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THE VALE OF IDAR:

A SERMON IN STONES.

"Wo die Berge so blau
Aus dem nebligen Grau
Schauen herein,
Wo die Sonne verglüht,
Wo die Wolke umzieht,
Möchte ich sein."

CARLYLE, when he is about to plunge the readers of his Frederick the Great' into an abstract of the history of the German Empire, sounds a note of warning, and bids them, before they leap, take a last look around and perceive that "the element is of a dangerous, extensive sort, mostly jungle and shaking bog." As he guides them, however, the bog becomes more passable; a point of lurid flame, a tender light, marks this or that holy or unholy personage; a humorous flash clears up transactions more or less creditable to human nature, as the case may be; and in the end the reader may profit much, and is sure of not a little diversion.

But the history of Germany is nothing to its geography-its political geography, that is. It may seem paradoxical and disrespectful to speak so of the solid centre of Europe; but it is true that its geography is the most shifting and unsteady bog-like thing that ever made the despair of a schoolmaster-desperate enough as schoolmasters are over the teaching of geography at all. Instruction and diversion cannot be obtained on any human terms whatever from the study of anything so unreasonable. A patchwork quilt is nothing to the appearance of the map of Germany. The patches which are forced by the misguided industry of a woman into incon

-BEETHOVEN: An die ferne Geliebte. Liederkreis von A. JEITTELES.

gruous continuity are at least fairly of a size; they even often horribly, as in a dream, adumbrate figures in plane and solid geometry. The most irregular coast-line has an obvious raison d'être in the "salt, unplumbed, estranging sea; " and if the inhabitants of Cromarty must be heartily ashamed of the untidy state of what they are pleased to call their county, they must also, unless they consider that the tatterdemalion condition of Nairn keeps them in countenance, be content to look upon themselves as an ignoble exception in this well-ordered empire, and hope earnestly that some form of consolidation may yet await their fragmentary shire. There are a good many matters in Church and State of which we are told daily that to apply to them the ordinary laws of common-sense, not to speak of higher standards, is absurd. They are to be understood only in their "historical continuity." I have no doubt those two Scottish counties are historically very continuous, and that they are sown broadcast over the north of Scotland in that odd way for the best of historical reasons.

But of the divisions on the map of Germany, I know, from studies in the aforesaid History of Frederick, and from other and far drier researches, that they have many of them, if not most of them, no reason whatever but the need and greed of men in high places; and while the eternal hills remain steadfast, and the ceaseless rivers water the plains in the same accustomed courses, while the inhabitants remain of the same race and the same speech through scores of generations, the boundaries of their dominions who rule or misrule have changed as the figures change in a kaleidoscope. German boundary-stones may well sigh with Horace Smith

"We have above ground seen some strange mutations; "

but, at least, the famous mummy who endured while dynasties thus rose and fell again, was not liable to frequent dislocation, nor painted in halves, or striped diagonally in all the colours of the rainbow, every time there was a new mutation; while, to this day, a German milestone can never be sure of waking up in the morning and finding itself displaying the same colours as when it went to sleep the night before.

The poet Shakespeare has been frequently convicted of gross error by the most respectable critics, besides having his very existence as a dramatist denied point-blank by some irrespectable persons. Amongst other matters he has been arraigned for speaking of Bohemia as a "desert country by the sea." Well, Bohemia has certainly no sea-coast now; it cannot even manage at any spot to peep over the top of its girdle of mountains. But what joy would it be to trace the historical continuity of Bohemia; to prove that it may have moved eastward, say from the Riviera; that respectable critics are wrong as well as pedantic; and that Shakespeare being, as some still think, a poet, not only had the best right in the world to give any country whatever a seaboard if he

liked, but that, apart from all such questionably "honest" things as poetry, the actual circumstances of Bohemia quite warranted the supposition that a convenient tempest would wash you ashore on its desert coast! It would only be an instance of the same inductive method of reasoning, and of the truly scientific spirit in which our canny Scot approached the question of Shakespeare's own nationality. Rare Ben Jonson might have been one of the Johnstones of Annandale; all the poets and men of genius in these islands before and after him, down to Mr Gladstone and Mr Ruskin, might be Scotch, said the exasperated Englishman; but could it possibly be said that Shakespeare was in any degree a Scotchman? "Weel," was the reply after some consideration-" weel, the abeelity wad warrant the supposeeshun!"

