Banks of the Rhine, Andernach, August 11

I AM indignant at myself, my dear friend, for having passed through Cologne like a Goth. I was there only eight and forty hours, though intending to remain there a fortnight. But after the increasing fog and rain of a whole previous week, the sun shed its magnificent rays so brilliantly on the Rhine, that I was fain to take advantage of it; desiring to see the river-landscape in all its rich and joyous perfection.

I quitted Cologne, therefore, this morning by the steam-boat, The Cockerill [1], and having left behind me the city of Agrippa[2]; having visited neither the old paintings of Ste. Marie of the Capitol; nor the crypt paved with mosaic of St. Gereon; nor the Crucifixion of St. Peter, painted by Rubens for the half-Gothic church in which he was baptized; nor the bones of the eleven thousand virgins in the cloisters of the Ursulines; nor the indecomposable body of the martyr Albinus; nor the silver sarcophagus of St. Cunibert; nor the tomb of Duns Scotus in the church of the Minorites; nor the sepulchre of the Empress Theophania, wife of Otho II., in the Church of St. Pantaleon; nor the Maternus Gruft, in the Church of Lisolphus; nor the two Golden chambers and the dome in the Convent of Ste. Ursula; nor the hall of the Imperial Diet (now a commercial depot); nor the old Arsenal, now a corn-warehouse. This is a long list of negations to prove that I have seen nothing of Cologne; a fact as provoking as it is undeniable. What, then, you will say, engaged my attention during the day I spent at Cologne? The Cathedral and the town-hall: nothing more! It could only be in speaking of a city so interesting as Cologne, that one presumed to allude to such magnificent edifices with apparent indifference. I arrived there soon after sunset, and immediately directed my steps towards the Cathedral; having made over my carpet-bag to one of those most worthy porters, in blue and orange uniforms, who are literally in the service of the King of Prussia (an excellent and profitable employment, let me tell you; for the traveller is handsomely muleted, that the king and the porter may share the spoil between them)! Before I dismiss the subject of the said porter, let me add, that I desired him, much to his surprise, to carry my baggage, not to any hotel in Cologne, but to one at Deutz, a small town on the opposite bank of the Rhine, connected with the city by a bridge of boats. I decided on this, because, when I am to spend some days in a town, I select my window with regard to the view; and the windows of Cologne look towards Deutz, just as those of the latter look towards Cologne. I consequently took up my quarters where I was able to contemplate the nobler object of the two.‚

Once alone, I wandered about in search of the dome; expecting it at each corner of the street. But not being acquainted with this inextricable, intricate city, night came on, and darkened the narrow streets; and, as I seldom inquire my way, I felt that I had wandered enough. At length, having ventured through a kind of archway, I suddenly found myself in an open space, both dark and solitary, but commanding a sublime spectacle. Before me, in the fantastic twilight, towered a multitude of gabled oldfashioned houses, which, to my surprise, were loaded with minarets and other architectural ornaments. Farther on, about an arrow’s flight, stood another mass, not so vast as the first, but loftier; a kind of square fortress, flanked at the angles by four immured towers, upon the summit of which something like a gigantic feather defined itself, as if waving on a helmet upon the brow of the old dungeon. These mysterious and incongruous objects proved to be the famous Cathedral of Cologne.

That which at first appeared to me a black feather drooping from the crest of the gloomy monument, was an immense crane, which I next day saw, and which from its lofty throne announces to passengers that the unfinished temple is one day to be continued; that this trunk of a steeple, and body of the church, now so wide apart, will one day be united; that the dream of Engelbert de Berg, realized into a building under Conrad de Hochstetten, will become in the course of two or three centuries more, the finest Cathedral in the world. This imperfect Iliad still hopes that Homers may be born for its completion.
The church was closed. I approached the steeple, the dimensions of which are prodigious. What I had taken for towers at the four angles, are merely the projection of the buttresses. Nothing is complete but the first story, composed of a colossal ogee, and yet the part finished reaches the height of the towers of Nôtre Dame at Paris! If ever the projected steeple be raised upon this huge mass of stone, Strasbourg must sink into insignificance. I doubt whether the beautiful steeple of Mechlin, which is also unfinished, arises from the soil in such solid and fair proportions.

