72. LETTER LXXII.
We had followed stream after stream through a
succession of delicious valleys for a hundred miles.
Descending from a slight eminence, we came upon
the broad and rapid Muhr, and soon after caught sight
of a distant citadel upon a rock. As we approached,
it struck me as one of the most singular freaks of nature
I had ever seen. A pyramid, perhaps three hundred
feet in height, and precipitous on every side, rose
abruptly in the midst of a broad and level plain, and
around it in a girdle of architecture, lay the capital
of Styria. The fortress on the summit hung like an
eagle's nest over the town, and from its towers, a pistol-shot
would reach the outermost point of the wall.
Wearied with travelling near three hundred miles
without sleep, I dropped upon a bed at the hotel, with
an order to be called in two hours. It was noon, and
we were to remain at Gratz till the next morning.
My friend, the Hungarian, had promised as he threw
himself on the opposite bed, to wake and accompany
me in a walk through the town, but the shake of a
stout German chambermaid at the appointed time had
no effect upon him, and I descended to my dinner
alone. I had lost my interpreter. The carte was in
German, of which I did not know even the letters.
After appealing in vain in French and Italian to the
persons eating near me, I fixed my finger at hazard
upon a word, and the waiter disappeared. The result
was a huge dish of cabbage cooked in some filthy oil
and graced with a piece of beef. I was hesitating
whether to dine on bread or make another attempt,
when a gentlemanly man of some fifty years came in
and took the vacant seat at my table. He addressed
me immediately in French, and smiling at my difficulties,
undertook to order a dinner for me something
less national. We improved our acquaintance with a
bottle of Johannesburgh, and after dinner he kindly
offered to accompany me in my walk through the
city.
Gratz is about the size of Boston, a plain German
city, with little or no pretensions to style. The military
band was playing a difficult waltz very beautifully
in the public square, but no one was listening except
a group of young men dressed in the worst taste of
dandyism. We mounted by a zig-zag path to the
fortress. On a shelf of the precipice, half way up,
hangs a small casino, used as a beer-shop. The view
from the summit was a feast to the eye. The wide
and lengthening valley of the Muhr lay asleep beneath
its loads of grain, its villas and farmhouses, the picture
of “waste and mellow fruitfulness,” the rise to
the mountains around the head of the valley was clustered
with princely dwellings, thick forests with glades
between them, and churches with white slender spires
shooting from the bosom of elms, and right at our
feet, circling around the precipitous rock for protection,
lay the city enfolded in its rampart, and sending
up to our ears the sound of every wheel that rolled
through her streets. Among the striking buildings
below, my friend pointed out to me a palace which he
said had been lately purchased by Joseph Bonaparte,
who was coming here to reside. The people were
beginning to turn out for their evening walk upon the
ramparts which are planted with trees and laid out for
a promenade, and we descended to mingle in the
crowd.
My old friend had a great many acquaintances.
He presented me to several of the best-dressed people
we met, all of whom invited me to supper. I had
been in Italy almost a year and a half, and such a
thing had never happened to me. We walked about
until six, and as I prefer ed going to the play, which
opened at that early hour, we took tickets for “Der
Schlimme Leisel,” and were seated presently in one of
the simplest and prettiest theatres I have ever seen.
Der Schlimme Leisel was an old maid who kept
house for an old bachelor brother, proposing, at the
time the play opens, to marry. Her dislike to the
match, from the dread of losing her authority over
his household, formed the humor of the piece, and
was admirably represented. After various unsuccessful
attempts to prevent the nuptials, the lady is brought
to the house, and the old maid enters in a towering
passion, throws down her keys, and flirts out of the
room with a threat that she “will go to America!”
Fortunately she is not driven to that extremity. The
lady has been already married secretly to a poorer
lover, and the old bachelor, after the first shock of
the discovery, settles a fortune on them, and returns
to his celibacy and his old maid sister, to the satisfaction
of all parties. Certainly the German is the most
unmusical language of Babel. If my good old friend
had not translated it for me word for word, I should
scarce have believed the play to be more than a gibbering
pantomime. I shall think differently when I
have learned it, no doubt, but a strange language
strikes upon one's ear so oddly! I was quite too tired
when the play was over (which, by the way, was at
the sober hour of nine), to accept any of the kind invitations
of which my companion reminded me. We
supped
tête-à-tête, instead, at the hotel. I was delighted
with my new acquaintance. He was an old citizen
of the world. He had left Gratz at twenty, and after
thirty years wandering from one part of the globe to
the other, had returned to end his days in his birth-place.
His relations were all dead, and speaking all
the languages of Europe, he preferred living at a hotel
for the society of strangers. With a great deal of
wisdom, he had preserved his good humor toward the
world; and I think I have rarely seen a kinder and
never a happier man. I parted from him with regret,
and the next morning at daylight, had resumed my
seat at the
Eil-wagon.
Imagine the Hudson, at the highlands, reduced to
a sparkling little river a bowshot across, and a rich
valley thridded by a road accompanying the remaining
space between the mountains, and you have the
scenery for the first thirty miles beyond Gratz. There
is one more difference. On the edge of one of the
most towering precipices, clear up against the clouds,
hang the ruins of a noble castle. The rents in the
wall, and the embrazures in the projecting turrets,
seem set into the sky. Trees and vines grow within
and about it, and the lacings of the twisted roots seem
all that keep it together. It is a perfect “castle in
the air.”
A long day's journey and another long night (during
which we passed Neustadt, on the confines of Hungary)
brought us within sight of Baden, but an hour or
two from Vienna. It was just sunrise, and market-carts
and pedestrians and suburban vehicles of all descriptions
notified us of our approach to a great capital.
