Part 14

Seeing a shrubbery and seats, I sit down by a little table for repose, when in a moment, from some invisible source overhead, like the orchestra in Wilhelm Meister, there bursts forth the most bewitching music. I am in heaven. I hear the hosannas of the celestial hosts. The shops are where the redeemed work for love of men.

The people passing to and fro know nothing of accounts, nor the perplexities of trade. They have ceased from their troubles--are at home--at rest. I am brought to eat ambrosia and drink the nectar and hear the music of the gods, and yet I am but a novice in this celestial city, and wait for the loving hands that shall lead me to the friends gone before....

I have made the tour of "Unter den Linden," and am sitting here just long enough to collect my wandering thoughts before moving on. I feel as if I had been the victim of one of De Quincey's dreams, and wait the awakening that will release me from its spell. As I recline here at my leisure, with a sandstone fountain making music at my feet, and grapevines and beeches embowering me about, I get a good view of the famous Brandenburg Gate and the statue of Victory, with her chariot and four, on the top. As I look on the magnificent group from where I am on the Thiergarten side, Victory has her back to me, her horses galloping with full speed towards the palace of the king. I had supposed, from pictures I had seen, that she was driving towards the park. I cannot have been mistaken. If so, why was such a ponderous mass turned around?

While endeavoring to explain to myself what seemed so strange, a young man took a seat by my side. Addressing him, "How is it? Isn't Victory reversed?" "_Ja wohl!_" he replies. How assuring the affix "_wohl_" in the hearty German expression of assent! It is the abracadabra that drives out fear, and fills up the great gulf between the stranger and yourself, enabling your sympathies to run over and interchange. Long live the noble people that always say, "Yes, well," and never, "Yes, ill."

"_Ja wohl!_" he replies. "Why?" "Well, you see,"--I knew by the expression lighting up his face that he was going to tell me of something that pleased,--"it was before the last struggle that Victory was driving her horses in the direction of Paris. The war came. The French were victors, and carried off our statue as a trophy to flatter their vanity and decorate their capital at the same time. Good, but in '70 it was our turn. The whipped became whippers. We beat the French and brought our Victory home, replanted her on her original site, with her back to Frankreich, her face looking proudly towards the Fatherland, as if she were glad and happy to be at home."

[Here we pass over pages of description of what was to be seen in the galleries and churches, to come again to the traveller's out-door impressions.]

In the first place, the climate, to my surprise, is perfect. I am sitting here at noon in August--smothering with us--in an atmosphere exhilarating and cool; men are passing with light overcoats, as if they were a trifle anxious to anticipate the September winds, and this is what the weather has been since leaving Erin, where it was, to my surprise, too dry and warm. Remember, that all I say about countries and people is only what _I_ have felt and seen. Every evening I wear a light overcoat, and find it about right. In the second place, there is no dust in Berlin, simply because the streets, which are better--all of them--than the concrete around the Philadelphia City Hall, are never allowed to get dirty; are _flooded with water_ and _dried_ every morning, and kept so. Nothing objectionable is permitted to remain on them for a moment. _Clean, uniformed men_--and handsome, gentlemanly-looking fellows they are, too--are constantly moving along with enclosed wheelbarrows, shovels, and brooms, removing whatever may offend; even their instruments for cleaning are designed artistically and free from soil. I can imagine the wheelbarrows attractive as flower receptacles at large gatherings, so graceful are they. You would tie bows on the shovels and hang them on the wall.