I have already observed that nothing resembles a ruin more than an incompleted plan. Already the briars, stonecrops, and parasite plants which delight in mortar, and luxuriate in the crevices of stone, have begun to clothe the venerable portal. The work of man is no sooner perfected than nature attempts its destruction! There was a deep silence in the place. I advanced as near the portal of the front as a rich iron railing of the fifteenth century would allow, till I distinctly heard the peaceful murmur of those diminutive forests which overrun the salient parts of old buildings. A light proceeding from a neighboring window afforded me a glimpse, under the vaultings of the arches, of a crowd of exquisite figures of angels and saints, seated for the perusal of a volume spread upon their knees, some listening while others preached with uplifted finger: an admirable prologue to a church which is only the Word substantialised into stone and marble.

Every “buttress and coigne of vantage” of this fine architecture is defaced by the swallows’ nests—an edifying contrast to the work of human hands, which they so boldly and foully encrust.

The light was now extinguished, and I saw nothing but the vast span of the Gothic arch, eighty feet wide, completely open, without any kind of covering, exposing the tower from top to bottom, so that my eye was able to penetrate the dark recesses of the steeple. Through this window that of the opposite side appeared diminished in perspective, also unglazed; while the stone framework of the compartments and oriel seemed traced as if with ink upon the clear and metallic sky of twilight. Nothing could be more melancholy and unique than the contrast between the two arched windows, as diversified by the effect of light and shade.

Such was my first visit to the Cathedral at Cologne. I forgot to describe the road from Aix-la-Chapelle to Cologne, but there is not much to relate. It resembles Picardy or Touraine: a succession of green or yellow plains, with here and there a distorted old elm, or pale rows of poplars in the bottom. I do not dislike such peaceful scenery, but it does not serve to excite enthusiasm. In the villages the old peasant-women appear like spectres, enveloped in long grey or pale pink cotton cloaks, with hoods that nearly cover their eyes. The young wear very short petticoats; their head being covered with a tight-fitting coif bedizened with spangles or glass beads, which almost conceals their beautiful hair, fastened just above the nape of the neck with a large silver arrow. When washing the steps of the houses, the calf of the leg, in kneeling, is seen as in the old Dutch paintings. As for the men, they wear blue smock-frocks and high-crowned hats, as becomes the citizens of a constitutional monarchy.

The road had been inundated with rain. I met no one except a young musician, pale and spare, proceeding to the exercise of his talents at the balls of Aix or Spa, with a knapsack on his back, and his violoncello in a ragged green-baize bag, his staff in one hand and his key-bugle in the other; dressed in a blue surtout, and embroidered waistcoat, a white cravat, and scanty trowsers tucked up at the boot to avoid the mud. Poor wretch!— half dressed for a ball and half for a journey. I detected also in a field near the road an indigenous sportsman, having a highcrowned apple-green hat, with a lilac satin faded cockade, a grey smock-frock, a large nose, and a fowling-piece.

In a pretty little square town, flanked with brick walls and ruined towers, about halfway, but its name I forget[3], I saw four pompous-looking travellers, seated in the ground-floor of an inn, the windows being open. Before them was a table well furnished with meat, fish, wines, pies, and fruit, which they were carving, eating, drinking, twisting, picking, and devouring; the first red, the second crimson, another violet, the fourth purple—living impersonations of voracity and gluttony. I seemed to behold the god Goulu, the god Glouton, the god Goinfre, and the god Gouliaf, seated round their inexhaustible repast.
The inns are really excellent in this country: excepting the one where I lodged in Aix, which is only tolerable (The Empereur), and where I had, to comfort my feet, a splendid carpet—painted upon the floor: by way of excuse, I suppose, for the exorbitance of the charges.

