III. UNIVERSITY LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 1845-1848.

Passage in a sailing ship—Gibraltar—Marseilles—Smugglers and a slaver—Italy—Life in Rome—Torlonia’s balls and the last great Carnival of 1846—Navone, the chief of police—Florence—Venice—How I passed the Bridge of Sighs—The Black Bait—Slavery—Crossing the Simplon—Switzerland—Pleasing introduction to Germany—Student life at Heidelberg—Captain Medwin—Justinus Kerner—How I saw Jenny Lind—Munich—Lola Montez—Our house on fire—All over Germany—How I was turned out of Poland—Paris in 1847—The Revolution of 1848—I become conspirator and captain of barricades—Taking of the Tuileries—The police bow me out of Prance—A season in London—Return to America.

After our return to Philadelphia something of great importance to me began to be discussed. My cousin Samuel Godfrey, who was a few years older than I, finding himself threatened with consumption, of which all his family died, resolved to go to Marseilles on a voyage, and persuaded my father to let me accompany him. At this time I had, as indeed for many years before, such a desire to visit Europe that I might almost have died of it. So it was at last determined that I should go with “Sam,” and after all due preparations and packing, I bade farewell to mother and Henry and the dear little twin sisters, and youngest Emily, our pet, and went with my father to New York, where I was the guest for a few days of my cousin, Mrs. Caroline Wight, whom the reader may recall as the one who used to correct my French exercises in Dedham.

We were to sail in a packet or ship for Marseilles. My father saw me off. He was wont to say in after years, that as I stood on the deck at the last moment and looked affectionately at him, there was in my eyes an expression of innocence or goodness and gentleness which he never saw again. Which was, I am sure, very true; the great pity being that that look had not utterly disappeared years before. If it only had vanished with boyhood, as it ought to have done, my father would have been spared much sorrow.

At this time I was a trifle over six feet two in height, and had then and for some time after so fair a red and white complexion, that the young ladies in Philadelphia four years later teased me by spreading the report that I used rouge and white paint! I was not as yet “filled out,” but held myself straightly, and was fairly proportioned. I wore a cap a l’étudiant, very much over my left ear, and had very long, soft, straight, dark-brown hair; my dream and ideal being the German student. I was extremely shy of strangers, but when once acquainted soon became very friendly, and in most cases made a favourable impression. I was “neat and very clean-looking,” as a lady described me, for the daily bath or sponge was universal in Philadelphia long ere it was even in England, and many a time when travelling soon after, I went without a meal in order to have my tub, when time did not permit of both. I was very sensitive, and my feelings were far too easily pained; on the other hand, I had no trace of the common New England youth’s vulgar failing of nagging, teasing, or vexing others under colour of being “funny” or “cute.” A very striking, and, all things considered, a remarkable characteristic was that I hated, as I still do, with all my soul, gossip about other people and their affairs; never read even a card not meant for my eyes, and detested curiosity, prying, and inquisitiveness as I did the devil. I owe a great development of this to a curious incident. It must have been about the time when I first went to college, that I met at Cape May a naval officer, who roomed with me in a cottage, a farm-house near a hotel, and whom I greatly admired as a man of the world and a model of good manners. To him one day I communicated some gossip about somebody, when he abruptly cut me short, and when I would go on informed me that he never listened to such talk. This made a very deep impression on me, which never disappeared; nay, it grew with my growth and strengthened with my strength. Now the New England people, especially Bostonians, are inordinately given to knowing everything about everybody, and to “tittle-tattle,” while the Southerners are comparatively free from it and very incurious. Two-thirds of the students at Princeton were of the first families in the South, and there my indifference to what did not personally concern one was regarded as a virtue. But there is a spot in this sun—that he who never cares a straw to know about the affairs of other people, will, not only if he live in Boston, but almost anywhere else—Old England not at all excepted—be forced, in spite of himself, and though he were as meek and lowly as man may be, into looking down on and feeling himself superior unto those people who will read a letter not meant for their eyes, or eavesdrop, or talk in any way about anybody in a strain to which they would not have that person listen. Which reminds me that in after years I got some praise in the newspapers for the saying that a Yankee’s idea of hell was a place where he must mind his own business. It came about in this way. In a letter to Charles Astor Bristed I made this remark, and illustrated it with a picture of Virgil taking a Yankee attired in a chimney-pot hat and long night-gown into the Inferno, over whose gate was written—

“Badate a vostri affari voi che intrate!” (Mind your own business ye who enter here!)

One day soon after my arrival at Princeton, George Boker laid on the table by me a paper or picture with its face down. I took no notice of it. After a time he said, “Why don’t you look at that picture?” I replied simply, “If you wanted me to see it you would have turned it face up.” To which he remarked, “I put it there to see whether you would look at it. I thought you would not.” George was a “deep, sagacious file,” who studied men like books.

My cousin who accompanied me had as a boy “run away and gone to sea” cod-fishing on the Grand Banks. If I had gone with him it would have done me good. Another cousin, Benjamin Stimson, did the same; he is the S. often mentioned in Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast.” Dana and Stimson were friends, and ran away together. It was quite the rule for all my Yankee cousins to do this, and they all benefited by it. In consequence of his nautical experience Sam was soon at home among all sailors, and not having my scruples as to knowing who was who or their affairs, soon knew everything that was going on. Our captain was a handsome, dissipated, and “loud” young man, with rather more sail than ballast, but good-natured and obliging.

“Come day, go day,” we passed the Gulf Stream and the Azores, and had long sunny calms, when we could not sail, and lay about on deck, warm and lazy, and saw the Azores, and so on, till we were near the Spanish coast. One evening there clipped right under our lee a fisherman’s smack. “I say, Leland, hail that fellow!” said the captain. So I called in Spanish, “Adonde venga usted?”

“Da Algesiras,” was the reply, which thrilled out of my heart the thought that, like the squire in Chaucer—

“He had been at the siege of Algecir.”

So I called, in parting, “Dios vaya con usted!”

Sam informed me that the manner in which I hailed the fisherman had made a great impression on the captain, who lauded me highly. It also made one on me, because it was the first time I ever spoke to a European in Europe!

Anon we were boarded by an old weather-beaten seadog of a Spanish pilot, unto whom I felt a great attraction; and greeting him in Malagan Spanish, such as I had learned from Manuel Gori, as Hermano! and offering him with ceremonious politeness a good cigar, I also drew his regards; all Spaniards, as I well knew, being extremely fond, beyond all men on earth, of intimacy with gentlemen. We were delayed for two days at Gibraltar. I may here remark, by the way, that this voyage of our ship is described in a book by Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler, entitled “A Year of Consolation Abroad.” She was on board, but never spoke to a soul among the passengers.

I was never acquainted with Mrs. Butler, as I easily might have been, for we had some very intimate friends in common; but as a boy I had been “frightened of her” by certain anecdotes as to her temper, and perhaps the influence lasted into later years. I have, however, heard her lecture. She was a very clever woman, and Mr. Henry James, in Temple Bar for March, 1893, thus does justice to her conversational power:

“Her talk reflected a thousand vanished and present things; but there were those of her friends for whom its value was, almost before any other, documentary. The generations move so fast and change so much, that Mrs. Kemble testified even more than she affected to do, which was much, to ancient manners and a close chapter of history. Her conversation swarmed with people and with criticism of people, with the ghosts of a dead society. She had, in two hemispheres, seen every one and known every one, had assisted at the social comedy of her age. Her own habits and traditions were in themselves a survival of an era less democratic and more mannered. I have no room for enumerations, which, moreover, would be invidious; but the old London of her talk—the direction I liked is best to take—was, in particular, a gallery of portraits. She made Count d’Orsay familiar, she made Charles Greville present; I thought it wonderful that she could be anecdotic about Miss Edgeworth. She reanimated the old drawing-rooms, relighted the old lamps, retuned the old pianos. The finest comedy of all, perhaps, was that of her own generous whimsicalities. She was superbly willing to amuse, and on any terms; and her temper could do it as well as her wit. If either of these had failed, her eccentricities were always there. She had more ‘habits’ than most people have room in life for, and a theory that to a person of her disposition they were as necessary as the close meshes of a strait-waistcoat. If she had not lived by rule (on her showing) she would have lived infallibly by riot. Her rules and her riots, her reservations and her concessions, all her luxuriant theory and all her extravagant practice; her drollery, that mocked at her melancholy; her imagination, that mocked at her drollery; and her wonderful manners, all her own, that mocked a little at everything: these were part of the constant freshness which made those who loved her love her so much. ‘If my servants can live with me a week, they can live with me for ever,’ she often said; ‘but the first week sometimes kills them.’ A domestic who had been long in her service quitted his foreign home the instant he heard of her death, and, travelling for thirty hours, arrived travel-stained and breathless, like a messenger in a romantic tale, just in time to drop a handful of flowers into her grave.”

