Читать книгу The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor - Russell H. Conwell - Страница 16

Table of Contents

Visit in London.—Exhibition of Relics.—The Lessons of Travel.—Historical Association.—London to Ostend.—The Cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle.—The Great Cathedral at Cologne.—Voyage up the Rhine.—Longfellow’s “Hyperion.”—Visit to Frankfort.—Kind Friends.—Reaches Heidelberg.—Climbing the Mountains.

London is a world in itself, as has often been written and, to such an impressible mind as that of Bayard, was a place, replete with pleasure and instruction. London instructs by two methods; one by agreeable, and the other by disagreeable examples. Bayard was equally taught by both. There was Westminster Abbey, with its numberless tombs of the talented and noble; and there was the Tower of London, with its dungeons and beheading blocks. There were the palatial residences of the West End, and there the hovels and holes of the Wych Street district. There were the great mercantile houses of Holborn and Regent Street, and there were the gambling dens of Drury Lane. There were the magnificent galleries of art, at the Museum, at the Palaces, at Westminster, and at Kensington; and there were the dirty, slimy exhibitions of marred humanity along the wharves of the Thames. There were the zoölogical wonders of the parks, and there were the dog-shows, and cock-pits of the St. Giles Rookery. There was the palace of the Queen, and there the Old Bailey. There was the office of the “Thunderer” (Daily Times), and there were the attics from whence flowed the vilest trash that man ever printed. There were Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, St. James Park, and the broad squares; and there were the filthy alleys and narrow lanes about London Bridge. There were the Rothschilds, and there the poor Micawbers and deserted Nicholas Nicklebys. The richest, the poorest, the best, the worst; the most cultivated, and the most ignorant; the most powerful monarch, and the most degraded fishmongers. Extremes! Extremes that meet in everything there. They all instruct by teaching the beholder what he ought to be, and what he ought not to be. One sees much in London that ought not to have been; and, strange to relate, many of the relics connected with such things, are exhibited with great pride. If there is any one thing above all others, for which the American should be thankful, it is for the fact that the dungeon, the rack, the wheel, the thumbscrew, the guillotine, the gibbet, the headsman’s block, the deadly hates of royalty, the cruelty of kings, and the jealousy of queens, have no place in the history of the Republic of the West. Yet there, somehow, the officials and guides who open to the public the records of the past and show visitors their institutions, give the most prominent places to deeds of horrid cruelty and shameless murders, as if they took pride in such fearful annals. It would seem as if, had our rulers butchered in cold blood their sons and daughters; had they cruelly starved their friends and relatives, we in America would be ashamed of it. It would be regarded as very natural here, if an ancestor was hung and quartered and his head carried about on a pole, to speak of it as seldom as possible. It would appear consistent if, had our national government oppressed the weak, degraded the poor, killed inoffensive captives, and, for selfish ambition, laid waste the cities and fields of an innocent people, we should attempt to bury the remembrance of those deeds so deep as to make a resurrection impossible. But there, in Europe, they appear to revel in the hideous doings of their ancestors, and will show you where human heads or bands were exhibited, and where noble men and women were persecuted to martyrdom, with the air of the circus manager who announces the clown. Who can hear the guide on London Bridge, “Here was posted the bleeding head of Sir William Wallace, the Scotch warrior and patriot, while the quarters of his body were at Stirling, Berwick, Perth, and Newcastle,” and not curse, with the deepest feeling, the people who murdered one of the greatest and best of men?

TOWER OF LONDON.

It is clear that these things made a strong impression upon Bayard, for we find him more frequently and more decidedly praising his own land, as he saw more and more of Europe. He saw, also, many of the advantages which European nations enjoy in art, literature, and commerce, and failed not to suggest them to his readers. But, unlike those shallow tourists, who would ape European manners, and think all European institutions should be at once imported here, his patriotic regard for the institutions and people of his own land, increased with the desire to benefit them. How reverently he speaks of George Washington; how touchingly does he speak with the European peasants who accost him, of the home of the free beyond the great ocean.

A whole week those young men searched the great city for valuable information. They slept and ate in the rudest of taverns, and tramped the city with the workmen and the beggars, but they were gathering the forces for a useful life. Bayard was filled with the sublimity of the mighty human torrent that, like a tide, rolls into London in the morning, dashes about the highways during the day, and surges outward at night. He felt the grandeur of St. Paul’s, the conflicting and exciting associations of Westminster, the marvellous feat of tunnelling under the Thames, the enormous wealth of churches, monuments, halls, and galleries, and carried away with him to the Continent a very complete idea of the institutions and the queer customs of the great metropolis.

From London, the party proceeded to Dover, and from thence to Ostend and Bruges. They travelled in the cheapest manner, walking wherever practicable, and going from Bruges to Ghent in a canal-boat, thence by railroad across the border to Aix-la-Chapelle. Here was another treat. The description which he gave in his letters of his visit to the old Cathedral, where rest the remains of Charlemagne, was one of the most vivid recitals to be found in the annals of travel. For some reason, he so abridged it in his book, as to take away the finest and most original delineations. Every reader of his first narration, who may never have visited Aix-la-Chapelle, can in imagination see the old Cathedral, with its shrines, its antique windows, and the shadows of saints on the floor, and hear the sweet undulations of the organ’s solemn peal. While to the traveller who follows him through those aisles, and under those magnificent arches, his words give life and language to the pillars, altars, and luminous decorations. To the least poetic or sentimental of travellers, it is a solemn place; and if so to them, how deep and impressive must it have been to a soul so full of emotion as that of Bayard! There he wrote his well-known poem, “The Tomb of Charlemagne.”