To end at once with Aix-la-Chapelle, I must inform you that literary piracy flourishes there much as in Belgium. In a street leading from the square of the town hall, I found my face exposed in a shop window by the side of my illustrious friend Lamartine. Executed by the Prussian re-impression, it is rather less ugly than the horrible caricatures sold by the stall-keepers and booksellers of Paris as my exact resemblance; an abominable calumny, against which I formally protest. “Caelum hoc el conscia sidera iestor.”[4]

I live in the true German fashion; dining with napkins the size of pocket-handkerchiefs, and sleeping in sheets of similar dimensions. I eat cherries with my roast mutton—prunes with my hare; and drink excellent Rhenish and Moselle, which an ingenious Frenchman next to me at dinner pronounced to be fit only for young ladies. After emptying his water-bottle, he deigned, however, to pronounce the Rhenish wines to be superior to Rhenish water.

In the hotels the waiters usually speak German; but there is always one who speaks French, partaking, of course, a little of the Tedescan. But variety has its charm.
A Frenchman ignorant of German, like myself, loses his time by addressing the head-waiter, except upon questions better explained in the Guide-books. He is only varnished with French. Dig a little, and you will find the German soil of his nature an inch below the surface.

Let me now relate my second visit to the Cathedral of Cologne. I returned the following morning. This magnificent church is ipproached by a walled court-yard, where you are assailed by beggars of every description. In relieving them, I recalled to mind that, previous to the occupation by the French, there were twelve thousand hereditary beggars in Cologne, who transmitted their particular stations from generation to generation. This strange community has disappeared. If aristocracies perish, pauperisms cease to be respected. Paupers no longer make bequests of their infirmities to their families.

Having rid myself of the beggars, I entered the church. A forest of various-sized columns, protected at their bases by wooden palisades, presented themselves; the capitals concealed by a scaffolding of surbased vaultings, constructed in planks, and of various curving and elevation. The church is dark, these low arches not allowing the eye to reach more than forty feet high. To the left there are four or five windows, admitting a brilliant light, which reaches from the wooden arch to the pavement; to the right are ladders, pulleys, ropes, windlasses, trowels, and squares. At the farther extremity, the chanting, grave voices of the choristers and prebends, the beautiful Latin of the Psalms floating through the church, the clouds of incense, the organ weeping with expressive suavity, and, from the works above, the biting of saws, the moanings of cranes, and deadened blows of the hammer upon wood,—completed my impressions of the Dom-Kirch or Cathedral of Cologne.

The spectacle of this fine Gothic edifice, united with the carpenter’s shop, this stately abbess wedded to a stonemason, and compelled to control her peaceful habits, her august and dignified life, her chants and prayers, her chaste seclusion being sacrificed to the riot and coarse dialogues of a noisy horde of workmen, produces at first a painful impression. The crane of the steeple was placed there on resuming the works, in 1499; which works are still in sluggish progress, and, if it please Heaven, the Cathedral of Cologne shall one day or other be completed. Nothing will be finer than the completion, if they only know how to accomplish the feat. The columns supporting the wooden arches mark out the plan of the nave, which is to connect the choir with the tower. I examined the stained windows, which are of the time of Maximilian, and executed in the bold exaggerated style of the German restoration of the art. They exhibit kings and knights with fiercelooking faces, haughty mien, waving plumes, and gigantic swords, armed like headsmen, and caparisoned like war-horses. Their formidable spouses kneel close beside them, with the profiles of wolves or lionesses; and the sun passing through the stained glass imparts a vivid glare to their eyes.