With these whatever is offensive on the streets is at once emptied into cast-iron receptacles, in themselves ornamental, arranged along the thoroughfares, and which are emptied before daybreak every day. The streets, as I said before, are many of them flooded with water daily, then dried with enormous squilgees (that's what they are called on shipboard),--that is, a band of rubber fitted into a socket of wood, something like what, with us, careful housewives use to dry windows, except that these are a yard wide, and one sweep of them over a wet street leaves a band its width as dry as a board and as clean as a dinner plate. In order to do this, of course the streets have to be absolutely smooth,--as they are, not the slightest indentation being visible. Then neatly-painted and handsomely-designed water-carts traverse _every_ street a number of times daily, ejecting showers of _misty_ spray; a work of supererogation, you say, to prevent any particle of dust that may be left from getting into the air. It is actually true that a child with a cambric dress could roll in the middle of any crowded thoroughfare with as much security from soil as if occupying a chair in a summer boarding-house.

The cleanliness and order exceeds even that of England or Scotland, than which, until you come to Germany, you think nothing can exceed. If, for example, a gentleman in lighting a cigar throws a match on the street, it is picked up; a leaf from a tree, a bit of paper from a store, a blade of grass, all are at once removed, and by men, too, that are Germans; that is,--clean, respectful, reputable, and intelligent. Even in the business avenues, and around the wholesale stores, the pavements and streets are as clean as the white steps of the homes of Philadelphia. Most of the streets are as wide as our Broad Street, some wider; as, for example, Unter den Linden.

That you may see for yourself this noble highway of the capital, allow me to conduct you across. "When I speak of horses imagine that you see them." Just suppose we are crossing together, and because of the many vehicles and people on horseback, I will take you by the hand, so. We have been admiring the trees and flowers in front of Prince Blücher's palace, one of a series of palaces on each side of the street near the Brandenburg Gate; they stand back from the pavements, and have extensive flower-gardens in front, the only separation between these and the very wide pavement being a low hedge of delicate, almost thornless, magenta roses. You remember--or did I tell you?--with what genial pride the old gardener, yesterday, told us that this same was a perpetual bloomer,--summer and winter,--that it was a German creation,--the development of its efflorescent peculiarity having been begun away back; but that he himself it was, by crossing it with _Rosa centifolia_, that had added the apex to the temple of its perfection,--namely, duplication of petals, diminution of stamen, heliotropism,--turning its face towards the sun, by which acquired habit the winter bloom has become as profuse as that of summer.

Well, we have been looking over this two-foot-high blooming hedge-row, and have decided to cross to the gardens on the other side; so now hold my hand and fear not, for life is sacred in the Fatherland, and we are under the protection of the police. You see that the gardens in front of the palaces used by the nobility and foreign ministers are about as wide as Broad Street, the pavement for the public forty feet more. We leave this and cross a strip as wide as an ordinary avenue, paved with square blocks,--this is exclusively for wagons, drays, and all vehicles of trade,--then a row of trees; after this we cross a band about the same width, but as smooth and as hard as granite; this is for pleasure-carriages only; then another row of trees; then a road the width of an ordinary street, which is neither concrete nor Belgian blocks, but a mixture of loam and sand, soft enough to be easy for horses' feet, and damp enough to keep it from being converted into clouds of dust; this is used by equestrians only, and a beautiful sight the lady and gentleman riders present every afternoon on their way to the park. We cross this soft way, and are in a wide promenade, perhaps eighty feet broad, arched over with the branches of lofty oaks, chestnuts, butternuts, lindens, beeches, and the like,--originally lindens only, hence the name "Under the Lindens,"--with elegant seats arranged along its entire length, on one of which we will sit down and rest, for we are half-way across the avenue, or rather series of avenues, which up here is flanked with lofty palaces and gardens of delight. On one side you go to, on the other you come from, the park. The lower part of this multiple avenue, instead of palaces and gardens, has the most magnificent residences, shops, and hotels that I have ever seen....

