERMON 133 to take the lead of the native, owing, probably, to the enjoyment of greater liberty, the Italians being more under the chilling sway of academical rules, and the influence of the by no means pure example of Canova. We walked afterwards in the garden of the Villa Medici, the prison of Galileo during his trial, now the French Academy ; and into its hall of plaster casts, where is a collection of the best antiques. This is going into the highest company. These are genuine aristocrats, choice specimens of manhood and womanhood. With many of them, time and ignorance have dealt roughly. Some are without arms, others without legs, and some without heads, but still they live. In their mythology, what a Poem the ancient Greeks gave birth to and bequeathed to the world. We next went to one of the Churches, to hear a sermon from an English Catholic Prelate. During Lent, there is daily preaching in many of the Churches. Chairs were set for two hundred persons, but there were present not more than fifty. The preacher was evidently a man of intellect, but dry and argu- mentative. The drift of his discourse was to show that priests are essential to salvation. Men, with all their selfishness, and perhaps through a modifica- tion thereof, have ever been prone to give up their affairs in trust to others, the trustees dividing themselves into the three hitherto inevitable classes, the legal, the medical, and the theological. Some even avail themselves to the full of all these helps and sub- stitutes, abandoning the conduct of their worldly possessions to their man of business, their bodies passively to their physician, and their souls as passively to their pastor. These languid nega- tives are of course few. By degrees the axiom is getting to be valued, that to thrive, whether secularly or spiritually, a man must look to his own interests. People are beginning to discern, that health is not a blessing in the gift of Doctors, that Religion is independent of hierarchies, and that the first preachers of Christianity were quite a different kind of men from most of the 134 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. atest. Some men are pre-eminently endowed to develope and feed the spiritual element of our nature, and most reverently do I regard and cordially hearken to such wherever I meet with them. As in the preacher before me, I perceived no marks of such inspiration, and as there was neither eloquence nor art to give his discourse the attraction of an intellectual entertainment, we soon left the church, a movement which can be effected here without notice. He handled his argument not without skill, and doubtless the sermon was edifying to most of his auditors, their minds having been drilled by him and his colleagues into the habit of acquiescence. The ordinary service was going on at the same time inde- pendently in a side chapel, where a very aged ecclesiastic, in a white satin embroidered robe, was saying mass, which to us, in the outskirts of tfre English Company, was quite audible. He was entirely alone, having no assistant at the altar and not a sin gle worshipper ; until just before he concluded, a bright-faced boy, ten or twelve years of age, came in with a long staff, to put out the tall candle. Ere the venerable father had ceased praying, the little fellow had the extinguisher up, thrusting it now and then half over the flame with playful impatience. The instant the old man had finished, out went the candle, and the boy, taking he large missal in his arms, walked off, looking over towards us for notice, and restraining with difficulty his steps to the pace of the aged priest, who tottered after him. On leaving the church, we went for the first time to the Borghese Gallery, froely open to strangers, and to artists, ot whom, in the different rooms, there were several taking copies. Strangers in Rome owe much to the unexampled liberality of the Italian nobles, ia opening to them the treasures of their palaces and villas. In the afternoon to the Vatican, where again we had a cloudy sky, and were therefore again disappointed before the great fres- SALTATOR ROSA. 135 coes of Raphael, which, from the darkness of the rooms wherein they are painted, hav'n't light enough even on the sunniest days. On coming out we took our accustomed walk up under the dome of St. Peter's. FRIDAY, March 10th. We visited this morning the Corsini Gallery, in which is the bound Prometheus of Salvator Rosa, with his fiery stamp upon it. The horror which a lesser genius could excite, cannot be subdued by any mastery of art. The keeper of the rooms, with the hostile feeling reciprocated among the inhabitants of the different sections of Italy, remarked, that none but a Neapolitan would choose so bloody a subject. Another remarkable picture in this collection, is a head of Christ bound with thorns, by Guercino. The agony, the fortitude, the purity are all there, and in the upcast translu- cent eyes is an infinite depth of feeling, as of mingled expostula- tion and resignation, that recalls vividly the touching words, " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?" 3 Tis one of the masterpieces of Rome. At twelve we found ourselves in St. Peter's, to witness the ceremony which takes place every Friday during Lent. The Pope, attended by his household and a numerous body of Cardi- nals and other prelates, says prayers successively at several dif- ferent altars. The Swiss Guard, in the old-time costume with pikes, formed a hollow oblong, within which the Pope and the whole cortege of priests knelt. For the Pope and Cardinals a cushion was provided ; the others knelt on the marble pavement. The Pope prayed inaudibly, and seemed to do so with heart. The strange uniform of the Guards, the numerous robed priests kneeling behind their chief, the gorgeous towering vaults above them, and the sacred silence, made a beautiful scene. In the afternoon we drove to the Villa Mills, built above the ruins of the House of Augustus, on Mount Palatine. Through a 136 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. door in the garden, round which clustered lemons, roses, and oranges, we descended to several of the rooms of Augustus, the floor whereof is about thirty feet below the present surface. From various points in the garden we had views of the majestic rem- nants of imperial Rome, the Colosseum, the baths of Caracalla, the temple of Peace, part of the Forum, the temple of Vesta, the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, the tomb of Cecilia Metella, inter- spersed with convents and churches and scattered buildings. Over the wall on the southern side of the Villa grounds, you look directly down upon some remains of the Circus