CHAPTER II. Il n'y a point de terre si bien moissonnée BONN is lovely, its site upon the Rhine, its beautifully wooded parks, now become academic groves, its palaces, retaining their external aspect, all remain; the only change, the Drones have been ejected and Bees have possession; widely different the daring conceited Bursch, his cap set defiantly forward or cast carelessly sideways, to the prim ecclesiastical proprieties of former days. The student-cap is a badge of fellowship with some society or club; the white caps usually noblemen, the others wear red, blue, green, or party-colored. In changing proprietors, the old motto has evidently not been expunged from the town-records, ,, Unter dem Krummstab ist gut wohnen" (it is good living under the Crosier); for the immortal Beer-Mug holds as prominent a post here, as in its pays par excellence, Bavaria, if I may judge by the vociferous demands of some handsome young students who frequented the gardens beneath our windows, and whose bursts of song enlivened us, without being offensively vulgar. These young men gave vent to genuine hilarity of spirits, and they were men of two or three and twenty, indulging in almost childish glee, rejoicing in existence unshackled by care; with us, they would al ready be in heavy harness, dragging up hill the burden of life. Bonn is the chosen university to educate the young princes of Germany, who associate to a certain extent with their comrades. At Bonn the splendors of the Rhine begin. From the gardens along the river you watch all the beautiful changes which evening - sunsets cast upon the seven mountains and the ruin-crowned Godesberg, from the hills without the town, all those varieties and combinations of natural beauties, which have been the theme of travellers for ages. I remained at Bonn many weeks, exploring its environs far and near, but our expedition to the Drachenfels produced an impression indelible for life. There be those who dare say the Ruins of the Rhine are a hackneyed theme; such will appreciate the enthusiasm of the English lady who, hearing me exclaim at first sight of a ruin, said: ,,Let me look upon the woman who has never seen a ruin". Coming, as we do, from a land where there are no ,, far-reaching memories", no,, birthright of a pictured. illuminated Past", we feel perhaps a stronger appeal to the sentimental and imaginative, than Europeans reared under the shadow of these old memorials. They speak with the same fervor of our great virgin - forests, our wide-stretching prairies, the volume of our mighty rivers, and are lost in wonder at the sublime grandeur of nature as it exists in the New World. A German officer of high rank told me that twenty years ago he was for throwing up his commission, shouldering an axe, and,,away westward he" from sheer enthusiasm after reading Cooper's descriptions of our forest-scenery and life in the woods. It was proposed one glorious afternoon we should visit the Oel-Berg, the highest of the seven mountains, and we crossed the Rhine on a flying-bridge to the little village of Koenigswinter. Passing up a straggling street, we found at the end a troop of asses waiting to be hired. These were furnished with seats, by courtesy called saddles, a sort of armchair covered with cherry-color, in which when once a lady has established herself, there is but little visible of the animal save the four spindle-shanks and the ears, his hereditary honor. Mine, named Myer, was an ass unexampled among his kind, ambitious, requiring no urging, no argument to force him on his way. We ascended gradually by a pathway through a thicket. Once I caught a glimpse of the glories in store for us, through an opening, but only for a moment; we again turned into a thickly wooded path, Myer steadily pursuing his upward way, Hans, his master, following, I with my own. thoughts, our party having straggled from each other at the outset; but I did not feel alone, there were crowds of familiar friends nodding to me as I passed; wild flowers, whispering pleasant tales of home, while I wondered in foreign lands to meet the pied blossoms so familiar to my childhood. They brought trains of thought and the way did not seem long. I was surprised when a sudden turn brought our party together, and we found ourselves on a bit of table-land, 1453 feet above the level of the river. The rich inner country lay before us, the vineclad hills around, the sun was sinking in a cloud of golden crimson, in the East a great round harvest-moon, not clad,, in silver sheen" but golden too, shedding yellow light. We paused all of us in deep silence. It was like a sermon, as some one aptly remarked, a feeling assimilating Nature with Nature's God, the same that prompted the Pastor on the Alps at sunrise to raise his hat and say:,,Let us pray"! We felt in the glories of nature a revealing of the Godhead and were silent. The weather was so serene, the moon so cloudless, it was proposed we should ascend the Drachenfels that night. There it lay towering before us, with a dense mass of black forest filling the valley between. To me it seemed an impossibility, but Onward was the word, and Myer obeyed with an alacrity untold of in the annals of his tribe, carrying me in ten minutes far ahead of all the party. This enhanced my enjoyment. The sound of merry voices on scenes like these disenchants the imagination and diverts the mind from contemplation; the profound Cathedral solemnity of nature demanded silence. Winding through thicket-paths, dark and dense, now we came upon openings in the wood, now plunged into deep ravines, again fronted amphitheatres of green hills illuminated by the moon, always toiling upward, hardly discerning the path before us, shadowed as it was with matted copse-wood. Suddenly we came upon the Steinberg, a parapet of rocks that seem to reach the clouds. Large blocks of stone have been detached from its sides and transported to Cologne for the repairing of the Cathedral, but little do they know, those hewers of stone, they leave behind a grander monument, a Cathedral of God's own work,,,a mockery of Man's art" towering in its might of architectural impossibilities. Here we paused and dismounted under the shadow of those mighty rock-masses, which recalled to my mind descriptions of Petrea. In the sublimity of the solemn silent night fast gathering around us, my eye rested on the meek patient expression of the poor tired asses. It was no transition from the sublime to the ridiculous, it was a mute appeal to the heart's best feelings, and the words. of the poet seemed made for the time and place: ,,The moon sits o'er the huge oak-tree; The soul of all her softest rays On yonder placid creature plays As if she wished to cheer the hardships of the oppress'd". Again the word was given, we mounted, another quarter of an hour's upward toiling, and we found ourselves at the base of the far-famed,,castled crag of Drachenfels". It was verging midnight, we looked down upon the Rhine silvered by the stream of moonlight, the adjacent country veiled in that dreamy indefiniteness of night-vapor. One or two fishing-boats were floating on the bosom of the river, with a lamp at their prow, glimmering like glowworms in the distance, the mountain. and the ruined tower above us, half light, half shade, imagination carried back to days of shadows standing under broken archways, beckoning the adventurous spectator onward. The Dragon's Cave below, the fair Gunhilda imprisoned there, by the ruthless lord of Drachenfels rescued by Siegfried, the hero of the Niebelungen, who slew the Dragon and restored the lady to her father. We have to thank the Past full often for the pleasure of the Present, but Nature, the great Mother, was there, and memory will fondly cherish through life that glorious midnight-hour upon the Drachenfels. Such was my initiation in the legendary lore of the Rhine, and I thought of the wild forest-clad mountains of my native land, of the boundless view from the Kaatskill, of the noble Hudson, that rival of the Rhine diminished to a silver-thread, winding through the harvest-colored lands, gold and brown and green, earth's motley. I wondered whether in the world's progress there ever would |