A few miles farther we were stopped in the midst
of an extensive plain by a crowd of carriages. A
criminal was about being guillotined. What was that
to one who saw Vienna for the first time? A few
steps farther the postillion was suddenly stopped. A
gentleman alighted from a carriage in which were two
ladies, and opened the door of the diligence. It was
the bride of the soldier-apothecary come to meet him
with her mother and brother. He was buried in dust,
just waked out of sleep, a three day's beard upon his
face, and, at the best, not a very lover-like person.
He ran to the carriage door, jumped in, and there was
an immediate cry for water. The bride had fainted!
We left her in his arms and drove on. The courier
had no bowels for love.
There is a small Gothic pillar before us, on the rise
of a slight elevation. Thence we shall see Vienna.
“Stop, thou tasteless postillion!” Was ever such a
scene revealed to mortal sight! It is like Paris from
the Barrière de l'Etoile—it seems to cover the world.
Oh, beautiful Vienna! What is that broad water on
which the rising sun glances so brightly? “The
Danube!” What is that unparalleled Gothic structure
piercing the sky? What columns are these? What
spires? Beautiful, beautiful city!
Vienna.—It must be a fine city that impresses one
with its splendor before breakfast, after driving all night
in a mail-coach. It was six o'clock in the morning
when I left the postoffice, in Vienna, to walk to a
hotel. The shops were still shut, the milkwomen
were beating at the gates, and the short, quick ring
upon the church bells summoned all early risers to
mass. A sudden turn brought me upon a square. In
its centre stood the most beautiful fabric that has ever
yet filled my eye. It looked like the structure of a
giant, encrusted by fairies—a majestically proportioned
mass, and a spire tapering to the clouds, but a surface
so curiously beautiful, so traced and fretted, so full of
exquisite ornament, that it seemed rather some curious
cabinet gem, seen through a magnifier, than a building
in the open air. In these foreign countries, the laborer
goes in with his load to pray, and I did not hesitate to
enter the splendid church of St. Etienne, though a
man followed me with a portmanteau on his back.
What a wilderness of arches! Pulpits, chapels, altars,
ciboriums, confessionals, choirs, all in the exquisite
slenderness of Gothic tracery, and all of one venerable
and timeworn die, as if the incense of a myriad censers
had steeped them in their spicy odors. The mass
was chanting, and hundreds were on their knees about
me, and not one without some trace that he had come
in on his way to his daily toil. It was the hour of the
poor man's prayer. The rich were asleep in their beds.
The glorious roof over their heads, the costly and
elaborated pillars against which they pressed their foreheads,
the music and the priestly service, were, for that
hour, theirs alone. I seldom have felt the spirit of a
place of worship so strong upon me.
The foundations of St. Etienne were laid seven hundred
years ago. It has twice been partly burnt, and
has been embellished in succession by nearly all the
emperors of Germany. Among its many costly tombs,
the most interesting is that of the hero Eugene of Savoy,
erected by his niece, the Princess Therese, of Liechtenstein.
There is also a vault in which it is said, in
compliance with an old custom, the entrails of all the
emperors are deposited.
Having marked thus much upon my tablets, I remembered
the patient porter of my baggage, who had
taken the opportunity to drop on his knees while I was
gazing about, and having achieved his matins, was now
waiting submissively till I was ready to proceed. A
turn or two brought us to the hotel, where a bath and
a breakfast soon restored me, and in an hour I was
again on the way with a valet de place, to visit the
tomb of the son of Napoleon.
He lies in the deep vaults of the capuchin convent,
with eighty-four of the imperial family of Austria beside
him. A monk answered our pull at the cloister-bell,
and the valet translated my request into German. He
opened the gate with a guttural “Yaw!” and lighting
a wax candle at a lamp burning before the image of
the Virgin, unlocked a massive brazen door at the end
of the corridor, and led the way into the vault. The
capuchin was as pale as marble, quite bald, though
young, and with features which expressed, I thought,
the subdued fierceness of a devil. He impatiently
waved away the officious interpreter after a moment or
two, and asked me if I understood Latin. Nothing
could have been mere striking than the whole scene.
The immense bronze sarcophagi, lay in long isles behind
railings and gates of iron, and as the long-robed
monk strode on with his lamp through the darkness,
pronouncing the name and title of each as he unlocked
the door and struck it with his heavy key, he seemed
to me, with his solemn pronunciation, like some mysterious
being calling forth the imperial tenants to judgment.
He appeared to have a something of scorn in
his manner as he looked on the splendid workmanship
of the vast coffin and pronounced the sounding titles of
the ashes within. At that of the celebrated Emperess
Maria Theresa alone, he stopped to make a comment.
It was a simple tribute to her virtues, and he uttered it
slowly, as if he were merely musing to himself. He
passed on to her husband, Francis the first, and then
proceeded uninterruptedly till he came to a new copper
coffin. It lay in a niche, beneath a tall, dim window,
and the monk, merely pointing to the inscription, set
down his lamp, and began to pace up and down the
damp floor, with his head on his breast, as if it was a
matter of course that here I was to be left awhile to
my thoughts.
It was certainly the spot, if there is one in the world,
to feel emotion. In the narrow enclosure on which
my finger rested lay the last hopes of Napoleon. The
heart of the master-spirit of the world was bound up
in these ashes. He was beautiful, accomplished,
generous, brave. He was loved with a sort of idolatry
by the nation with which he had passed his childhood.
He had won all hearts. His death seemed impossible.
There was a universal prayer that he might live, his
inheritance of glory was so incalculable.
I read his epitaph. It was that of a private individual.
It gave his name, and his father's and mother's; and
then enumerated his virtues, with a commonplace
regret for his early death. The monk took up his
lamp and reascended to the cloister in silence. He
shut the convent-door behind me, and the busy street
seemed to me profane. How short a time does the
most moving event interrupt the common current of
life.