There came on board of our boat a fruit-dealer, and the old pilot, seeing that I was about to invest a real in grapes, said, “Let me buy them for you”; which he did, obtaining half-a-peck of exquisite large grapes of a beautiful purple colour.

There was a middle-aged lady among the passengers, of whom the least I can say was, that she had a great many little winning ways of making herself disagreeable. She imposed frightfully on me while on board, getting me to mark her trunks for her, and carry them into the hold, &c. (the sailors disliked her so much that they refused to touch them), and then cut me dead when on shore. This ancient horror, seeing me with so many grapes, and learning the price, concluded that if a mere boy like me could get so many, she, a lady, could for four reals lay in a stock which would last for life, more or less. So she obtained a bushel-basket, expecting to get it heaped full; but what was her wrath at only getting for her silver half-dollar just enough to hide the bottom thereof! Great was her rage, but rage availed her nought. She did not call old pilots “Brother,” or give them cigars, or talk Malagano politely. She was not even “half-Spanish,” and therefore, as we used to say at college of certain unpopular people, was “a bad smoke.”

We went on shore on Sunday, which in those days always made Gibraltar literally like a fancy ball. The first person whom I met was a pretty young lady in full, antique, rich Castilian costume, followed by a servant bearing her book of devotion. Seeing my gaze of admiration, she smiled, at which I bowed, and she returned the salute and went her way. Such an event had never happened to me before in all my life. I accepted it philosophically as one of a new order of things into which I was destined to enter. Then I saw men from every part of Spain in quaint dresses, Castilians in cloaks, Andalusians in the jaunty majo rig, Gallegos, Moors from the Barbary coast, many Greeks, old Jews in gabardines, Scotch Highland soldiers, and endless more—concursus splendidus—non possum non mirari.

I felt myself very happy and very much at home in all this. I strolled about the streets talking Spanish to everybody. Then I met with a smuggler, who asked me if I wanted to buy cigars. I did. In New York my uncle George had given me a box of five hundred excellent Havanas, and these had lasted me exactly twenty days. I had smoked the last twenty-five on the last day. So I went and bought at a low enough figure a box of the worst cigars I had ever met with. But youth can smoke anything—except deceit.

Entrance to the galleries was strictly forbidden in those days, but an incorruptible British sergeant, for an incorruptible dollar or two, showed us over them. There was, too, a remarkable man, a ship-chandler named Felipe, to whom I was introduced. Felipe spoke twenty-four languages. He boarded every ship and knew everybody. Gibraltar was then a vast head-quarters of social evils, or blessings, and Felipe, who was a perfect Hercules, mentioned incidentally that he had had a new maja, or moza, or muger, or puta, every night for twenty years! which was confirmed by common report. It was a firm principle with him to always change. This extraordinary fact made me reflect deeply on it as a psychological phenomenon. This far surpassed anything I had ever heard at Princeton. Then this and that great English dignitary was pointed out to me—black eyes ogled me—everybody was polite, for I had a touch of the Spanish manner which I had observed in the ex-Capitan-General and others whom I had known in Philadelphia; and, in short, I saw more that was picturesque and congenial in that one day than I had ever beheld in all my life before. I had got into “my plate.”

From Gibraltar our ship sailed on to Marseilles. The coasts were full of old ruins, which I sketched. We lay off Malaga for a day, but I could not go ashore, much as I longed to. At Marseilles, Sam and the captain and I went to a very good hotel.

Now it had happened that on the voyage before a certain French lady—the captain said she was a Baroness—having fallen in love with the said captain, had secreted herself on board the vessel, greatly to his horror, and reappeared when out at sea. Therefore, as soon as we arrived at Marseilles, the injured husband came raging on board and tried to shoot the captain, which made a great scandal. And, moved by this example, the coloured cook of our vessel, who had a wife, shot the head-waiter on the same day, being also instigated by jealousy. Sam Godfrey chaffed the captain for setting a bad moral example to the niggers—which was all quite a change from Princeton. Life was beginning to be lively.

There had come over on the vessel with us, in the cabin, a droll character, an actor in a Philadelphia theatre, who had promptly found a lodging in a kind of maritime boarding-house. Getting into some difficulty, as he could not speak French he came in a great hurry to beg me to go with him to his pension to act as interpreter, which I did. I found at once that it was a Spanish house, and the resort of smugglers. The landlady was a very pretty black-eyed woman, who played the guitar, and sang Spanish songs, and brought out Spanish wine, and was marvellously polite to me, to my astonishment, not unmingled with innocent gratitude.

There I was at home. At Princeton I had learned to play the guitar, and from Manuel Gori, who had during all his boyhood been familiar with low life and smugglers, I had learned many songs and some slang. And so, with a crowd of dark, fierce, astonished faces round me of men eagerly listening, I sang a smuggler’s song—

“Yo que soy contrabandista, Y campo a me rispeto, A todos mi desafio, Quien me compra hilo negro? Ay jaleo! Muchachas jaleo! Quien me compra hilo negro!”

Great was the amazement and thundering the applause from my auditors. Let the reader imagine a nun of fourteen years asked to sing, and bursting out with “Go it while you’re young!” Then I sang the Tragala, which coincided with the political views of my friends. But my grand coup was in reserve. I had learned from Borrow’s “Gypsies in Spain” a long string of Gitano or Gypsy verses, such as—

“El eray guillabela, El eray obusno; Que avella romanella, No avella obusno!”

“Loud sang the gorgio to his fair, And thus his ditty ran:— ‘Oh, may the Gypsy maiden come, And not the Gypsy man!’”

And yet again—

“Coruncho Lopez, gallant lad, A smuggling he would ride; So stole his father’s ambling prad, And therefore to the galleys sad Coruncho now I guide.”

This was a final coup. How the diabolo I, such an innocent stranger youth, had ever learned Spanish Gypsy—the least knowledge of which in Spain implies unfathomable iniquity and fastness—was beyond all comprehension. So I departed full of honour amid thunders of applause.

From the first day our room was the resort of all the American ship-captains in Marseilles. We kept a kind of social hall or exchange, with wine and cigars on the side-table, all of which dropping in and out rather reminded me of Princeton. My friend the actor had pitched upon a young English Jew, who seemed to me to be a doubtful character. He sang very well, and was full of local news and gossip. He, too, was at home among us. One evening our captain told us how he every day smuggled ashore fifty cigars in his hat. At hearing this, I saw a gleam in the eyes of the young man, which was a revelation to me. When he had gone, I said to the captain, “You had better not smuggle any cigars to-morrow. That fellow is a spy of the police.”

The next day Captain Jack on leaving his ship was accosted by the douaniers, who politely requested him to take off his hat. He refused, and was then told that he must go before the préfet. There the request was renewed. He complied; but “forewarned, forearmed”—there was nothing in it.

Captain Jack complimented me on my sagacity, and scolded the actor for making such friends. But he had unconsciously made me familiar with one compared to whom the spy was a trifle. I have already fully and very truthfully described this remarkable man in an article in Temple Bar, but his proper place is here. He was a little modest-looking Englishman, who seemed to me rather to look up to the fast young American captains as types or models of more daring beings. Sometimes he would tell a mildly-naughty tale as if it were a wild thing. He consulted with me as to going to Paris and hearing lectures at the University, his education having been neglected. He had, I was told, experienced a sad loss, having just lost his ship on the Guinea coast. One day I condoled with him, saying that I heard he had been ruined.

“Yes,” replied the captain, “I have. Something like this: My mother once had a very pretty housemaid who disappeared. Some time after I met her magnificently dressed, and I said, ‘Sally, where do you live now?’ She replied, ‘Please, sir, I don’t live anywhere now; I’ve been ruined.’”

Sam explained to me that the captain had a keg of gold-dust and many diamonds, and having wrecked his vessel intentionally, was going to London to get a heavy insurance. He had been “ruined” to his very great advantage. Then Sam remarked—

“You don’t know the captain. I tell you, Charley, that man is an old slaver or pirate. See how I’ll draw him out.”