Germany seems one great family with no foreign help, where each member recognizes and respects the position of the other, and are united in the training of their children and the development of their own minds; but not as though, like other people, they had to _resolve_ to be good; this, as a matter of course; virtue appears to come to them by nature. Everything they do seems a pleasure rather than a task, as if they said that industry and thrift are essential to happiness, labor the prelude to enjoyment; besides, they are never in a hurry. They take an hour to drink a glass of beer, and talk of heaven, earth, and the waters under the earth while sipping it. The gesticulating German, outside of books, I have not yet seen; what they do they do well; they enjoy doing it, and they do it that it may be a joy to others, and it always is. This feeling enters into every service, from the making of a pin to the concocting of a new system of theology, or a free-and-easy way of getting to heaven; and then the universality of culture that prevails, thanks to the standing army and the omnipresent public schools,--they have private schools too, to be sure, but then these snob and denominational affairs, unlike with us, just as the public schools, are under strict _governmental inspection_, and their managers are not permitted to teach what they please, unless what they please is for the good of the pupils, the country, and the people at large. It is because of this national surveillance that the private schools of Germany are said to be as good as those under the direct control of the government.

Familiarizing the pupil with music and the natural sciences is an important part of German education, especially the study of _animal organisms_, "birds, beasts, and reptiles," as we used to say of Goldsmith's "Animated Nature." As an illustration at hand, since sitting here in front of a garden near the Kaiser's palace, putting upon record the above traits, a workman watering a lawn noticed me looking up for a moment, just as he had enveloped the top of a lofty spruce with spray. Of course, as the sun was shining, and each particle of water becoming a prism, the disintegration of the white rays of light resulted in a rainbow, curved partially around the trees. I look at it, racking my memory at the same time for the word I need; he sees I observe it and am pleased; he nods, and says, "_Schön_" (beautiful); I reply, "Very." In a few moments, dragging the hose towards me, throwing the water over a weeping birch, and making another rainbow, he points towards it. "Our Herr Professor Helmholtz," pointing towards the University, "says there are but three prismatic colors, and yet I can now see seven, can't you?--red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet; and I suppose a Frenchman could see seventy, for it is said that they can see colors where other people only see shades." He continues to water the grass, and I, having found my missing link, to write.

[Dr. Woods next describes what is to be seen within the German beer-gardens,--the music, the decorum, the absence of intoxication, the intelligence manifested in conversation. Then to out-door life again.]

Other traits. Houses have curtains on the outside of windows as well as on the inside, and windows are nearly always double, with a space of about four inches between. They open outward and inward, instead of up and down; when closed, all noise is shut out. Indeed, there is no noise on even the busiest streets, which are so smooth that no sounds are heard but those of horses' feet; no screaming of papers or wares of any sort is permitted, and no chimes! Then, again, people in the most ordinary circumstances have fine lace curtains and beautifully woven fabrics hanging around in graceful festoons, portières, statuary, pictures, flowers, birds, and books; often the most beautiful things in the way of prints are pinned frameless on the walls; there are beautiful marquetry floors, but no carpets.

Again, the orchards throughout the country are without protecting walls, just as farms are. At each corner a stone marks the division, and when ploughing, a couple of reversed furrows from stone to stone serves both as a division and promenade, and crops are not only grown to this line of demarcation, but grow over it, so that at a distance there is no division at all. I have seen branches bent to the ground with ripe fruit, and children walking under them to _buy_ from an old woman or man across the way, never apparently even thinking of molesting what is not theirs. This is one of the things that fill you with wonder. In Weimar, between the Goethe House and the principal school, a long branch _loaded with red apples_ hung over the way, almost touching my head, and yet it was under this that hundreds of children passed daily to and from school.

A pleasant custom in Berlin, as in London, is window-gardening--windows constructed so on purpose, the glass projecting a couple of feet beyond the side of the house, forming attractive ferneries, wherein are contained various sorts of cryptogami, as well as flowers in bloom, needing but little attention, as the moisture evaporating from the soil, etc., having no way of escaping, is taken up by the leaves. Also at the entrance to houses I have noticed beautiful dwarf apple-trees, with glossy leaves, and bearing an abundance of diminutive fruit. On one of these little trees, yesterday, I counted fifty-three ripe apples. These on the pavement day and night, and just the height of a boy's hand in passing, notwithstanding what I had observed about fenceless orchards, made me suspect them apples of Sodom, or they certainly would have been plucked. To satisfy curiosity, I called on a florist having some for sale, and found that they tasted as good as they looked. I have concluded, therefore, that if Adam and Eve had been Germans there would have been no Fall; and I know no race doing more towards having Eden restored than these same people.