Maximus, which occupied the valley between the Palatine and Aventine Hills, and where took place the rape of the Sabines. It will take a long while for Niebuhr to efface belief in the reality of those early Roman doings. At last we ascended to a terrace built over a spot where had once been a temple of Juno, whence was a pros- pect of modern Rome with its throng of cupolas. We next mounted the Capitol Hill, to go into the Church Aracaeli. SATURDAY, March llth. We visited this morning the Convent of the Sacre Cceur on the Trinitd del Monte. This is a sisterhood of French ladies, some of them noble, devoted to the education of the upper classes. The establishment looked the model of neatness. The pupils, who had a uniform dress, rose and curtsied to us as we entered the rooms. They looked healthy and happy. The sisters had the manner and tone of well-bred ladies, chastened by seclusion from the rivalries of the world. It is one of the results of Catholic organization and discipline, that in an institution like this, a field of utility is opened to those whom disappointment, or distaste for excitement, or a natural proneness to piety, disposes to withdraw from the world. Through the principle of association, the various resources of many are centred upon a high object, and much activity, that would otherwise have lain dormant or have been CONVENT HYMN. 137 wasted, is turned to excellent account. From one of the lofty dormitories, with its numerous clean white beds, we looked out into a broad garden belonging to the convent, and beyond this to the Ludovisi grounds and Villa. Afterwards, at the room of Flatz, a Tyrolese painter, we were charmed with the artist and his works. His subjects are all reli- ; gious, and are executed with uncommon grace and feeling. A pupil of his, too, Fink, is a young man of promise. There are people with minds so exclusively religious, that Religion does not, as is its office, sustain, temper, exalt their being ; it fills, it is their being. When the character is upright and simple, such persons become earnest and calm ; when other- wise, they are officious and sentimental. If -their intellect is sensuous, they delight in the imagery and manipulating ceremo- nies of the Catholic worship, and then, having of course, by their original structure, no intellectual breadth or power, they will be liable, under the assaults of a picture-loving mind and absorbing devotional feeling, to become Romanists even in Rome itself! SUNDAY, March 12th. This afternoon we returned to the chapel of the Sacr6 Cceur, to hear the music at the evening benediction. 'Twas a hymn from the sisterhood, accompanied by the organ. The service commenced silently at the altar, round which curled profuse in- cense, that glowed before the lighted candles like silver dust. The few persons present were kneeling, when the stillness was broken by a gentle gush of sound from the invisible choir up behind us. It came like a heavenly salutation. The soft tones seemed mes- sengers out of the Infinite, that led the spirit up to whence they had come. At the end of each verse, a brief response issued from deep male voices at the opposite end of the church, near the altar, sounding like an earthly answer to the heavenly call. Then again were the ears possessed by the feminine harmony, that poured itself down upon the dim chapel like an unasked blessing. 138 SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE. MONDAY, March 13th. This morning, at the Spada Palace, we saw the statue of Pom- pey, which " all the while ran blood " when Csesar fell under the blows of the conspirators in the Capitol. J Tis a colossal figure, bout ten feet in height, of fine character, dignified, vigorous, and life-like. We drove afterwards out to the English burying-ground, where lie the ashes of Shelley, " enriching even Rome," as his wife had a right to say. I revere the character, and admire the genius of Shelley, yet I was not moved by the presence of his tomb. Emotion cannot be summoned at will, I have at times, in a holy spot, found myself in a state of utter insensibility, and, instead of turning my eyes inward under its spirit-moving influ- ence, have caught my lips playing with the reminiscence of a jest, as irrepressible as it was impertinent in such a place. For all that, the visit was not barren ; the feeling would come after- wards. In the afternoon, we visited the rooms of Overbeck, the distin- guished German painter, a great master in drawing and composi- tion. Like Flatz, his subjects are all scriptural. Very few artists being able to achieve the highest triumph in execution, which is the transparence and vivid beauty of healthiest life, addict themselves naturally, in a critical age, to an emulous cultivation of those qualities which through study are more attain- able, and then attach to them a kind of importance which they do not deserve. This seems to be the case just now with composi- tion, an element which may shine in a picture unworthy of per- manent regard, and which stands related to the genial quality in Art as the narrative does to the poetical in a printed volume. Under genuine inspiration, the parts of a work will always, when Art is out of its first rudiments, put themselves together compe- tently to the development of the idea, although the artist may not excel in composition ; but from the most skilful combination of the constituent parts, will never be generated that unfading charm COLOSSEUM BY MOONLIGHT. 139 of life and beauty, which genius alone can impart, and the produc- tion whereof even genius cannot explain. In short, composition is the intellectual department of painting, and will be ineffective until vivified by the fire of feeling. We walked afterwards through the gallery of the Capitol, and then to the Tarpeian rock. TUESDAY, March 14th. We commenced the day, which was bright at last, with a walk on the Pincian. Visited in the morning a second time the rooms of the German painter Flatz, and his pupil. We drove after- wards through the sunny air past the Forum and Colosseum out to the grand church of St. John of the Lateran, where, in the court, is the finest obelisk in Rome, brought, like the others, from Egypt, the land of obelisks. It is a single shaft of red granite, more than a hundred feet high. In the afternoon, we walked again on the Pincian, amidst a throng of people from all parts of the world, in carriages, on horseback, and on foot. How seldom you meet a fine old coun- tenance ; one that has been enriched by years, that has the au- tumnal mellowness of joyous and benignant sensations. Oftener you see on old shoulders a face corrugated and passion-ploughed, that may be likened to a river-bed, which, deserted by the turbi