One of these windows represents a beautiful idea, which I have before met with;—the Genealogy of the Virgin.[5] At the foot of the picture lies prostrate the giant Adam, in imperial costume. From his loins issues a tree, whose branches spread over the window, showing forth all the royal ancestors of the Holy Virgin. David is playing the harp; Solomon is deep in thought; and at the top of the tree, in a dark blue ground, expands a flower exhibiting the Virgin bearing the Child.
Some steps farther off, I perused the following sorrowful epitaph :—
INCLITVS ANTE FVI, COMES EMVNDVS
VOCITATVS, HIC NECE PROSTRATVS, SVB
TEGOR VT VOLVI, FRISHEIM, SANCTE
MEVM FERO, PETRE, TIBI COMITATVM
ET MIHI REDDE STATVM, TE PRECOR,
AETHEREVM HAEC LAPIDVM MASSA
COMITIS COMPLECTITVR OSSA.[6]
I transcribe this epitaph just as I saw it, upon a vertical slab of stone, inscribed as prose, without any indication of the barbarous hexameters and pentameters forming the distich. The closing rhyming verses contain a false quantity, mass-a, which surprised me, as in the middle ages people knew at least how to write Latin verses.

The aisle to the right of the transept is only marked out, terminating in a vast oratory, cold, ugly, and ill-furnished, with the exception of a few confessionals. I hastened to return to the church.

On leaving the oratory, three things simultaneously struck me: to my left, a beautiful little pulpit of the sixteenth century, cleverly designed and miraculously carved in black oak; farther on, the iron railing of the choir, an exquisite specimen of the iron-work of the fifteenth century; and before me was a beautiful gallery or tribune, with low arches and thick pilasters, much in the style of our procursive restoration, and which I suppose to have been intended for our unfortunate fugitive queen, Marie de' Medicis.

At the entrance of the choir, in an elegant shrine, the eyes are dazzled by a genuine Italian Madona, covered with spangles and tinsel, as well as the Child. Above this gorgeous image, probably as an antithesis, you perceive a massive box for the poor, fashioned after the twelfth century, festooned with chains and padlocks, and half-inserted in a coarsely sculptured block of granite.

On raising my eyes, I saw suspended from the vault some gilded sticks tied to a transversal rod of iron, by the side of which is the following inscription : “Quot pendere vides baculos, tot episcopus annos huic Agrippina prcefuit ecclesia.”[7] I approve this unerring method of counting the years, and making evident to the bishop the lapse of time he has either lost or gained. Three stripes are now appended to the roof.[8]

The choir is contained in the celebrated apsis, which at present constitutes the Cathedral of Cologne; the steeple of the tower, roof of the nave, and the transept being deficient.
The choir is splendid. Shrines of the most delicate carving in wood—chapels, rich with noble sculpture—paintings of every period—tombs of every form. Bishops in granite, reposing in a fortress; others in touchstone, borne by a procession of weeping angels; bishops in marble, laid upon a lattice-work of iron; bishops of brass, stretched upon the ground; bishops in boxwood, kneeling before the altar; lieutenant-generals of the time of Louis XV., leaning on their sepulchres; Crusaders, each with his dog lying affectionately against his steel-clad heel; statues of the apostles, in cloth of gold; confessionals, in oak, with their twisted columns; nobly carved stalls; baptismal fonts, in the form of sarcophagi; altar-stones adorned with little figures; fragments of stained glass; Annunciation of the fifteenth century, upon a gold ground, in which the angel, whose parti-colored wings are lined with white, gazes with a somewhat human eye on the Holy Virgin; tapestries executed after the designs of Rubens; iron-work one might attribute to Quentin Matsys; and cabinets with painted doors and gilded shutters, worthy of Frank Floris.

All this, however, is in a disgracefully neglected state, and if the Cathedral be in process of external improvement, sad havoc goes on within. Not a tomb but is mutilated, or an iron rail but has lost its gilding, and dust and dirt are visible in all directions. The flies are effacing the face of the venerable Archbishop of Heinsberg; and the brazen individual who lies upon the pavement under the name of Conrad of Hochsteden, who intended to have built this gigantic cathedral, is unable now to crush the spiders which seem to hold him down, like Gulliver, enchained by their threads. Alas! a feeble arm of flesh is worth as many thousands cast in brass! I rather believe that a bearded figure of an old man I noticed lying mutilated in a corner is by Michel Angelo;—which reminds me that at Aix-la-Chapelle I saw the famous columns taken by Napoleon, and retaken by Blucher, heaped up in an angle of the old cloister burying-ground, like trunks of trees waiting the operation of the saw-pit. Napoleon intended them for the Louvre; Blucher left them in a charnelhouse. One of the questions which we are oftenest compelled to ask ourselves in this world is “Cui bono!”