‘The next day Sam began to talk. He remarked that he had been to sea and had some money which he wished to invest. His health required a warm climate, such as the African coast. We would both, in fact, like to go into the Guinea business. [Bozales—“sacks of charcoal,” I remarked in Spanish slaver-slang.] The captain smiled. He had apparently heard the expression before. He considered it. He had a great liking for me, and thought that a trip or two under the black flag would do me a great deal of good. So he noted down our address, and promised that as soon as he should get a ship we should hear from him.

After that the captain, regarding me as enlisted in the fraternity, and only waiting till ’twas “time for us to go,” had no secrets from me. He was very glad that I knew Spanish and French, and explained that if I would learn Coromantee or Ebo, it would aid us immensely in getting cargoes. By the way, I became very well acquainted in after years with King George of Bonney, and can remember entertaining him with a story how a friend of mine once (in Cuba) bought thirty Ebos, and on entering the barracoon the next morning, found them all hanging by the necks dead, like a row of possums in the Philadelphia market—they having, with magnificent pluck, and in glorious defiance of Buckra civilisation, resolved to go back to Africa. I have found other blacks who believed that all good darkies when they die go to Guinea, and one of these was very touching and strange. He had been brought as a slave-child to South Carolina, but was always haunted by the memory of a group of cocoa-palms by a place where the wild white surf of the ocean bounded up to the shore—a rock, sunshine, and sand. There he declared his soul would go. He was a Voodoo, and a man of marvellous strange mind.

Day by day my commander gave me, as I honestly believe, without a shadow of exaggeration, all the terrific details of a slaver’s life, and his strange experiences in buying slaves in the interior. Compared to the awful massacres and cruelties inflicted by the blacks on one another, the white slave trade seemed to be philanthropic and humane. He had seen at the grand custom in Dahomey 2,500 men killed, and a pool made of their blood into which the king’s wives threw themselves naked and wallowed. “One day fifteen were to be tortured to death for witchcraft. I bought them all for an old dress-coat,” said the captain. “I didn’t want them, for my cargo was made up; it was only to save the poor devils’ lives.”

If a slaver could not get a full cargo, and met with a weaker vessel which was full, it was at once attacked and plundered. Sometimes there would be desperate resistance, with the aid of the slaves. “I have seen the scuppers run with blood,” said the captain. And so on, with much more of the same sort, all of which has since been recorded in the “Journal of Captain Canot,” from which latter book I really learned nothing new. I might add the “Life of Hobart Pacha,” whom I met many times in London. A real old-fashioned slaver was fully a hundred times worse than an average pirate, because he was the latter whenever he wished to rob, and in his business was the cause of far more suffering and death.

The captain was very fond of reading poetry, his favourite being Wordsworth. This formed quite a tie between us. He was always rather mild, quiet, and old-fashioned—in fact, muffish. Once only did I see a spark from him which showed what was latent. Captain Jack was describing a most extraordinary run which we had made before a gale from Gibraltar to Cape de Creux, which was, indeed, true enough, he having a very fast vessel. But the Guinea captain denied that such time had ever been made by any craft ever built. “And I have had to sail sometimes pretty fast in my time,” he added with one sharp glance—no more—but, as Byron says of the look of Gulleyaz, ’twas like a short glimpse of hell. Pretty fast! I should think so—now and then from an English cruiser, all sails wetted down, with the gallows in the background. But as I had been on board with Sam, the question was settled. We had made a run which was beyond all precedent.

I fancy that the captain, if he escaped the halter or the wave, in after years settled down in some English coast-village, where he read Wordsworth, and attended church regularly, and was probably regarded as a gentle old duffer by the younger members of society. But take him for all in all, he was the mildest-mannered man that ever scuttled ship or cut a throat, and he always behaved to me like a perfect gentleman, and never uttered an improper word.

We had to wait one month till my cousin could get certain news from America. We employed the time in travelling in the south, visiting Arles, Nismes, Montpellier, and other places. An English gentleman named Gordon, whom I had met in Marseilles, had given me a letter of introduction to M. Saint René Taillandier in the latter place. I knew nothing at all then about this great man, or that he was the first French critic of German literature, but I presented my letter, and he kindly went with me about the town to show me its antiquities. I can remember discussing Gothic tracery with him; also, that I told him I was deeply interested in the Troubadours. He recommended Raynouard and several other books, when finding that I was familiar with them all, he smiled, and said that he believed he could teach me nothing more. I did not know it then, but that word from him would have been as good as a diploma for me in Paris.

As for old Roman ruins and Gothic churches, and cloisters grey, and the arrowy Rhone, and castellated bridges—everything was in a more original moss-grown, picturesque condition then than it now is—I enjoyed them all with an intensity, a freshness or love, which passeth all belief. I had attended Professor Dodd’s lectures more than once, and illuminated manuscripts, and had bought me in Marseilles Berty’s “Dictionary of Gothic Architecture,” and got it by heart, and began to think of making a profession of it, which, if I had known it, was the very wisest thing I could have done. And that this is no idle boast is clear from this, that I in after years made a design according to which a “store,” which cost £30,000, was built, my plan being believed by another skilled architect to have been executed by a “professional.” This was really the sad slip and escape of my lifetime.

In those days, really good red wine was given to every one at every table; savoury old-fashioned dishes, vegetables, and fruits were served far more freely and cheaply than they now are, when every dainty is sent by rail to Paris or London, and the drinking of Bordeaux and Burgundy did me much good. Blessed days of cheapness and good quality, before chicory, the accursed poison, had found its way into coffee, or oleomargarine was invented, or all things canned—the world will never see ye more! I have now lived for many months in a first-class Florence hotel, and in all the time have not tasted one fresh Italian mushroom, or truffle, or olive—nothing but tasteless abominations bottled in France!

It was settled that my cousin should return from Marseilles to the United States, while I was to go on alone to Italy. It was misgivingly predicted at home by divers friends that I would be as a lamb set loose among wolves, and lose all my money at the outstart. Could they have learned that within a week after my arrival I had been regarded by Spanish smugglers as a brother, and tripped up a spy of the police, and been promised a situation as a slaver’s and pirate’s assistant, they might have thought that I had begun to learn how to take care of myself in a hurry. As for losing my money, I, by a terrible accident, doubled it, as I will here describe.

Before leaving home, a lady cousin had made for Samuel and me each a purse, and they were exactly alike. Now by a purse I mean a real purse, and not a pocket-book, or a porte-monnaie, or a wallet—that is, I mean a long bag with a slit and two rings, and nothing else. And my cousin having often scolded me for leaving mine lying about in our room, I seeing it, as I thought, just a few minutes before my departure, lying on the table, pocketed it, thanking God that Sam had not found it, or scolded me.

I went on board the steamboat and set sail towards Italy. I was sea-sick all night, but felt better the next day. Then I had to pay out some money, and thought I would look over my gold. To my utter amazement, it was doubled! This I attributed to great generosity on Sam’s part, and I blessed him.

But, merciful heavens! what were my sensations at finding in the lower depth of my pocket another purse also filled with Napoleons in rouleaux! Then it all flashed upon me. Samuel, the careful, had left his purse lying on the table, and I had supposed it was mine! I felt as wretched as if I had lost instead of won.

When I got to Naples I found a letter from my cousin bewailing his loss. He implored me, if I knew nothing about it, not to tell it to a human soul. There was a M. Duclaux in Marseilles, with whom we had had our business dealings, and from him Sam had borrowed what he needed. I at once requested Captain Olive, of the steamer, to convey the purse and its contents to M. Duclaux, which I suppose was done secundem ordinem.

Poor Sam! I never met him again. He died of consumption soon after returning home. He was one of whom I can say with truth that I never saw in him a fault, however trifling. He was honour itself in everything, as humane as was his grandfather before him, ever cheerful and kind, merry and quaint.

