University of Virginia Library

73. LETTER LXXIII.

I had quite forgotten, in packing up my little portmanteau
to leave the ship, that I was coming so far
north. Scarce a week ago, in the south of Italy, we
were panting in linen jackets. I find myself shivering
here, in a latitude five hundred miles north of Boston,
with no remedy but exercise and an extra shirt, for a
cold that would grace December.

It is amusing, sometimes, to abandon one's self to a
valet de place. Compelled to resort to one from my
ignorance of the German, I have fallen upon a dropsical
fellow, with a Bardolph nose, whose French is execrable,
and whose selection of objects of curiosity is
worthy of his appearance. His first point was the emperor's
stables. We had walked a mile and a half to
see them. Here were two or three hundred horses of
all breeds, in a building that the emperor himself
might live in, with a magnificent inner court for a
menáge, and a wilderness of grooms, dogs, and other
appurtenances. I am as fond of a horse as most people,
but with all Vienna before me, and little time to
lose, I broke into the midst of the head groom's pedigrees,
and requested to be shown the way out. Monsieur
Karl did not take the hint. We walked on a
half mile, and stopped before another large building.
“What is this!”—“The imperial carriage-house, monseigneur.”
I was about turning on my heel and taking
my liberty into my own hands, when the large door
flew open, and the blaze of gilding from within, turned
me from my purpose. I thought I had seen the ne
plus ultra of equipages at Rome. The imperial family
of Austria ride in more style than his holiness.
The models are lighter and handsomer, while the gold
and crimson is put on quite as resplendently. The
most curious part of the show were ten or twelve state
traineaux or sleighs. I can conceive nothing more
brilliant than a turnout of these magnificent structures
upon the snow. They are built with aerial lightness,
of gold and sable, with a seat fifteen or twenty feet
from the ground, and are driven, with two or four
horses, by the royal personage himself. The grace
of their shape and the splendor of their gilded trappings
are inconceivable to one who has never seen them.

Our way lay through the court of the imperial palace.
A large crowd was collected round a carriage
with four horses standing at the side-door. As we approached
it, all hats flew off, and a beautiful woman,
of perhaps twenty-eight, came down the steps, leading
a handsome boy of two or three years. It was the
young queen of Hungary and her son. If I had seen
such a face in a cottage ornée on the borders of an
American lake, I should have thought it made for the
spot.

We entered a door of the palace at which stood a
ferocious-looking croat sentinel, near seven feet high.
Three German travelling students had just been refused
admittance. A little man appeared at the ring of the
bell within, and after a preliminary explanation by my
valet, probably a lie, he made a low bow, and invited
me to enter. I waited a moment, and a permission
was brought me to see the imperial treasury. Handing
it to Karl, I requested him to get permission inserted
for my three friends at the door. He accomplished
it in the same incomprehensible manner in
which he had obtained my own, and introducing them
with the ill-disguised contempt of a valet for all men
with dusty coats, we commenced the rounds of the
curiosities together.

A large clock, facing us as we entered, was just
striking. From either side of its base, like companies
of gentlemen and ladies advancing to greet each other,
appeared figures in the dress and semblance of the
royal family of Austria, who remained a moment, and
then retired bowing themselves courteously out backward.
It is a costly affair, presented by the landgrave
of Hesse to Maria Theresa, in 1750.

After a succession of watches, snuff-boxes, necklaces,
and jewels of every description, we came to the famous
Florentine diamond, said to be the largest in the world.
It was lost by a duke of Burgundy upon the battle-field
of Granson, found by a soldier, who parted with
it for five florins, sold again, and found its way at last
to the royal treasury of Florence, whence it was
brought to Vienna. Its weight is one hundred and
thirty-nine and a half carats, and it is estimated at one
million forty-three thousand three hundred and thirty-four
florins. It looks like a lump of light. Enormous
diamonds surround it, but it hangs among them like
Hesperus among the stars.

The next side of the gallery is occupied by specimens
of carved ivory. Many of them are antique, and
half of them are more beautiful than decent. There
were two bas-reliefs among them by Raphael Donner,
which were worth, to my eye, all the gems in the gallery.
They were taken from scripture, and represented
the Woman of Samaria at the well, and Hagar waiting
for the death of her son. No powers of elocution, no
enhancement of poetry, could bring those touching passages
of the Bible so movingly to the heart. The
latter particularly arrested me. The melancholy
beauty of Hagar, sitting with her head bowed upon her
knees, while her boy is lying a little way off, beneath
a shrub of the desert, is a piece of unparalleled workmanship.
It may well hang in the treasury of an emperor.

Miniatures of the royal family in their childhood,
set in costly gems, massive plate curiously chased,
services of gold, robes of diamonds, gem-hilted swords,
dishes wrought of solid integral agates, and finally the
crown and sceptre of Austria upon red velvet cushions,
looking very much like their imitations on the stage,
were among the world of splendors unfolded to our
eyes. The Florentine diamond and the bas-reliefs by
Raphael Donner were all I coveted. The beauty of
the diamond was royal. It needed no imagination
to feel its value. A savage would pick it up in the
desert for a star dropped out of the sky. For the
rest, the demand on my admiration fatigued me, and
I was glad to escape with my dusty friends from the
university, and exchange courtesies in the free air.
One of them spoke English a little, and called me
“Mister Englishman,” on bidding me adieu. I was
afraid of a beer-shop scene in Vienna, and did not
correct the mistake.