A RAMBLE IN PRUSSIA.

STEPHEN POWERS.

[Country life in Prussia is well delineated in the following description of a journey on foot from Wittenberg to Potsdam. It is not an alluring picture, and brings us into the presence of a stolid generation such as would scarcely be looked for in the rural districts of that active realm.]

Once out of Wittenberg, I journeyed on along the ancient royal highway, between the ever-welcome colonnades of stately poplars, planted that the royal head might never be scorched by the too ardent sun of summer. The sun shone as brightly as it ever does in blue old Germany, but what a weary, weary land to my eyes, on the pitiless cold May-day, was that sandy champaign, almost utterly naked in its hopeless sterility, and diversified only now and then by a bald-headed knoll, swelling broadly up with a thousand acres! So indescribably blue and cold and pinched was it, without any vegetation but a forest of cultivated pines, which, after a quarter of a century, had struggled up with their wretched, scraggy stems only fifteen feet! The very soil looked blue and thin and skinny, and the rye looked blue, and so meagre and chilled that it could not conceal the ground or the knees of the men who plucked up the weeds.

All the dismal immensity of this fenceless, hedgeless, houseless waste, except an acre of rye in a thousand, was given up to the sorrel, the lichens, and the quitches. The very air seemed poor and attenuated like thin skimmed milk. All the houses were clustered together in little villages far apart, where they huddled close, as if for warmth; the dead, dull peat-fires gave forth no cheerful wreathing smoke; and in all the desolate waste there was scarcely a soul abroad. The faces of the yellow-haired children, who were occasionally watching some geese, were mottled with blue and purple and goose-pimples, and if a man ventured abroad to pluck up weeds in the stunted rye, which seemed to shiver with a kind of rustling, starved chilliness, his hands were bluer than the air. So utterly worn out, so bluish-wan and starved with the lapse of untold centuries, seemed all the earth and the air of that Germany which I looked out upon on that dismal May forenoon.

Lamartine says the blood of the Germans is blue, but that of these Brandenburgers must certainly be sour.

It will readily be believed that I did not undertake a pilgrimage through this inexpressibly bleak region in pursuit of fine landscapes. I wished only to visit, by their own firesides and in their own fields, that sturdy, grim, Puritanic race of Brandenburgers, to whom Prussia is primarily indebted for all her greatness.

It was weary hours after the middle of the day before the spires of Wittenberg disappeared below a sand-hill. The afternoon was far spent, and I began to cast longing glances ahead in search of an eligible tavern, for I thoroughly agree with Dr. Johnson that "there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern."

I had come up with a thumping lout of a young peasant, who strode along with his "clouted shoon," measuring about a yard and a quarter at a stride, whose voice blubbered and gurgled up out of his stomach in such a manner that the fierce wind whisked it away, and left me nothing but an occasional horse-laugh (whereupon I would also laugh, though I had not the remotest notion of the matters whereof he was discoursing); and by his advice I passed several inns, though I found afterwards, to my sorrow, he was looking only for the cheapest. At last we came to one which was meaner than all the others, but I was too weary to go a step farther. It bore the pretentious name of the inn of the Green Linden. It was a mere hovel, built of cobbles and mud-stuccoed, tawny-yellow within, greenish-yellowish without, with an earthen floor and benches around the walls. Above the door were twined some sprigs of Whitsuntide birch, which I had seen during the day on the peasants' hats, wagons, and everywhere.