The programme of the steamboat declared that meals were included in the fare, “except while stopping at a port.” But we stopped every day at Genoa or Leghorn, or somewhere, and stayed about fifteen hours, and as almost every passenger fell sea-sick after going ashore, the meals were not many. On board the first day, I made the acquaintance of Mr. James Temple Bowdoin, of Boston, and Mr. Mosely, of whom I had often heard as editor of the Richmond Whig. Mr. Bowdoin was a nephew of Lady Temple, and otherwise widely connected with English families. He is now living (1892), and I have seen a great deal of him of late years. With these two I joined company, and travelled with them over Italy. Both were much older than I, and experienced men of the world; therefore I was in good hands, and better guides, philosophers, mentors, pilots, and friends I could hardly have found. Left to myself, I should probably ere the winter was over have been the beloved chief of a gang of gypsies, or brigands, or witches, or careering the wild sea-wave as a daring smuggler, all in innocence and goodness of heart; for truly in Marseilles I had begun to put forth buds of such strange kind and promise as no friend of mine ever dreamed of. As it was, I got into better, if less picturesque, society.

We came to Naples, and went to a hotel, and visited everything. In those days the beggars and pimps and pickpockets were beyond all modern conception. The picturesqueness of the place and people were only equalled by the stinks. It was like a modern realistic novel. We went a great deal to the opera, also to the Blue Grotto of Capri, and ascended Mount Vesuvius, and sought Baiæ, and made, in fact, all the excursions. As there were three, and sometimes half-a-dozen of our friends on these trips, we had, naturally, with us quite a cortége. Among these was an ill-favoured rascal called “John,” who always received a dollar a day. One evening some one raised the question as to what the devil it was that John did. He did not carry anything, or work to any account, or guide, or inform, yet he was always there, and always in the way. So John, being called up, was asked what he did. Great was his indignation, for by this time he had got to consider himself indispensable. He declared that he “directed, and made himself generally useful.” We informed him that we would do our own directing, and regarded him as generally useless. So John was discarded. Since then I have found that “John” is a very frequent ingredient in all societies and Government offices. There are Johns in Parliament, in the army, and in the Church. His children are pensioned into the third and fourth and fortieth generation. In fact, I am not sure that John is not the great social question of the age.

There was in Philadelphia an Academy of Fine Arts, or Gallery, of which my father had generously presented me with two shares, which gave me free entrance. There were in it many really excellent pictures, even a first-class Murillo, besides Wests and Allstons. Unto this I had, as was my wont, read up closely, and reflected much on what I read, so that I was to a certain degree prepared for the marvels of art which burst on me in Naples. And if I was, and always have been, rather insensible to the merits of Renaissance sculpture and architecture, I was not so to its painting, and not at all blind to the unsurpassed glories of its classic prototypes. Professor Dodd had indeed impressed it deeply and specially on my mind that the revival of a really pure Greek taste in England, or from the work of Stewart and Revett, was contemporary with that for Gothic architecture, and that the appreciation of one, if true, implies that of the other. As I was now fully inspired with my new resolution to become an architect, I read all that I could get on the subject, and naturally examined all remains of the past far more closely and critically than I should otherwise have done. And this again inspired in me (who always had a mania for bric-à-brac and antiquity, which is certainly hereditary) a great interest in the characteristic decoration of different ages, which thing is the soul and life of all æsthetic archæology and the minor arts; which latter again I truly claim to have brought, I may say, into scientific form and made a branch of education in after years.

I think that we were a month in Naples. I kept a journal then, and indeed everywhere for three years after. The reader may be thankful that I have it not, for I foresee that I shall easily recall enough to fill ten folios of a thousand pages solid brevier each, at this rate of reminiscences. As my predilection for everything German and Gothic came out more strongly every day, Mr. Mosely called me familiarly Germanicus, a name which was indeed not ill-bestowed at that period.

From Naples we went to Rome by vettura, or in carriages. We were two days and two nights on the route. I remember that when we entered Rome, I saw the douanier who examined my trunk remove from it, as he thought unperceived, a hair-brush, book, &c., and slyly hide them behind another trunk. I calmly walked round, retook and replaced them in my trunk, to the discomfiture, but not in the least to the shame, of the thief, who only grinned.

And here I may say, once for all, that one can hardly fail to have a mean opinion of human common-sense in government, when we see this system of examining luggage still maintained. For all that any country could possibly lose by smuggling in trunks, &c., would be a hundred-fold recompensed by the increased amount of travel and money imported, should it be done away with, as has been perfectly and fully proved in France; the announcement a year ago that examination would be null or formal having had at once the effect of greatly increasing travel. And as there is not a custom-house in all Europe where a man who knows the trick cannot pull through his luggage by bribery—the exceptions being miraculously rare—the absurdity and folly of the system is apparent.

We went to the Hotel d’Allemagne, where I fell ill, either because I had a touch of Neapolitan malaria in me (in those days the stench of the city was perceptible three miles out at sea, and might have risen unto heaven above and been smelt by the angels, had they and their home been as near to earth as was believed by the schoolmen), or because the journey had been too much for me. However, an English physician set me up all right in two or three days (he wanted to sell us pictures which would have cured any one—of a love of art), and then there began indeed a glorious scampering and investigating, rooting and rummaging—

“’Mid deathless lairs in solemn Rome.”

Galleries and gardens, ruins and palaces, Colosseum and temples, churches and museums—ye have had many a better informed and many a more inspired or gifted visitor than I, but whether from your first Sabine days you ever had a happier one, or one who enjoyed you more with the simple enjoyment of youth and hope gratified, I doubt. Sometimes among moss-grown arches on a sunny day, as the verd-antique lizards darted over the stones from dark to light, while far in the distance tinkled bells, either from cows or convents, and all was calm and sweet, I have often wondered if it could indeed be real and not a dream. Life often seemed to me then to be too good to be true. And there was this at least good in my Transcendentalism and Poly-Pantheism, that it quite unconsciously or silently gave me many such hours; for it had sunk so deeply into my soul, and was so much a real part thereof, that it inspired me when I never thought of it, in which I differed by a heaven’s width from the professional Yankee Transcendentalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Æsthetes, and other spiritualists or sorcerers, who always kept their blessed belief, as a holy fugleman, full in sight, to give them sacred straight tips, or as a Star-spangled Bannerman who waved exceedingly, while my spirit was a shy fairy, who dwelt far down in the depths of the all too green sea of my soul, where it seemed to me she had ever been, or ever a storm had raised a wave on the surface. Antiquely verdant green I was, no doubt. And even to this day the best hours of my life are when I hear her sweet voice ’mid ivy greens or ruins grey, in wise books, hoar traditions. Be it where it will, it is that, and not the world of men or books, which gives the charm.

It was usual for all who drew from Torlonia’s bank not less than £20 to be invited to his soirées. To ensure the expenses, the footman who brought the invitation called the day after for not less than five francs. But the entertainment was well worth the money, and more. There was a good supper—Thackeray has represented a character in “Vanity Fair” as devouring it—and much amusement.

Now I had written my name Chas., which being mistaken for Chev., I in due time, received an invitation addressed to M. le Chevalier Godfrey de Leland. And it befell that I once found a lost decoration of the Order of the Golden Spur, which in those days was actually sold to anybody who asked for it for ten pounds, and was worth “nothing to nobody.” This caused much fun among my friends, and from that day I was known as the Chevalier Germanicus, or the Knight of the Golden Spur, to which I assented with very good grace as a joke. There were even a few who really believed that I had been decorated, though I never wore it, and one day I received quite a severe remonstrance from a very patriotic fellow-countryman against the impropriety of my thus risking my loss of citizenship. Which caused me to reflect how many there are in life who rise to such “honours,” Heaven only knows how, in a back-stairs way. I know in London a very great man of science, nemini secundus, who has never been knighted, although the tradesman who makes for him his implements and instruments has received the title and the accolade. Fie at justitia!

I saw at one of the Torlonia entertainments a marvellously beautiful and strange thing, of which I had read an account in Mme. de Staël’s Corinne. There was a stage, on which appeared a young girl, plainly dressed, and bearing a simple small scarf. She did not speak or dance, or even assume “artistic positions”; what she did was far more striking and wonderful. She merely sat or stood or reclined in many ways, every one of which seemed to be perfectly natural or habitual, and all of which were incredibly graceful. I have forgotten how such women were called in Italy. I am sure that this one had never been trained to it, for the absolute ease and naturalness with which she sat or stood could never have been taught. If it could, every woman in the world would learn it. Ristori was one of these instinctive Graces, and it constituted nearly all the art there was in her.

This was in 1846. The Carnival of that year in Rome was the last real one which Italy ever beheld. It was the very last, for which every soul saved up all his money for months, in order to make a wild display, and dance and revel and indulge in

“Eating, drinking, masking, And other things which could be had for asking.”