There were, apparently, but two tombs cared for and respected, amidst all this degradation—the cenotaphs of the Counts of Schauenbourg, a couple who seem to have been foreseen by Virgil. Both were Archbishops of Cologne; both lie in the same place of sepulture; having two handsome tombs of the seventeenth century, opposite each other, so that Adolphus von Schauenbourg is able to contemplate his brother Antony. I have purposely delayed to mention the most venerable part of this sacred edifice, the famous Shrine of the Magi, which consists of a vast chamber, embellished with marbles of all kinds, environed with thick copper gratings; the architecture being in the mixed and fantastic styles of Louis XIII. and Louis XV. It is situated in the rear of the high altar, at the extremity of the choir. Three turbans introduced into the composition of the grating first attract the eye; and on looking up, one perceives a bas-relief, representing the Adoration of the Magi: lower down you perceive the following lines :—
“Corpora sanctorum recubant hie terna Magorum.
Ex his sublatum nihil est alibive locatum.” [9]
I advanced toward the tomb; and through this grating, scrupulously shut, beheld, through a cloudy glass, the famous Byzantine shrine of massive gold, sparkling with diamonds and pearls; just as, through the obscurity of twenty centuries, behind the gloomy and austere film of Church traditions, you hail the Oriental story of the Three Wise Men of the East.‚

On either side the venerated grating, two hands, in gilt copper, emerge from the marble, each holding a begging-box, and under which the Chapter has engraved the following indirect solicitation:
“Et apertis thesauris suis obtulerunt ei munera.” [10]
Three lamps burn perpetually before the shrine, named Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, after the names of the three Magi. As I was about to withdraw, I felt a prick in the sole of my foot, and looking down, I found it to be the head of a large copper nail upon which I had trodden, which was inserted in a slab of the marble pavement. I now remembered that Marie de Medicis desired to have her heart deposited under the Chapel of the Three Kings. The pavement under my feet probably covered this royal heart. On the surface of the stone, as may be seen by traces still visible, was formerly placed a plate of gilt brass, according to the German custom of adorning graves with the name or escutcheon and epitaph of the deceased. It was the nail of this plate which had just pricked my foot. When the French were in possession of Cologne, the revolutionary ideas, or possibly some rapacious coppersmith, extirpated this plate bearing the device of the Bourbons, as well as many others which surrounded it; for quantities of copper fastenings protruding from the pavement, announce many similar defacements. And thus this wretched queen, who found herself obliterated in the first instance from the heart of Louis XIII., her son, and afterwards from the remembrance of Richelieu, her creature, was fated in the sequel to have her very sepulchral inscription erased from the face of the earth.

So strange is destiny! This Marie de Medicis, this widow of Henri IV., exiled, forsaken, and distressed, as afterwards her daughter Henrietta, the widow of Charles I., came and died at Cologne, in 1642, in a lodging belonging to one Ibach, No. 10, in the Sterngasse, in the very house where sixty-five years before, in 1577, her painter, Rubens, was born .[11]

The Cathedral of Cologne, viewed by day, and reduced from that imaginary proportion which the evening light confers on every object, and which I call crepuscular grandeur, loses somewhat of its dignity. The outline, though fine, is dry, arising probably from the perseverance of the architect in repairing and cementing the venerable apsis. Great caution is required in the reparation of ancient edifices. As they now stand, I prefer the half-finished tower to the perfect apsis. All things considered, with due deference to the prejudices of the ultra refined, who choose to consider the Cathedral of Cologne the Parthenon of Christian architecture, I know no reason for assigning the palm to this sketch of a cathedral, rather than to our own Nôtre Dame, or those of Amiens, Rheims, or Chartres.