The history of Germany would warrant any supposition as to its geography. Does the reader know that Austria used to lie mostly to west of the Rhine? I disregard an uncomfortable misgiving that there were two Austrias, and ask with Mrs Hemans, "Where is that country now?" Austria is no longer in Germany at all; it has become a part of the still vexed Eastern question-and this though there is no town more German than Vienna. Again, in 1771, you shook the dust of Prussia off your feet five miles outside Danzig; you passed the last Prussian sentry in his pepper-pot sentry-box in the middle of the highway, where he kept watch in the grim vicinity of a malefactor hung in chains on a very solidly built gibbet-possibly an international gibbet, for this at least is an international symboland you went on, and lo, you were in a Polish town! Twenty-three years later the sentry was gone, and the town of Danzig was Prussian. The battle had been fought in which Kosciusko had done neither of the things which history has expected and continues to report of him-that is, he had neither cried out "Finis Poloniæ!" nor fallen; but in which, nevertheless, Poland as a nation had passed away, and which inspired one whom, like a certain Nithsdale peasant speaking of Longfellow, I should call "no' just the first o' poets," to the composition of the utterly desperate stanza which ends

"Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell,

And freedom shrieked-as Kosciusko fell."

To "parse" in early youth many such stanzas of the "Pleasures of Hope" may not inevitably bring on pessimism for life, but I know from personal experience that it tends to leave one as cool-headed on the subject of the woes of the unfortunate country of Poland as Carlyle himself could desire.

And then there is Prussia. Where is Prussia not? Where Prussia came from, is told nowhere so well as in the history of its wonderful king. Where it is going to, is a matter still on the knees of the gods. It is the general element, so to speak, in which the lesser German States float like islands of more or less uncertain stability, with a great tendency towards disappearing beneath the blue; and the wonder is, that below a certain magnitude they have not been engulfed one and all long since. This absorbent quality of Prussia should be very comforting from the point of view of the distracted student. It is all the more disappointing to find any evidence of a retrogression which might thrust him back into some such state of bewilderment as is

created in the mind by having, at the bidding of inhuman examiners, to draw out maps of England under the Heptarchy. There is a Greek word for a figure of speech signifying the opposite of hyperbole. It has always seemed to me that the playful term Heptarchy is applied by right of that figure of speech. But the Heptarchy, after all, is a bugbear belonging to the "remotest" and "darkest " ages, and need never be dragged out of the lumber-closet except for such degrading purposes as examinations; whereas the mutable character of German things, in spite of the hopes of fusion into one large Prussia, is of to-day, or at least of yesterday.

Is it reasonable that, in an enlightened nineteenth century, a piece of ground in the midst of Prussian territory-a very small piece of ground-should be fenced off, and have its milestones painted afresh, and its population set apart and counted-and be in fact a State? How, under such impossible conditions, can the knowledge of German geography become a "common good," as the phrase is? It cannot; far be it from me to attempt to make it so. I would ask leave to pilot my readers only to one particular spot, to this one little State; there to spy out, if it may be, the loveliness of the land, to catch a glimpse of the lives of men and women of like passions with ourselves, yet different as the soil which nurtures them differs from our own.

The beauties of the Rhine are, I am told, a hackneyed topic. Personally, I have always thought it very moderately beautiful, at least in the height of summer. Of course it has the merit of being full of water, and of rather beautiful water; and here and there a lovely little triangular town flows out of one of the deep side valleys which furrow the mountainous country on either hand, and spreads itself along the curving bank of the great stream. But there is a certain staginess about much of the Rhine; its containing banks, however rocky, have a self-conscious intentional look; and the colouring is often distressingly ugly even in the best light. We will leave it; I will not mention it more lest it become a weariness, and I trust it will not be rash if I take it for granted that the reader knows its general course, from where it begins its northward journey after it has plunged through the Lake of Constance and sharply turned the corner round the southern end of the Black Forest at Basel, to where, after passing many an ancient city, Alt Breisach and Strassburg and Speier and Worms, it reaches Mainz "the golden" and the northern limits of Germania Superior. Here it leaves the curious strip of plain in which it has been comfortably travelling due north between two ranges of mountains running parallel in the same direction-the mountains of the Palatinate on the left, the Odenwald on the right-because it meets an obstacle in the Taunus, the westerly end of the forest-covered mountain-chain which towers in a great curve east and west across the centre of Europe, and therefore has to turn westwards through the Binger Loch, a deep gorge not wholly the work of its own waters, towards the meeting-place of the rivers, "ad confluentum Mosæ et Rheni," as Cæsar has it, towards Coblenz.