Then all Rome ran mad, and rode in carriages full of flowers, or carts, or wheelbarrows, or triumphal chariots, or on camels, horses, asses, or rails—n’importe quoi—and merrily cast confetti of flour or lime at one another laughing, while grave English tourists on balconies laboriously poured the same by the peck from tin scoops on the heads of the multitude, under the delusion that they too were enjoying themselves and “doing” the Carnival properly. It was the one great rule among Italians that no man should in the Carnival, under any provocation whatever, lose his temper. And here John Bull often tripped up. On the last night of the last Carnival—that great night—there was the Senza Moccolo or extinguishment of lights, in which everybody bore a burning taper, and tried to blow or knock out the light of his neighbour. Now, being tall, I held my taper high with one hand, well out of danger, while with a broad felt hat in the other I extinguished the children of light like a priest. I threw myself into all the roaring fun like a wild boy, as I was, and was never so jolly. Observing a pretty young English lady in an open carriage, I thrice extinguished her light, at which she laughed, but at which her brother or beau did not, for he got into a great rage, even the first time, and bade me begone. Whereupon I promptly renewed the attack, and then repeated it, “according to the rules of the game,” whereat he began to curse and swear, when I, in the Italian fashion of rebuke (to the delight of sundry Italians), pointed my finger at him and hissed; which constituted the winning point d’honneur in the game.

There, too, was the race of wild horses, right down through the Corso or Condotti, well worth seeing, and very exciting, and game suppers o’nights after the opera, and the meeting with many swells and noted folk, and now it all seems like some memory of a wild phantasmagoria or hurried magic-lantern show—galleries and ruins by day, and gaiety by night. Even so do all the scenes of life roll up together at its end, often getting mixed.

Yet another Roman memory or two. We had taken lodgings in the Via Condotti, where we had a nice sitting-room in common and a good coal-fire. Our landlady was lady-like and spoke French, and had long been a governess in the great Borghese family. As for her husband, there were thousands of Liberals far and wide who spoke of him as the greatest scoundrel unhung, for he was at the head of the Roman police, and I verily believe knew more iniquity than the Pope himself. It would have been against all nature and precedent if I had not become his dear friend and protégé, which I did accordingly, for I liked him very much indeed, and Heaven knows that such a rum couple of friends as Giuseppe Navone and myself, when out walking together, could not at that time have been found in Europe.

It may here be observed that I was decidedly getting on in the quality of my Mentors, for, as regarded morals and humanity, my old pirate and slaver friend was truly as a lamb and an angel of light compared to Navone. And I will further indicate, as this book will prove, that if I was not at the age of twenty-three the most accomplished young scoundrel in all Europe, it was not for want of such magnificent opportunities and friends as few men ever enjoyed. But it was always my fate to neglect or to be unable to profit by advantages, as, for instance, in mathematics; nor in dishonesty did I succeed one whit better, which may be the reason why the two are somehow dimly connected in my mind. Here I think I see the unfathomable smile in the eye of Professor Dodd (it never got down to his lips), who was the incarnate soul of purity and honour. But then the banker, E. Fenzi, who swindled me out of nearly 500 francs, was an arithmetician, and I write under a sense of recent wrong. How this loss, and Fenzi’s failure, flight, and the fuss which it all caused in Florence, were accurately foretold me by a witch, may be read in detail in my “Etrusco-Roman Remains in Tuscan Tradition.” London: T. Fisher Unwin.

My landlady was a very zealous Catholic, and tried to convert me. This was a new experience, and I enjoyed it. I proved malleable. So she called in a Jesuit priest to perfect the work. I listened with deep interest to his worn-out fade arguments, made a few points of feeble objection for form’s sake, yielded, and met him more than half way. But somehow he never called again. Latet anguis in herba—my grass was rather too green, I suppose. I was rather sorry, for I expected some amusement. But I had been too deep for the Jesuit—and for myself.

The time came for my departure. I was to go alone on to Florence, in advance of my friends. Navone arranged everything nicely for me: I was to go by diligence on to Civita Vecchia, where I was to call on a relative of his, who kept a bric-à-brac shop. I did not know how or why it was that I was treated with such great respect, as if with fear, by the conductor, and by all on the road. I was en route all night, and in the morning, very weary, I went to a hotel, called a commissionaire, and bade him get my passport from the police, and have it visée, and secure me a passage on the boat to Leghorn. He returned very soon, and said with an air of bewilderment, “Signore, you sent me on a useless errand. Here is your passport put all en règle, and your passage is all secured!”

I saw it at once. The kind fatherly care of the great and good Navone had done it all! He had watched over me invisibly and mysteriously all the time during the night; on the road I was a pet child of the Roman police! The Vehmgericht had endorsed me with three crosses! Therefore the passport and the passage were all right, and the captain was very deferential, and I got to Florence safely.

In Florence I went to the first hotel, which was then in what is now known as the Palazzo Feroni, or Viesseux’s, the great circulating library of Italy. It is a fine machicolated building, which was in the Middle Ages the prison of the Republic. From my window I had a fine view of the Via Tornabuoni—in which I had coffee since I concluded the last line. There were but three or four persons the first evening at the table-d’hôte. One was a very beautiful Polish countess, who spoke French perfectly. She was very fascinating, and, when she ate a salad, smeared her lovely mouth and cheeks all round with oil to her ears. Some one said something to her about the manner in which the serfs were treated in Poland, whereupon she replied with great vivacity that the Polish serfs were even more degraded and barbarous than those of Russia. Which remark inspired in me certain reflections, which were amply developed in after years by the perusal of Von Moltke’s work on Poland, and more recently of that very interesting novel called “The Deluge.” If freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell, it was probably, from a humanitarian point of view, with joy.

There was, however, at the same hotel a singular man, a Lithuanian Pole named Andrékovitch, with whom I became very intimate, and whom I met in after years in Paris and in America. He had been at a German university, where he had imbibed most liberal and revolutionary ideas. He subsequently took part in one or two revolutions, and was exiled. He had read about Emerson in a French magazine, and was enthusiastic over him. In strange contrast to him was a handsome young man from the Italian Tyrol, who was, like the Pole and myself, full of literary longings, but who was still quite a Roman Catholic. He knew about as much, or as little, of the world as I did, and was “gentle and bland.” When we bade farewell, he wept, and kissed me. Andrékovitch was eccentric, wild, and Slavonian-odd to look at at any time. One evening he came into my room clad in scarlet dressing-gown, and having altogether the appearance of a sorcerer just out of a Sabbat. The conversation took a theological turn. Andrékovitch was the ragged remnant of a Catholic, but a very small one. He sailed close to the wind, and neared Rationalism.

“But the Pope! . . .” exclaimed the Tyrolese.

Andrékovitch rose, looking more sorcerer or Zamiel-like than ever, and exclaiming, “The Pope be—!” left the room. The last word was lost in the slam of the door. It was a melodramatic departure, and as such has ever been impressed on my memory.

My father, while a merchant, and also my uncle, had done a very large business in Florentine straw goods, and I had received letters to several English houses who had corresponded with them. I heard, long after, that my arrival had caused a small panic in Florence in business circles, it being apprehended that I had come out to establish a rival branch, or to buy at head-quarters for the American “straw-market.” I believe that their fears were appeased when I interviewed them. One of these worthy men had been so long in Italy that he had caught a little of its superstition. He wished to invest in lottery tickets, and asked me for lucky numbers, which I gave him.

As I write these lines in Florence, I have within half-an-hour called for the first time on an old witch or strega, whom I found surrounded by herbs and bottles, and a magnificent cat, who fixed his eyes on me all the time, as if he recognised a friend. I found, however, that she only knew the common vulgar sorceries, and was unable to give me any of the higher scongiurazioni or conjurations; and as I left, the old sorceress said respectfully and admiringly, “You come to me to learn, O Maestro, but it is fitter that I take lessons from you!” Then she asked me for “the wizard blessing,” which I gave her in Romany. So my first and last experiences in the deep and dark art come together!

I became acquainted in Florence with Hiram Powers, which reminds me that I once in Rome dined vis-à-vis to Gibson and several other artists, with whom I became intimate as young men readily do. I contrived to study architecture, and made myself very much at home in a few studios. The magnificent Fiorara, or flower-girl, whom so many will remember for many years, was then in the full bloom of her beauty. She and others gave flowers to any strangers whom they met, not expecting money down, but when a man departed the flower-girls were always on hand to solicit a gratuity. Twenty years later this same Fiorara, still a very handsome woman, remembered me, and gave my wife a handsome bouquet on leaving.