As we were going out of the court, four covered
wagons, drawn each by four superb horses, dashed
through the gate. I waited a moment to see what

they contained. Thirty or forty servants in livery
came out from the palace, and took from the wagons
quantities of empty baskets carefully labelled with
directions. They were from Schoenbrunn, where the
emperor is at present residing with his court, and had
come to market for the imperial kitchen. It should
be a good dinner that requires sixteen such horses to
carry to the cook.

It was the hungry hour of two, and I was still musing
on the emperor's dinner, and admiring the anxious
interest his servants took in their disposition of the
baskets, when a blast of military music came to my
ear. It was from the barracks of the imperial guard,
and I stepped under the arch, and listened to them
an hour. How gloriously they played! It was probably
the finest band in Austria. I have heard much
good music, but of its kind this was like a new sensation
to me. They stand, in playing, just under the
window at which the emperor appears daily when in
the city.

I have been indebted to Mr. Schwartz, the American
consul at Vienna, for a very unusual degree of
kindness. Among other polite attentions, he procured
for me to-day an admission to the Polytechnic school
—a favor granted with difficulty, except on the appointed
days for public visits.

The Polytechnic school was established in 1816, by
the present emperor. The building stands outside the
rampart of the city, of elegant proportions, and about
as large as all the buildings of Yale or Harvard college
thrown into one. Its object is to promote instruction
in the practical sciences, or, in other words,
to give a practical education for the trades, commerce,
or manufactures. It is divided into three departments.
The first is preparatory, and the course occupies two
years. The studies are religion and morals, elementary
mathematics, natural history, geography, universal
history, grammar, and “the German style,” declamation,
drawing, writing, and the French, Italian, and
Bohemian languages. To enter this class, the boy
must be thirteen years of age, and pays fifty cents per
month.

The second course is commercial, and occupies one
year. The studies are mercantile correspondence,
commercial law, mercantile arithmetic, the keeping of
books, geography, and history, as they relate to commerce,
acquaintance with merchandise, &c., &c.

The third course lasts one year. The studies are
chymistry as applicable to arts and trades, the fermentation
of woods, tannery, soap-making, dying, blanching,
&c., &c.; also mechanism, practical geometry,
civil architecture, hydraulics, and technology. The
two last courses are given gratis.

The whole is under the direction of a principal,
who has under him thirty professors and two or three
guardians of apparatus.

We were taken first into a noble hall, lined with
glass cases containing specimens of every article manufactured
in the German dominions. From the finest
silks down to shoes, wigs, nails, and mechanics' tools,
here were all the products of human labor. The variety
was astonishing. Within the limits of a single
room, the pupil is here made acquainted with every
mechanic art known in his country.

The next hall was devoted to models. Here was
every kind of bridge, fortification, lighthouse, dry-dock,
breakwater, canal-lock, &c., &c.; models of steamboats,
of ships, and of churches, in every style of architecture.
It was a little world.

We went thence to the chemical apartment. The
servitor here, a man without education, has constructed
all the apparatus. He is an old gray-headed man,
of a keen German countenance, and great simplicity
of manners. He takes great pride in having constructed
the largest and most complete chemical apparatus
now in London. The one which he exhibited
to us occupies the whole of an immense hall, and produces
an electric discharge like the report of a pistol.
The ordinary batteries in our universities are scarce a
twentieth part as powerful.

After showing us a variety of experiments, the old
man turned suddenly and asked us if we knew the geometrical
figures described by the vibrations of musical
notes. We confessed our ignorance, and he produced
a pane of glass covered with black sand. He
then took a fiddle-bow, and holding the glass horizontally,
drew it downward against the edge at a peculiar
angle. The sand flew as if it had been bewitched,
and took the shape of a perfect square. He asked us
to name a figure. We named a circle. Another
careful draw of the bow, and the sand flew into a circle,
with scarce a particle out of its perfect curve.
Twenty times he repeated the experiment, and with
the most complicated figures drawn on paper. He had
reduced it to an art. It would have hung him for a
magician a century ago.

However one condemns the policy of Austria with
respect to her subject provinces and the rest of Europe,
it is impossible not to be struck with her liberal
provision for her own immediate people. The public
institutions of all kinds in Vienna are allowed to be
the finest and most liberally endowed on the continent.
Her hospitals, prisons, houses of industry, and schools,
are on an imperial scale of munificence. The emperor
himself is a father to his subjects, and every tongue
blesses him. Napoleon envied him their affection, it
is said, and certainly no monarch could be more universally
beloved.

Among the institutions of Vienna are two which
are peculiar. One is a maison d'accouchement, into
which any female can enter veiled, remain till after
the period of her labor, and depart unknown, leaving
her child in the care of the institution, which rears it
as a foundling. Its object is a benevolent prevention
of infanticide.

The other is a private penitentiary, to which the
fathers of respectable families can send for reformation
children they are unable to govern. The name
is kept a secret, and the culprits are returned to their
families after a proper time, punished without disgrace.
Pride of character is thus preserved, while the
delinquent is firmly corrected.