The Moselle-winding as the Greek Mæander, and tortuous, one would think, with far better reason-rises nearly as far south as Basel on the western slopes of

the blue Alsatian mountains the Vosges, while the eastern slopes send their waters directly to the Rhine. It sweeps in a wide north-westerly curve round the goodly corner of hill and plain and coal-field-the loss of which fills the French with rage and mourning-and passing close under the walls of Metz, turns towards the north-east, and descends step by step and bend by bend, from where the Saar joins it above Trier, "Trevir metropolis, urbs amœnissima," to its trysting-place with the Rhine. From a little above Trier, the left side of the valley of the Moselle is formed by the south-eastern slopes of the somewhat disorderly crowd of volcanic mountains known as the Eifel, the right side by the northwestern declivities of a continuous range named in succession Hochwald, Idarwald, Hundsrück, and Soon.

This range again, about twentyfive miles broad as the crow flies across the hill and sixty miles in length, has its south-eastern slopes also broken from time totimeby valleys or deep ravines, and across the foot of these flows, almost parallel with the Moselle, another and one of the most beautiful tributaries of the Rhine, the Nahe. And on the left bank of the Nahe, reaching hardly half way up the hill towards the Moselle, lies our little State, the Principality of Birkenfeld an der Nahe-the Nava of the Romans. There may be, nay, there are, States smaller still, but a certain delicacy of feeling forbids our prying into their microscopic circumstances, and we may assume that Birkenfeld is a very good size as States go in Germany. Its area is about 160 square miles-that is, the area of the island of Arran almost to an acre. You can easily saunter across it in two hours of even a warm summer's day, and walk from end to end of it between dawn and dusk. The whole tale of its inhabitants is far below that of the burgh of Leith; and even German geography books know it so little that they most libellously state that its inhabitants speak French, instead of High Dutch as they do speak. But it has a capital and other cities; it has a Government, even a privy council; it has national colours, possibly a national anthem, and a standing army; it has certainly an excellent school board, on which the Jew sits down by the Gentile, be he Catholic or Protestant, in the most enlightened manner; and it has, lastly, a real reigning prince, Prince Peter, who comes from his home nearly 300 miles off in the bleak hungry flats by the North Sea, regularly and officially, once in every five years, like any Prince Peter in a fairy tale, to do a little reigning in Birkenfeld-for a week! And the whole thing was, with out with your leave or by your leave of the inhabitants, carved out of the old Archiepiscopal Electorate of Trier, then part of Prussia, just seventy years ago, and presented to the Duke of Oldenburg. Why, it is hard for an uninitiated student of the great mystery known as the Congress of Vienna to see.

The easiest way to get to most places on dry land in these evil days seems undoubtedly to go by the train. And it is to be feared, Mr Ruskin notwithstanding, that it is time to class lines of railway among the natural features of a country: there even seems some hope that, like the old coaching roads, they may deserve one day to be counted among its beauties. Be that as it may, the railway which travels from Bingen up the valley of the Nahe, and on over

the hills to Metz and Paris, is a remarkably shy and discreet railway, and, particularly where it skirts the little territory of Birkenfeld, plays hide-and-seek in and out of numberless long tunnels, and round the corners of precipices and sharp edges of mountains-or where it does appear, hangs aloft on airy bridges, in the most becoming and delightful way. In less than twenty-four English miles it crosses and recrosses the Nahe on bridges twenty times, and threads its way through ten long tunnels pierced in the solid rock. No one could call a line of railway a disfigurement which subdues obstacles in as intrepid a manner as a Roman road, and which so constantly hides modestly from view just after it has achieved some triumph over contumacious rock or evasive riverbank. On this very intermittent line, the most beautiful point is the station of Oberstein, the largest town, though not the "capital," of the Principality. The line runs at a considerable height along the left bank of the Nahe-which is here a stony mountain-stream-for the space of about a mile, between the ends of two long tunnels pierced through projecting edges of rocky mountain; and the river lies back far below like the arc of a bow on the string. The little mountain town lies on either side of the river, facing towards high noon, between the railway and the circling cliff, and again and again it calls to mind that "little town by river or sea-shore, or mountain built with peaceful citadel," the living pathos of whose eternally silent streets Keats has set to a melody of words as lovely as the urn round whose fair proportions the image of that Attic townlet was moulded by the long-vanished Greek. The little German town, however, is not silent nor desolate,

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