I studied Provençal and Italian poetry in illuminated MSS. in the Ambrosian or Laurentian Library, and took my coffee at Doney’s, and saw more of Florence in a few weeks’ time than I have ever done since in any one of my residences here, though some of them have been for six and nine months. As is quite natural. Who that lives in London ever goes to see the Tower? All things in Europe were so new and fresh and beautiful and wonderful to me then, and I had been yearning for them so earnestly for so many years, and this golden freedom followed so closely on the deadly ennui of Princeton, that I could never see enough.

If any of my readers want to know something of sorcery, I can tell them that among its humblest professors it is perfectly understood that pleasure or enjoyment is one of its deepest mysteries or principles, as an integral part of fascination. So I can feel an enchantment, sometimes almost incredible, in gazing on a Gothic ruin in sunshine, or a beautiful face, a picture by Carpaccio, Norse interlaces, lovable old books, my amethyst amulet, or a garden. For if you could sway life and death, and own millions, or walk invisible, you could do no more than enjoy; therefore you had better learn to enjoy much without such power. Thus endeth the first lesson!

I arrived in Venice. There had been a time in America when, if I could have truthfully declared that I had ever been in a gondola, I should have felt as if I held a diploma of nobility in the Grand Order of Cosmopolites. Having been conveyed in one to my hotel on the Grand Canal, I felt that I at last held it! Now I had really mastered the three great cities of Italy, which was the first and greatest part of all travel in all the world of culture and of art. Fate might hurl me back to America, or even into New Jersey, but I had “swum in a gondola.”

I very soon made the acquaintance of two brothers from New York named Seymour, somewhat older than myself, and men of reading and culture. With them I “sight-saw” the city. I had read Venice up rather closely at Princeton, and had formed a great desire to go on the Bridge of Sighs. For some reason this was then very strictly forbidden. Our Consul, who was an enterprising young man, told me that he had been for months trying to effect it in vain. It at once became apparent to me as a piece of manifest destiny that I must do it.

One day I had with me a clever fellow, a commissionaire or guide, and consulted him. He said, “I think it may be done. You look like an Austrian, and may be taken for an officer. Walk boldly into the chief’s office, and ask for the keys of the bridge; only show a little cheek. You may get them. Give the chief’s man two francs when you come out. At the worst, he can only refuse to give them.”

It was indeed a very cheeky undertaking, but I ventured on it with the calmness of innocence. I went into the office, and said, “The keys to the bridge, if you please!” as if I were in an official hurry on State business. The official stared, and said—

“Do I understand that you formally demand the keys?”

“Ja wohl, certainly; at once, if you please!”

They were handed over to me, and I saw the bridge and gave the two francs, and all was well. But it gave me no renown in Venice, for the Consul and all my friends regarded it as a fabulous joke of mine, inspired by poetic genius. But I sometimes think that the official who yielded up the keys, and the man whom he sent with me, and perhaps the commissionaire, all had a put-up job of it among them on those keys, and several glasses all round out of those two francs. Quien sabe? Vive la bagatelle!

We went on an excursion to Padua. What I remember is, that what impressed me most was a placard here and there announcing that a work on Oken had just appeared! This rather startled me. Whether it was for or against the great German offshoot from Schelling, it proved that somebody in Italy had actually studied him! Eppure si muove, I thought. It cannot be true that—

“Padua! the lamp of learning In thy halls no more is burning.”

I have been there several times since. All that I now recall is that the hotel was not very good the last time.

I met in Venice a young New Yorker named Clark, who had crossed with me on the ship. He was a merry companion. Sailing with him one morning in a gondola along the Grand Canal, we saw sitting before a hotel its porter, who was an unmistakable American man of full colour. Great was Clark’s delight, and he called out, “I say, Buck! what the devil are you doing here?”

With a delighted grin, the man and brother replied in deep Southern accent—

“Dey sets me hyar fo’ a bait to ’tice de Americans with.”

I heard subsequently that he had come from America with his mistress, and served her faithfully till there came into the service a pretty French girl. Great was the anger of the owner of the man to find that he had unmistakably “enticed” the maid. To which he replied that it was a free country; that he had married the damsel—she was his wife; and so the pair at once packed up and departed.

We used to hear a great deal before the war from Southerns about the devotion of their slaves, but there were a great many instances in which the fidelity did not exactly hold water. There was an old Virginia gentleman who owned one of these faithful creatures. He took him several times to the North, and as the faithful one always turned a deaf ear to the Abolitionists, and resisted every temptation to depart, and refused every free-ticket offered for a journey on “the underground railway,” and went back to Richmond, he was of course trusted to an unlimited extent. When the war ended he was freed. Some one asked him one day how he could have been such a fool as to remain a slave. He replied—

“Kase it paid. Dere’s nuffin pays like being a dewoted darkey. De las’ time I went Norf wid massa I made ’nuff out of him to buy myself free twice’t over.”

Doubtless there were many instances of “pampered and petted” household servants who had grown up in families who had sense to know that they could never live free in the freezing North without hard work. These were the only devoted ones of whom I ever heard. The field-hands, disciplined by the lash, and liable to have their wives or children or relatives sold from them—as happened on an average once at least in a life—were all to a man quite ready to forsake “ole massa” and “dear ole missus,” and flee unto freedom. And what a vile mean wretch any man must be who would sacrifice his freedom to any other living being, be it for love or feudal fidelity—and what a villain must the man be who would accept such a gift!

I had never thought much of this subject before I left home. I did not like slavery, nor to think about it. But in Europe I did like such thought, and I returned fully impressed with the belief that slavery was, as Charles Sumner said, “the sum of all crimes.” In which summation he showed himself indeed a “sumner,” as it was called of yore. Which cost me many a bitter hour and much sorrow, for there was hardly a soul whom I knew, except my mother, to whom an Abolitionist was not simply the same thing as a disgraceful, discreditable malefactor. Even my father, when angry with me one day, could think of nothing bitterer than to tell me that I knew I was an Abolitionist. I kept it to myself, but the reader can have no idea of what I was made to suffer for years in Philadelphia, where everything Southern was exalted and worshipped with a baseness below that of the blacks themselves.

For all of which in after years I had full and complete recompense. I lived to see the young ladies who were ready to kneel before any man who owned “slä-äves,” detest the name of “South,” and to learn that their fathers and friends were battling to the death to set those slaves free. I lived to see the roof of the “gentlemanly planter,” who could not of yore converse a minute with me without letting me know that he considered himself as an immeasurably higher being than myself, blaze over his head amid yell and groan and sabre-stroke—

“And death-shots flying thick and fast,”

while he fled for life, and the freed slaves sang hymns of joy to God. I saw the roads, five miles wide, level, barren, and crossed with ruts, where Northern and Southern armies had marched, and where villages and plantations had once been. I saw countless friends or acquaintances, who had once smiled with pitying scorn at me, or delicately turned the conversation when Abolition was mentioned in my presence, become all at once blatant “nigger-worshippers,” abundant in proof that they had always had “an indescribable horror of slavery”—it was, in fact, so indescribable that (until it was evident that the North would conquer) none of them ever succeeded in giving anybody the faintest conception of it, or any idea that it existed. I can still recall how gingerly and cautiously—“paw by paw into the water”—these dough faces became hard-baked Abolitionists, far surpassing us of the Old Guard in zeal. I lived to see men who had voted against Grant and reviled him become his most intimate friends. But enough of such memories. It is characteristic of the American people that, while personally very vindictive, they forgive and forget political offences far more amicably—very far—than do even the English. However, in the case of the Rebellion, this was a very easy thing for those to do who had not, like us old Abolitionists, borne the burden and heat of the day, and who, coming in at the eleventh hour, got all the contracts and offices! It never came into the head of any man to write a Dictionnaire des Girouettes in America. These late converts had never known what it was to be Abolitionists while it was “unfashionable,” and have, as it were, live coals laid on the quivering heart—as I had a thousand times during many years—all for believing the tremendous and plain truth that slavery was a thousand times wickeder than the breach of all the commandments put together. It was so peculiar for any man, not a Unitarian or Quaker, to be an Abolitionist in Philadelphia from 1848 until 1861, that such exceptions were pointed out as if they had been Chinese—“and d---d bad Chinese at that,” as a friend added to whom I made the remark. So much for man’s relations with poor humanity.

