Arrived At The Station, We Found We Must Wait Till Half Past Five In
The Afternoon For The Train.
This would have been an intolerable doom
in the disconsolate precincts of an English or American station, but
not in a German one.
As usual, this had a charming garden, laid out
with exquisite taste, and all glowing and fragrant with plats of
verbena, fuschias, heliotropes, mignonette, pansies, while rows of
hothouse flowers, set under the shelter of neatly trimmed hedges, gave
brightness to the scene. Among all these pretty grounds were seats and
walks, and a gardener, with his dear pipe in his mouth, was moving
about, watering his dear flowers, thus combining the two delights of a
German, flowers and smoke. These Germans seem an odd race, a mixture
of clay and spirit - what with their beer drinking and smoking, and
their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earthly; but
an ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursting out in
most unexpected little jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on
a cactus.
The station room was an agreeable one, painted prettily in frescoes,
with two sofas. So we arranged ourselves in a party. S. and I betook
ourselves to our embroidery, and C. read aloud to us, or tried the
Amati, and when we were tired of reading and music we strolled in the
garden, and I wrote to you.
I wonder why we Anglo-Saxons cannot imitate the liberality of the
continent in the matter of railroad stations, and give the traveller
something more agreeable than the grim, bare, forbidding places, which
now obtain in England and America. This Wittenberg is but a paltry
town; and yet how much care is spent to make the station house
comfortable and comely! I may here say that nowhere in Europe is
railway travelling so entirely convenient as in Germany, particularly
in Prussia. All is systematic and orderly; no hurrying or shoving, or
disagreeable fuss at stations. The second class cars are, in most
points, as good as the first class in England; the conductors are
dignified and gentlemanly; you roll on at a most agreeable pace from
one handsome station house to another, finding yourself disposed to be
pleased with every thing.
There is but one drawback to all this, and that is the smoking.
Mythologically represented, these Germans might be considered as a
race born of chimneys, with a necessity for smoking in their very
nature. A German walking without his pipe is only a dormant volcano;
it is in him to smoke all the while; you may be sure the crater will
begin to fume before long. Smoking is such an acknowledged attribute
of manhood, that the gentler sex seem to have given in to it as one of
the immutable things of nature; consequently all the public places
where both sexes meet are redolent of tobacco! You see a gentleman
doing the agreeable to a lady, cigar in mouth, treating her
alternately to an observation and a whiff, both of which seem to her
equally matters of course. In the cars some attempt at regulation
subsists; there are cars marked "_Nich rauchen_" into which
_we_ were always very careful to get; but even in these it is not
always possible to make a German suspend an operation which is to him
about the same as breathing.
On our way from Frankfort to Halle, in a "_nich rauchen_" car,
too, a jolly old gentleman, whose joyous and abundant German sounded
to me like the clatter of a thousand of brick, wound up a kind of
promiscuous avalanche of declamation by pulling a matchbox from his
pocket, and proceeding deliberately to light his pipe. The tobacco was
detestable. Now, if a man _must_ smoke, I think he is under moral
obligation to have decent tobacco. I began to turn ill, and C.
attacked the offender in French; not a word did he understand, and
puffed on tranquil and happy. The idea that any body did not like
smoke was probably the last that could ever be made to enter his head,
even in a language that he did understand. C. then enlisted the next
neighbor, who understood French, and got him to interpret that smoke
made the lady ill. The chimney-descended man now took his pipe out,
and gazed at it and me alternately, with an air of wondering
incredulity, and seemed trying to realize some vast conception, but
failing in the effort, put his pipe back, and smoked as before! Some
old ladies now amiably offered to change places with me, evidently
regarding me as the victim of some singular idiosyncrasy. As I
changed, a light seemed to dawn on the old chimney's mind - a
good-natured one he was; he looked hard at me, and his whiffs became
fainter till at last they ceased, and he never smoked more till I was
safe out of the cars.
LETTER XLVI.
ERFURT, Saturday Evening.
MY DEAR: -
I have just been to Luther's cell in the old Augustine Convent, and if
my pilgrimage at Wittenberg was less interesting by the dirt and
discomfort of the actual present, here were surroundings less
calculated to jar on the frame the scene should inspire. It was about
sunset, - a very golden and beautiful one, and C. and I drove through
various streets of this old town. I believe I am peculiarly alive to
architectural excitements, for these old houses, with their strange
windows, odd chimneys, and quaint carvings, delight me wonderfully.
Many of them are almost gnome-like in their uncouthness; they please
me none the less for that.
We drove first to the cathedral, which, with an old deserted church,
seemingly part of itself, forms a pile of Gothic architecture, a
wilderness of spires, minarets, arches, and what not, more picturesque
than any cathedral I have seen. It stands high on a sort of platform
overlooking a military parade ground, and reached by a long flight of
steps.
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