Even the Cathedral of Beauvais, also a mere apsis, scarcely known and little vaunted, does not seem to me, whether in size or details, much inferior to that of Cologne.

The town-hall, situated near the Cathedral, is one of those charming motley edifices built at different periods and composed of every style, which are to be met with in those self-established communities whose laws, habits, and customs have an equally incongruous origin. The progress of the formation of such edifices and communities affords a curious study, being rather a work of agglomeration than of construction. All is the result of progressive increase, and encroachments upon the property of neighbors, rather than of forethought or a preconcerted plan.

Growing wants have created an extension of means. The town-hall of Cologne, therefore, though probably possessing some Roman vault among its foundations, was nothing more, towards 1250, than a gloomy-looking building, such as our Maisons aux piliers[12] . But as there was now occasion for a belfry, for the purpose of alarms, defence, and watchfulness, the fourteenth century erected a tower for both civil and feudal purposes.
Under Maximilian the cheering breath of the regeneration of the arts began to agitate the gloomy stone foliage of the cathedrals; a taste for elegance and embellishment became universal; and the authorities of Cologne felt the necessity of bestowing a proper exterior upon their town-hall. They accordingly sent to Italy for some disciple of the school of Michel Angelo; or perhaps to France, for some able competitor of Jean Goujon; and to their gloomy façade of the thirteenth century added a triumphant and magnificent porch.
A few years afterwards, they felt the want of a public lounge near their registry-office, and laid out a charming plot of ground, surrounded by arcades, sumptuously embellished by escutcheons and bas-reliefs; which I was so fortunate as to see, but which, henceforth, will be seen by few, for they are on the eve of falling into ruins.

Lastly, under Charles V., having found it necessary to have a vast hall for the purpose of sales, proclamations, and assemblies of burgesses, they erected, opposite their belfry, a handsome brick and stone building, of the highest order of taste and design.

At the present day, the nave of the thirteenth century, the portico and pleasance of Maximilian, the hall of Charles V., grown old together, and alike abounding in traditions and events, fortuitously mingled and grouped together, unite to render the town-hall of Cologne as original as it is picturesque.

As a production of art, and the reflection of history, I prefer it to the cold, insipid style, with its triple front over-burthened with archivaults, and the parsimonious deficiency of embellishment visible in its stunted roofs without minarets, crest, or chimneys, with which, in the very teeth of the good city of Paris, the masons are masking our superlative specimen of the genius of Bocador.[13]

For we are singular people! We submit to the demolition of the ancient Hôtel de la Tremouille[14], and create public monuments of this wretched nature, permitting individuals to call themselves architects, who presume to lower two or three feet, and thus completely disfigure, the lofty roofs of Dominique Bocador, to adopt the flat attics of their own invention. Are we always to remain the same tasteless barbarians, who, pretending to adore Corneille, allow him to be retouched and corrected by the hand of Monsieur Andrieux? No matter—let us return to Cologne.

I ascended the tower, and beneath a dull grey sky, somewhat in harmony with my thoughts, contemplated this interesting city.

Cologne on the Rhine, like Rouen on the Seine, and Antwerp on the Scheldt, that is, like all cities seated on broad and rapid rivers, is built in the form of a strung bow, of which the river is the chord.

The roofs are slated, and crowded together, and packed like cards doubled together: the streets are narrow, the gables carved and ornamented. A red boundary of city walls, rising on all sides above the roofs, hems in the town, buckling it as in a belt to the river. From the tower of Thurmchen, to the superb tower of Bayenthurme, among the battlements of which stands the marble statue of a bishop bestowing his benediction on the Rhine —from Thurmchen to Bayenthurme, the city exhibits, to the length of a league, a facade of fronts and windows.

Midway, a long bridge of boats, gracefully curving with the current, crosses the river, connecting that multifarious mass of gloomy architecture, Cologne, with Deutz, which consists of a small cluster of white houses.