My old friend, B. P. Hunt, was one of these few exceptions. His was a very strange experience. After ceasing to edit a “selected” magazine, he went to and fro for many voyages to Haïti, where, singular as it may seem, his experiences of the blacks made of him a stern Abolitionist. He married a connection of mine, and lived comfortably in Philadelphia, I think, until the eighties.

I travelled with Mr. Clark from Venice to Milan, where we made a short visit. I remember an old soldier who spoke six languages, who was cicerone of the roof of the Cathedral, and whom I found still on the roof twenty years later, and still speaking the same six tongues. I admired the building as a beautiful fancy, exquisitely decorated, but did not think much of it as a specimen of Gothic architecture. It is the best test of æsthetic culture and knowledge in the world. When you hear anybody praise it as the most exquisite or perfect Gothic cathedral in existence, you may expect to hear the critic admire the designs of Chippendale furniture or the decoration of St. Peter’s.

So we passed through beautiful Lombardy and came to Domo d’Ossola, where a strange German-Italian patois was spoken. It was in the middle of April, and we were warned that it would be very dangerous to cross the Simplon, but we went on all night in a carriage on sleigh-runners, through intervals of snowstorm. Now and then we came to rushing mountain-torrents bursting over the road; far away, ever and anon, we heard the roar of a lauwine or avalanche; sometimes I looked out, and could see straight down below me a thousand feet into an abyss or on a headlong stream. We entered the great tunnel directly from another, for the snow lay twenty feet deep on the road, and a passage had been dug under it for several hundred feet, and so two tunnels were connected. Just in the worst of the road beyond, and in the bitterest cold, we met a sleigh, in which were an English gentleman and a very beautiful young lady, apparently his daughter, going to Italy. “I saw her but an instant, yet methinks I see her now”—a sweet picture in a strange scene. Poets used to “me-think” and “me-seem” more in those days, but we endured it. Then in the morning we saw Brieg, far down below us in the valley in green leaves and sunshine, and when we got there then I realised that we were in a new land.

We had a great giant of a German conductor, who seemed to regard Clark and me as under his special care. Once when we had wandered afar to look at something, and it was time for the stage or Eilwagen to depart, he hunted us up, scolded us “like a Dutch uncle” in German, and drove us along before him like two bad boys to the diligence, “pawing up” first one and then the other, after which, shoving us in, he banged and locked the door with a grunt of satisfaction, even as the Giant Blunderbore locked the children in the coffer after slamming down the lid. Across the scenes and shades of forty years, that picture of the old conductor driving us like two unruly urchins back to school rises, never to be forgotten.

We went by mountains and lakes and Gothic towns, rocks, forests, old chateaux, and rivers—the road was wild in those days—till we came to Geneva. Thence Clark went his way to Paris, and I remained alone for a week. I had, it is true, a letter of introduction to a very eminent Presbyterian Swiss clergyman, so I sent it in with my card. His wife came out on the balcony, looked coolly down at me, and concluding, I suppose from my appearance, that I was one of the ungodly, went in and sent out word that her husband was out, and would be gone for an indefinite period, and that she was engaged. The commissionaire who was with me—poor devil!—was dreadfully mortified; but I was not very much astonished, and, indeed, I was treated in much the same manner, or worse, by a colleague of this pious man in Paris, or rather by his wife.

I believe that what kept me a week in Geneva was the white wine and trout. At the end of the time I set out to the north, and on the way met with some literary or professional German, who commended to me the “Pfisterer-Zunft” or Bakers’ Guild as a cheap and excellent hostelry. And it was curious enough, in all conscience. During the Middle Ages, and down to a very recent period, the Zünfte or trade-guilds in the Swiss cities carried it with a high hand. Even the gentlemen could only obtain rights as citizens by enrolling themselves as the trade of aristocrats. I had heard of the boy who thought he would like to be bound apprentice to the king; in Berne he might have been entered for a lower branch of the business. These guilds had their own local taverns, inns, or Herbergs, where travelling colleagues of the calling might lodge at moderate rates, but nobody else. However, as time rolled by, these Zünfte or guild-lodgings were opened to strangers. One of the last which did so was that of the Pfister or bakers (Latin, pistor), and this had only been done a few weeks ere I went there. As a literary man whom I met on the ramparts said to me, “That place is still strong in the Middle Age.” It was a quaint old building, and to get to my room I had to cross the great guild-hall of the Ancient and Honourable Society of Bakers. There were the portraits of all the Grand Masters of the Order from the fourteenth or fifteenth century on the walls, and the concentrated antique tobacco-smoke of as many ages in the air, which, to a Princeton graduate, was no more than the scent of a rose to a bee.

I could speak a little German—not much—but the degree to which I felt, sympathised with, and understood everything Deutsch, passeth all words and all mortal belief. Sit verbo venia! But I do not believe that any human being ever crossed the frontier who had thought himself down, or rather raised himself up, into Teutonism as I had on so slight a knowledge of the language, even as a spider throweth up an invisible thread on high, and then travels on it. Which thing was perceived marvellously soon, and not without some amazement, by the Germans, who have all at least this one point in common with Savages, New Jerseymen, Red Indians, Negroes, Gypsies, and witches, that they by mystic sympathy know those who like them, and take to them accordingly, guided by some altogether inexplicable clue or Hexengarn, even as deep calleth unto deep and star answereth star without a voice. Whence it was soon observed at Heidelberg by an American student that “Leland would abuse the Dutch all day long if he saw fit, but never allowed anybody else to do so.” The which thing, as I think, argues the very ne plus ultra of sympathy.

I found my way to Strasburg, where I went to the tip-top outside of the cathedral, and took the railway train for Heidelberg. And here I had an adventure, which, though trifling to the last degree, was to me such a great and new experience that I will describe it, let the reader think what he will. I went naturally enough first-class, so uncommon a thing then in Germany that people were wont to say that only princes, Englishmen, and asses did so. There entered the same carriage a very lady-like and pretty woman. The guard, seeing this, concluded that—whatever he concluded, he carefully drew down all the curtains, looking at me with a cheerful, genial air of intense mystery, as if to say, “I twig; it’s all right; I’ll keep your secret.”

It is a positive fact that all this puzzled me amazingly. There were many things in which I, the friend and pupil of Navone, was as yet as innocent as a babe unborn. The lady seemed to be amused—as well she might. Sancta simplicitas! I asked her why the conductor had drawn the curtains. She laughed, and explained that he possibly thought we were a bridal pair or lovers. Common sense and ordinary politeness naturally inspired the reply that I wished we were, which declaration was so amiably received that I suggested the immediate institution of such an arrangement. Which was so far favourably received that it was sealed with a kiss. However, the seal was not broken. I think the lady must have been very much amused. It is not without due reflection that I record this. Kissing went for very little in Germany in those days. It was about as common in Vienna as shaking hands. But this was my first experience in it. So I record it, because it seems as if some benevolent fairy had welcomed me to Germany; it took place just as we crossed the frontier. However, I found out some time after, by a strange accident, that my fairy was the wife of a banker who lived beyond Heidelberg; and at Heidelberg I left her and went to the first hotel in the town.

I had formed no plans, and had no letters to anybody. I had read Howitt’s “Student Life in Germany” through and through, so I thought I would study in Heidelberg. But how to begin? That was the question. I went into a shop and bought some cigars. There I consulted with the shopkeeper as to what I should do. Could he refer me to some leading authority in the University, known to him, who would give me advice? He could, and advised me to consult with the Pedell Capelmann.

Now I didn’t know it, but Pedell—meaning beadle, commonly called Poodle by the students—was the head-constable of the University. In honest truth I supposed he must be the President or Pro-Rector. So I went to Pedell Capelmann. His appearance did not quite correspond to my idea of a learned professor. He was an immensely burly, good-natured fellow, who came in in his shirt-sleeves, and who, when he learned what I wanted, burst out into a Her’r’r’ Gottsdonerrwetter! of surprise, as he well might. But I knew that the Germans were a very sans façon bourgeois people, and still treated him with deep respect. He suggested that, as there were a great many American students there, I had better call on them. He himself would take me to see the Herr O—, with whom, as I subsequently learned, he had more than once had discussions relative to questions of University-municipal discipline. As for the startling peculiarity which attended my introduction to University life, it is best summed up in the remark which the Herr O. (of Baltimore) subsequently made.

