spring up, among those rocks and bounding streams, wild seedlings of Fancy, clustering and blossoming in poetic legends, or shall these Chroniclers monopolize all? - Wise brains have conned the genealogy of Dragons, traced their history afar off among the oldest Chinese legends, which delight, we know, in reproducing these green-eyed monsters grinning defiance from cups and platters and flower-vases. Dragons have dwelt for ever in the islands of the East. Dragons were the emblems carried aloft on standards before the Persian armies ; aye, old Roger Bacon recommends an unguent made of the flesh of the Dragons of Ethiopia said to be efficacious in prolonging human life. Bronzed with antiquity, they pass current yet, these Lindwurms as the German poets call them, whilst the modest appropriation of a modern Yankee sea-dragon has been laughed to scorn,,,but mind ye, it argueth a verie rustic wit, so to doate on worm-eaten elde'. This episode of the great national epic excited my curiosity to know more of its hero Siegfried. The work is full of sorcery and wonders, divided into thirty eight books, curious as portraying the manners of the age, its author unknown. The story turns upon the adventures of the princess Chriemhild of Burgundy, won by Siegfried. He is treacherously murdered. In order to revenge herself, she weds Attila, king of the Huns (Etzel as the Germans call him), hoping through his power to accomplish her purpose. All the kin are invited to Vienna, a dreadful battle ensues, the murderer of Siegfried is brought to the queen, who cuts off his bead with her own hand. Hildebrand revenges him by stabbing the queen“. When Germany roused herself from her long inglorious thraldom to foreign tastes, and began to listen to the notes of her native Bards, the poetry of the Middle Ages. revived, and then was formed what has been called the Romantic School. This poetry not only manifested itself in their songs, but appertained to their painting, building, art, and modes of life. The brothers Boissérée at Bonn were among the first whose attention was called to the merit of the old German art. From sequestrated convents and obscure places they gathered that curious collection of pictures which was purchased by the king of Bavaria in 1827 and remains one of the most splendid features of the gallery at Munich. Thus while the French were transporting to Paris all the well-known works of art, these men employed themselves in exhuming from the dust of old conventchapels, and cobwebbed book-shelves, pictures, traditions, and volumes of ancient German Sagas, which had till now remained without interest. They communicated their enthusiasm to Frederic Schlegel, and through him they asked the opinion of Goethe and backed by such authority, they pursued their researches. Cologne was rich in these treasures, and in five or six years their collection embraced a period of two hundred years. This impetus. being given, various other amateurs continued the same researches, making collections which all tended to one end, the development of art and the national pride in a school of painting which had flourished simultaneously with that of Italy. The inexplicable charm that attracts the taste toward the productions of the Middle Ages is like other mysteries of the mind hard to define, but the naïveté, simplicity, and childlike faith pervading the conceptions of those days excites a tenderness of feeling which supplants any idea of the ridiculous in the crude achievements of old art. CHAPTER III. THE KREUZBERG. ,,It was a strange and fearful sight: ,,The cowls upon their head, ,,The clinging robe and the changing light, WE took a carriage one afternoon and driving up the alley of chestnuts which forms a strait avenue from the old Palace to that of Clemensruhe (of which more hereafter), we turned aside to the right and skirting the walls of the enclosure passed through the little village of Poppelsdorf. In spite of the beauties of nature, everywhere heaped in profusion, these German villages seem constructed to keep out all enjoyment of its charm. Tall, narrow, uncouth-looking houses, gables towards the street, packed so closely together that rarely a gateway is left between. If such occur, it is a wide portal, flanked by stone-pillars, furrowed by time, encrusted with wallmoss, forming the frame-work, not to a flower-garden but a cow-stable, and all its delectable accompaniments. The houses are built of beams of wood transversed fantastically; the interstices filled up with brownish red clay, windows of the very smallest dimensions, and usually a stone bench against the wall, where the good man sits and smokes his pipe at evening when his work is done. The impression is one of total discomfort, and the only evidence there of the existence of feelings beyond the toil for daily bread and the bare necessity of living, are the pots of flowers that garnish the window-sills, telling there is a sense of the beautiful deep-rooted in the human heart, which even poverty cannot eradicate. These window-flowers are universal throughout Germany. We were bent upon visiting the Kreuzberg a little further on, where a chapel built on the site of an old convent of Servites, dating from 1627, is the attraction. From the point where the chapel stands. the eye wanders over the beautiful country of the Rhine, and Bonn lies just below, embosomed among its groves and gardens. They chose well, those old fathers, for rarely was a convent raised, that did not command some beautiful scene of Nature. We entered the chapel through a side-door where crouched some miserable old women mumbling prayers and asking alms in the same breath. Poor old souls, how many benedictions a few groschen bought!,,Never turn thy face from any poor man" is the text of the Germans. The coin is insignificant, it is true, but the habit commendable, no one can deny; the argument against encouraging paupers does not hold here as with us. They are poor, want bread, and so long as one has a halfpenny to give, they are helped. It is only however in these country-excursions that demands are made upon one's charity by the old and decrepit; in the cities provision is made for them and no street-begging allowed. The chapel of the Kreuzberg bears now but little evidence of prosperity, once a pilgrimage of some importance, now a villagechurch with white-washed walls and naked altar, the flowers and ornaments faded and covered with dust, but the sorrowful image was there, Mary holding the dead body of the Saviour in her arms. However coarsely wrought there is always sympathy for that mother-grief-a puny lamp burned before her. But is was not to this shrine our pilgrimage had been devoted, nor to that of the Holy Stairs in the rear of the church, said to be the facsimile of the one our Saviour trod when he ascended to the judgment-hall; our visit was to the Dead. In front of the image of the Virgin lay a trap-door leading to a vault beneath the chapel where we were to descend. The sacristan lighted a torch at the taper on the shrine, and preceded us down a wooden ladder. There below, like carved effigies, side by side, lay the ancient Fathers of the convent in cowl and cassock, preserved in a mummied state by some peculiarity of the soil or dryness of the air, their skins and garments reduced to one uniform clay-color, this very fact taking from the disagreeable effect of Death. In many the features remain formed, on the clasped hands the nails are still visible, and some hair remains on the chin of one of them. Most have lain there three hundred years, the last interment was ninety years ago. I asked if exposure to the upper air would not decompose the whole into dust. The sacristan told me the same idea had suggested itself to a young Englishman some time since, who stole a finger to test the experiment. However that horrible finger remained goading his conscience, with the dread of hooded Monk haunting his path, to claim his own; for who knows from these prolific Banks of Rhine, rife with such legends, what might have hap pened, had not the rifled finger been restored. The Monk regained his own, and the Briton his peace of mind. On our drive homeward we stopped at the Clemensruhe Palace. It has been appropriated to the museums of natural history, and its gardens to botanical specimens. The collections of minerals and fossils are considered especially interesting as illustrating the geology of the Rhine and the volcanic deposits of the Seven Mountains. One |