From the centre of Cologne, and round the peaked roofs, turrets, and flower-decked attics, arise the varying altitudes of twenty-seven churches, independent of the Cathedral. Four of these are majestic Roman edifices, each of a different design, and worthy of the title of cathedral. To the north is St. Martin; to the west, St. Gereon; the church of the Holy Apostles to the south; and Ste. Marie of the Capitol to the east;—forming a forest of towers, steeples, and domes.

Considered in detail, this city is all life and animation, the bridge being crowded with passengers and carriages, the river with sails, and the banks with masts. The streets swarm—the windows chatter—the roofs sing in the sunshine. Here and there groves of trees refresh the gloomy-looking houses; while the old edifices of the fifteenth century, with their long friezes of fruits and flowers, afford a refuge to the pigeons and doves who sit cooing there to their hearts’ content. Around this vast community—rich from industry, military from necessity, maritime from site—an extensive and fertile plain extends in all directions, depressed towards Holland, most part of which is watered by the Rhine. Towards the north-east it is bounded by that nest of romantic legends and traditions called the Seven Mountains.

And thus the horizon of Cologne is circumscribed on one side by Holland and her commerce, on the other by Germany and her poetry; embodying those two grand phases of the human mind, the real and the ideal. Cologne itself is a city devoted to the delights of business, as well as the pleasures of imagination.

On descending from the belfry, I paused in the court-yard before the magnificent porch. Just now I called it triumphant; the word should have been “triumphal,” for the second story of this admirable composition is a series of minor triumphal arches, side by side, like arcades, and dedicated with suitable inscriptions; the first to Caesar; the second to Augustus; the third to Agrippa, the founder of Cologne (Colonia Agrippina); the fourth to Constantine, the Christian Emperor; the fifth to Justinian, the lawgiver; the sixth to Maximilian, the Emperor, then on the throne. Upon the facade, the sculptor poet has carved three bas-reliefs, representing three lion tamers; Milo of Crotona, Pepin-le-Bref, and Daniel the prophet. At the two extremities he has placed Milo of Crotona, who subdued his lions by manual strength: and Daniel, who employed spiritual influence. Betwixt the two, as a link naturally uniting the one with the other, he placed Pepin-le-Bref, who subdued the beasts of the forest with the exact measure of physical and moral strength requisite for a soldier. The union of moral and physical force engenders courage. A combination of the athlete and the prophet forms the hero.

Pepin is represented sword in hand, and his left arm, wrapt in his cloak, is plunged into the jaws of the lion, who, snarling and showing his fangs, is rearing on his hinder legs, in the formidable attitude usually described as the lion rampant. Pepin confronts him valiantly. Daniel is represented standing with his arms motionless, and his eyes upraised to heaven, while the lions play at his feet; to show that superiority of soul triumphs without effort. As to Milo of Crotona, with his arm clenched in the cloven tree, he is struggling fiercely with the lions, who devour him, the penalty of blind and unintelligent presumption confiding in muscular power. In the three contests, it is only vulgar strength which is defeated.

These bas-reliefs contain a world of meaning. The effect of the last is terrible. I cannot describe the awful influence, probably unsuspected by the sculptor himself, exercised by this gloomy poem, which represents nature wreaking vengeance upon man; the vegetable and brute creation making common cause against the enemy, their oak coming to the aid of the lion to exterminate a gladiator. Unfortunately, the whole of this basrelief, entablatures, mouldings, cornices, colonnades, all this beautiful porch, has been restored, scraped, and stuccoed, with the most deplorable nicety.

As I was leaving the town-hall, a man oldened rather than old, depressed rather than infirm, of miserable exterior, but haughty deportment, traversed the court. The guide who accompanied me to the belfry pointed him out to my notice.