Around a pine table were eight or ten men and hobbledehoys, each with a _Schoppen_ of terribly stiff beer before him, and most of them smoking the long goosenecked porcelain pipe, while four of them were intent on cards. The men were hard, gristly-faced, sour-blooded fellows, who only muttered now and then a monosyllable, which I could seldom understand; while the youths looked on with the most vacuous, loamy countenances imaginable. So intent were they on the miserable game that they gave no heed to our arrival, and when I endeavored to ascertain who was the landlord, I received only a blank stare or a gesture of impatience. I sat down and waited, and I confess for a few minutes my enthusiasm for the Prussian people fell absolutely to the freezing-point.

After about half an hour the landlord seemed to be disturbed in his mind by a suspicion that I was a foreigner, drew near and ascertained that fact, whereupon he brought me some vile black coffee and some good wheaten _Semmel_, and then returned to his occupation. The players continued at their game far into the night, and though the stakes were of the most trifling nature, often only a half-penny, they displayed a fierce and obstinate eagerness which was surprising. They would rise up on their feet, lean far across the table and smite it with appalling violence. When they at last desisted, and were preparing to disperse, they collected about me, and, finding I was an American, listened to me awhile with a kind of drowsy, immovable passiveness, while the smoke lazily swirled above their heads. Unlike the lively Swabians and the joyous drinkers of the sunny wine of Freiburg, they scarcely asked any questions or expressed any interest beyond grunting their assent or wonder.

At last the host and myself were left alone, and then he proceeded to prepare the only couch he could offer by shaking down on the floor a bundle of rye straw. He tucked me all up, as if I were one of his young _Buben_, shook the hand which I reached out from the straw, and left me with a cheerful _Schlafen Sie wohl_. In the adjoining room a lusty fellow stretched himself on a bench, pillowed his head on a portentous loaf of rye bread, not having even inserted that useful article of diet into a pillow-case, and there he snored--_stertitque supinus_--the livelong night in a tone so audible that I was greatly tempted to rise and introduce a wisp of rye straw judiciously into his windpipe.

When I sat up on my couch next morning, pulling the straw out of my hair, I said to myself, like Richard, "Oh, I have passed a miserable night!" I had not had any "fearful dreams," nor, for that matter, any sleep, that I was aware of; neither had I any "ugly sights," because it was too dark to see them, but I felt them. They appeared to be greatly rejoiced to be permitted, once in their lives, to extract blood out of a man's veins instead of beer.

The next day I passed through spectacles of the most wonderfully minute and unceasing toil. In an artificial pine-forest, where the trees were become too large to be ploughed, there were men on their knees plucking the weeds between the rows; others in long sheep-skin cloaks were weeding fields of flax; a woman was culling in a royal forest the merest sprigs and leaf-stems for fuel; others along the roadside snipped off the close, short fleece of grass, and carried it in mighty bundles on their backs for the stalled cattle. Here a stalwart yeoman lazily leans his chin on his crook, guarding three sheep as they nimbly nibble! Peasant-women, going to the village to hawk their little produce, shuffled along with their wooden shoes, making a prodigious dust, chatting cheerfully with their stolid lords, though they were bowed down nearly to the earth beneath the intolerable weight of vegetables. And the infamous brutal tyrants trudged along beside the poor women, never even offering to touch the burdens with so much as one of their fingers!

I think the Prussians will certainly never "witch the world with noble horsemanship." The horses are splendid creatures for farm-animals, strong and glossy and round, superb as the finest Clydesdales; but the owners seem to have no confidence upon their backs, and little skill in guiding them in vehicles. The Prussians are by no means a chivalric race, in the etymologic sense. In all my travels in Prussia I have yet to see a civilian on horseback outside of a city, and even there it is usually only officers who prance through the streets. The immense superiority of the Hungarian cavalry over the Prussian was abundantly demonstrated in the Bohemian campaign until the magnificent infantry battalions turned the scale; and the dreaded "three Uhlans" of Edmond About were far oftener Poles than Prussians.