This grand old pile was succeeded next day by the great Gothic Cathedral, at Cologne, which was not then finished, is not now completed, and will never see the end of the mason’s labors, because the time taken in the construction is so long that the very stone decays, and must be replaced at the base by the time the delicate tracery of the towers is set on those skyward heights. The structure must be constantly in process of reconstruction, from the bottom, upwards. When Bayard looked upon this wonderful building, which since 1248 had been in an uncompleted state, two hundred and fifty years having been spent in active labor, he said it impressed him most deeply, by way of comparison. Two hundred and forty years before America was discovered, the foundations of that church were laid, and here they are working on it still! By such lessons is an American made to know his place in the history of the world. Had the history of these old lands been less barbarous and cruel, we should feel humble indeed. But in view of what the old folks have done, we may be thankful that we are young, and have our record yet to write. But the fact that we are not so old, so great, so artistic, or so cultured as we have flattered ourselves, is wholesome information, and as taught by these old Cathedrals of Europe, is very necessary to the success of our young men. How deeply these things moved Bayard, is seen by the very frequent mention we find in his writings, of aisle, or arch, or dome, or spire.

But one of the most attractive spots to that young voyager, in all his wanderings in Europe, he saw while going up the Rhine, from Cologne to Mayence. He viewed with satisfaction the vineyards and villages along the banks; he was charmed with the crags and crumbling towers of the innumerable old castles which ornament the tops of all the most prominent hills and mountains. The walled cities, the legendary caves and grottos, the most exquisite fables that account for the miraculous construction of cliff, and convent, and crusaders’ halls, all came upon him as he glided by them on the muddy river, as dreams come to the drinker of hashish. But beyond all these in interest to our young wanderer, was the little walled town of Boppart, whose feudal history is nearly lost, but whose romantic connection with Longfellow’s “Hyperion,” has given it a fresh lease of life. Bayard there recalled his life at home, and his days of anxious waiting; for, had not this same “Hyperion,” with entrancing interest, spurred on his hope to one day travel along the Rhine? Had not this same “Hyperion” given the impulse that started his cousin on such a great journey to the university at Heidelberg? And were not those houses in the town of Boppart, and was not that cottage the very Inn of the “Star,” and might not that woman, near the shore, be “Paul Flemming’s” boatwoman? Oh! grand and revered Longfellow! when we note how many a life, like these, has turned upon the reading of your inspired words, one feels as if to have seen your face and heard your voice, and to have been beneath the same roof, was an honor greater than kings could bestow!

But Boppart, Lurlei Berg, Oberwisel, Bingen, and Geisenheim were soon left behind, and Mayence, with its Cathedral six centuries old, its walls and fortresses, welcomed them to its monotonous shades.

A beautiful trait of Bayard’s character comes gracefully into view as we read his grateful acknowledgments of the kindnesses he received. On his first walk in his apprentice days, in Pennsylvania, having determined to see some mountains, although he had to walk two hundred miles to view them, he was kindly served at a well, on the way, by a farmer’s girl, who cheerfully drew the bucket from the well and ran for a glass, that he, a dusty, thirsty stranger, might drink without further fatigue; and in his later years he records the fact in his book, with the sweetest expressions of thankfulness. So when he arrived at Frankfort, and was kindly received and entertained by Mr. Richard S. Willis, the American consul, brother of Bayard’s old friend, Nathaniel P. Willis, he sits down at once, and in his letters to his friends, and in his public correspondence, he speaks of the generosity and thoughtfulness of his old friend, and the hospitable and cultured characteristics of his new friend. They were noble friends, who made for him a home at their fireside in Frankfort, and deserve the thanks of every admirer of Bayard Taylor. His thanks they had throughout a long life, and not only thanks, but grateful deeds.

It was Bayard’s purpose to go to Heidelberg, with his cousin, and give himself to close study, at the University, or with private tutors; but just how he was going to obtain the means to pay his expenses was something of an enigma. It may be that his good fortune in the outset made him too confident and careless in regard to other undertakings. At all events, his stay in Heidelberg was much shorter than he had at first intended that it should be, and his studies were much more broken and superficial than his letters show he thought they would be. He was not constituted for close, hard, metaphysical study, and made but little attempts in that direction, after he arrived at Heidelberg. He loved the grand old Castle better than the whittled benches of the University. He enjoyed the Kaisersthul and the lesser mountains, far more than the monotonous recital of German theories. The river Neckar called him in its murmurs, the clouds beckoned to him as they flew over the Heligen Berg, the wind called for him as it sighed around the vineyards of Ziegelhausen, and all thoughts of private, quiet study fled at the summons. So he climbed the mountains. It was always a passion with him to gain an altitude as high as possible, and look out upon the world. He tells how, when a boy, he ventured out of a chamber window in the old farm-house at Kennett, and seeing a row of slats which the carpenters had used for steps in ascending the roof, he sallied forth, and there astride of the roof, gained his first view of a landscape. He said afterward, that the roof appeared to be so high and the view so extensive, that he imagined he could see Niagara Falls. Whether this inclination to climb up came to him through the stories of his old Swiss nurse, whose bed-time stories were of the mighty Alps and their towering cones, or whether it was an hereditary trait in his nature, none may be able to decide. He was certainly prone to go upwards, and had a tendency, for horizontal motion equally as strong. He would not remain stationary; hence, at Heidelberg, he inspected every nook and crevice of the picturesque old Castle, crouched through its conduits, rapped its ponderous tun, scaled its roofless and crumbling walls, rushed into the recesses of the adjacent thickets, and tested the celebrated beer at the students’ resorts. He joined excursion parties which visited the neighboring mountains, and after he had been there a month, he knew the fields, rocks, trees, valleys, dells, and peaks, as well as a native, and appears to have loved them with a patriotic regard almost equal to the eldest burgher.