“That man is a poet,” said he, “who wastes his substance in the wine-houses, and his time in writing epics.” It appears that this individual, whose name retains an honorable obscurity, has indited odes against Napoleon,—against the revolution of 1830,—against the romantic school,—against the French—to say nothing of an epopee imploring the architect to continue the cathedral of Cologne in the style of the Pantheon at Paris. Let him play the Homer if he please; but a dirtier specimen of the sons of Apollo it never was my fate to look on. This species of epic poet is luckily unknown in France. On the other hand, as I was crossing a narrow obscure street, some minutes later, a little old man started abruptly from a barber's shop, crying aloud, “Sir, sir, sir! the French are mad, sir; stark mad, sir! drum a drum drum! ra ta plan plan!—war with all the world, sir! bang, bang, bang! The Emperor, eh? The French are brave, sir, and stuck it well into the Prussians, eh? They got a dose and a half at Jena, sir, bang, bang, bang! rum, bravo for the French, sir! Drum a drum drum!” This mad harangue delighted me. France still retains an honorable place amid the recollections and hopes of these noble nations. One bank at least of the Rhine still loves us; I had almost said awaits us.

Towards evening, when the stars shot forth their light, I strolled upon the shore opposite Cologne. I had before me the whole city, with its innumerable gables and sombre steeples, defined against the pallid sky of the west. To my left, like the giantess of Cologne, stood the lofty spire of St. Martin, with its two openworked towers. Nearly fronting me was the gloomy cathedral, with its thousand pinnacles bristling like the back of a hedgehog, crouched up on the brink of the river, the immense crane on the steeple forming the tail, while the lanterns alight towards the bottom of the gloomy mass glared like its eyes. Amid this pervading gloom I heard nothing but the gentle ripple far below at my feet, the deadened sounds of horses’ hoofs upon the bridge, and from a forge in the distance the ringing strokes of the hammer on the anvil; no other noise disturbed the stillness of the Rhine. A few lights flickered in the windows from the forge; the sparks and flakes of a raging furnace shot forth and extinguished themselves in the Rhine, leaving a long luminous trace, as if a sack of fire was shooting forth its contents into the stream.

Influenced by this gloomy aspect of things, I said to myself,— The Gaulic city has disappeared, the city of Agrippa vanished —Cologne is now the city of St. Engelbert, but how long will it be thus? The temple built yonder by St. Helena fell a thousand years ago—the Church constructed by Archbishop Anno will also fall—the ruin is gradually undermining the city; every daysome old stone, some old remembrance is detached from its place by the wear and tear of a score of steam-boats. A city does not affix itself with impunity to the grand artery of Europe. Cologne, though more ancient than Treves and Soleure, the two most ancient communities of the Continent, has been thrice reformed and transformed by the rapid and violent current of ideas ascending and descending unceasingly, from the cities of William the Taciturn to the mountains of William Tell, and bringing to Cologne from Mayence the opulence of Germany, and from Strasbourg the opulence of France.

A fourth climacteric epoch appears to menace Cologne. The mania of utilitarianism and positivism, so called in the slang of the day, pervades every quarter of the world, and innovations creep into the labyrinth of its antique architecture, and open streets penetrate its Gothic obscurity. What is called “the taste of the day” is beginning to invade it, with houses or frontages in the fashion of our Rue de Rivoli, to the profound amazement of the shopkeepers. Nay, have we not seen that there exist drunken rhymers who would fain behold the old minister of Conrad of Hochstetten converted into the Pantheon of Soufflot?

In that cathedral, still endowed and adorned, for vanity’s sake rather than from devotion, the ancient tombs of the Arch bishops are decaying. The peasant-women, with their superb old costume of scarlet, and coifs of gold and silver, have yielded their place upon the quays to smart and flippant griselles, attired in the Paris fashion; and I saw the last brick dislodged from the old cloister of St. Martin, in order that a cafe might be built on the site. Long rows of pert white houses give a cockneyfied air to the Catholic and feudal suburb of the martyrs of Thebes[15] and an omnibus takes you across the historical bridge of boats, for six sols, from Agrippina to Tuitium!—Alas, alas! the old cities of Europe are departing.