“Great God, fellows! he made his first call on old Capelmann!!”

He took me to the Herr O. and introduced me. I was overwhelmed with my cordial reception. There was at once news sent forth that a new man and a brother fellow-countryman had come to join the ranks. “And messengers through all the land sought Sir Tannhäuser out.” I was pumped dry as to my precedents, and as I came fresh from Princeton and had been through Italy, I was approved of. The first thing was a discussion as to where I was to live. The Frau Directorinn Louis in the University Place had two fine rooms which had just been occupied by a prince. So we went and secured the rooms, which were indeed very pleasant, and by no means dear as it seemed to me. I was to breakfast in my rooms, dine with the family at one o’clock, and sup about town.

Then there was a grand council as to what I had better study, and over my prospects in life; and it was decided that, as the law-students were the most distinguished or swell of all, I had better be a lawyer. So it was arranged that I should attend Mittermayer’s and others’ lectures; to all of which I cheerfully assented. The next step was to give a grand supper in honour of my arrival. After the dinner and the wine, I drank twelve schoppens of beer, and then excused myself on the plea of having letters to write. I believe, however, that I forgot to write the letters. And here I may say, once for all, that having discovered that, if I had no gift for mathematics, I had a great natural talent for Rheinwein and lager, I did not bury that talent in a napkin, but, like the rest of my friends, made the most of it, firstly, during two semesters in Heidelberg:

“Then I bolted off to Munich, And within the year, Underneath my German tunic Stowed whole butts of beer; For I drank like fifty fishes, Drank till all was blue, For whenever I was vicious I was thirsty too.”

The result of which “dire deboshing” was that, having come to Europe with a soul literally attenuated and starved for want of the ordinary gaiety and amusement which all youth requires, my life in Princeton having been one continued strain of a sobriety which continually sank into subdued melancholy, and a body just ready to yield to consumption, I grew vigorous and healthy, or, as the saying is, “hearty as a buck.” I believe that if my Cousin Sam had gone on with me even-pace, that he would have lived till to-day. When we came abroad I seemed to be the weakest; he returned, and died in a few months from our hereditary disease. How many hecatombs of young men have been murdered by “seriousness” and “total abstinence,” miscalled temperance, in our American colleges, can never be known; perhaps it is as well that it never will be; for if it were, there would be a rush to the other extreme, which would “upset society.” And here be it noted that, with all our inordinate national or international Anglo-Saxon sense of superiority to everybody and everything foreign, we are in the main thing—that is, the truly rational enjoyment of life and the art of living—utterly inferior to the German and Latin races. We are for the most part either too good or too bad—totally abstemious or raving drunk—always in a hurry after excitement or in a worry over our sins, or those of our neighbours. “Rest, rest, perturbed Yankee, rest!”

My rooms were on the ground-floor, the bedroom looking into the University Square and my study into a garden. Next door to me dwelt Paulus, the king of the Rationalists. He was then, I believe, ninety-four years of age. He remained daily till about twelve or one in a comatose condition, when he awoke and became lively till about three, when he sank into sleep again. His days were like those of a far Northern winter, lit by the sun at the same hours.

The next morning a very gentlemanly young man knocked at my door, and entered and asked in perfect English for a Mr. Bell, who lived in the same house. I informed him that Mr. Bell was out, but asked him to enter my room and take a chair, which he did, conversing with me for half an hour, when he departed, leaving a card on a side-table. In a few minutes later, O., who was of the kind who notice everything, entered, took up the card, and read on it the name and address of the young Grand Duke of Baden, who was naturally by far the greatest man in the country, he being its hereditary ruler.

“Where the devil did you get this?” asked O., and all, in amazement.

“Oh,” I replied, “it’s only the Duke. He has just been in here making a call. If you fellows had come five minutes sooner you’d have seen him. Have some beer!”

The impression that I was a queer lot, due to my making my first call on Capelmann et cetera, was somewhat strengthened by this card, until I explained how I came by it. But as Dr. Johnson in other words remarked, there are people to whom such queer things happen daily, and others to whom they occur once a year. And there was never yet a living soul who entered into my daily life who did not observe that I belong to the former class. If I have a guardian angel, it must be Edgar A. Poe’s Angel of the Odd. But he generally comes to those who belong to him!

It was a long time before I profited much by my lectures, because it was fearful work for me to learn German. I engaged a tutor, and worked hard, and read a great deal, and talked it con amore; but few persons would believe how slowly I learned it, and with what incredible labour. How often have I cursed up hill and down dale, the Tower of Babel, which first brought the curse of languages upon the world! And what did I ever have to do with that Tower? Had I lived in those days, I would never have laid hand to the work in merry, sunny, lazy Babylon, nor contributed a brick to it. By the way, it was a juvenile conjecture of mine that the Tower of Babel was destroyed for being a shot-tower, in which ammunition was prepared to be used by the heathen. Which theory might very well have been inspired by a verse from the old Puritanical rendering of the Psalms:—

“Ye race itt is not alwayes gott By him who swiftest runns, Nor y^e Battell by y^e Peo-pel Who shoot with longest gunnes.”

Even before I had gone to Princeton I had read and learned a great deal relative to Justinus Kerner, the great German supernaturalist, mystic, and poet, firstly from a series of articles in the Dublin University Magazine, and later from a translation of “The Seeress of Prevorst,” and several of the good man’s own romances and lyrics. I suppose that, of all men on the face of the earth, I should have at that time preferred to meet him. Wherefore, as a matter of course, it occurred that one fine morning a pleasant gentlemanly German friend of mine, who spoke English perfectly, and whose name was Rücker, walked into my room, and proposed that we should take a two or three days’ walk up the Neckar with our knapsacks, and visit the famous old ruined castle of the Weibertreue. My mother had read me the ballad-legend of it in my boyhood, and I had learned it by heart. Indeed, I can still recall it after sixty years:—

“Who can tell me where Weinsberg lies? As brave a town as any; It must have sheltered in its time Brave wives and maidens many: If e’er I wooing have to do, Good faith, in Weinsberg I will woo!”

“And then, when we are there,” said Rücker, “we will call on an old friend of my father’s, named Justinus Kerner. Did you ever hear of him?”

Did a Jew ever hear of Moses, or an American of General Washington? In five minutes I convinced my friend that I knew more about Kerner than he himself did. Whereupon it was decided that we should set forth on the following morning.

Blessed, beautiful, happy summer mornings in Suabia—green mounts and grey rocks with old castles—peasants harvesting hay—a Kirchweih, or peasant’s merry-making, with dancing and festivity—till we came to Weinsberg, and forthwith called on the ancient sage, whom we found with the two or three ladies and gentlemen of his family. I saw at a glance that they had the air of aristocracy. He received us very kindly, and invited us to come to dinner and sup with him.

The Weibertreue is an old castle which was in or at the end of Dr. Kerner’s garden. Once, when all the town had taken refuge in it from the Emperor Conrad, the latter gave the women leave to quit the fort, and also permission to every one to carry with her whatever was unto her most valuable, precious, or esteemed. And so the dames went forth, every one bearing on her back her husband.

In the tower of the castle, or in its wall, which was six feet thick, were eight or ten windows, gradually opening like trumpets, through which the wind blew all the time, and pleasantly enough on a hot summer day. In each of these the Doctor had placed an Æolian harp, and he who did not believe in fairies or the gentle spirit of a viewless sound should have sat in that tower and listened to the music as it rose and fell, as in endless solemn glees or part-singing; one harp stepping in, and pealing out richly and strangely as another died away, while anon, even as the new voice came, there thrilled in unison one or two more Ariels who seemed to be hurrying up to join the song. It was a marvellous strange thing of beauty, which resounded, indeed, all over Germany, for men spoke of it far and wide.

Quite as marvellous, in the evening, was the Doctor’s own performance on the single and double Jew’s harp. From this most unpromising instrument he drew airs of such exquisite beauty that one could not have been more astonished had he heard the sweet tones of Grisi drawn from a cat by twisting its tail. But we were in a land of marvels and wonders, or, as an English writer described it, “Weinsberg, a place on the Neckar, inhabited partly by men and women—some in and some out of the body—and partly by ghosts.” There were visions in the air, and dreams sitting on the staircases; in fact, when I saw the peasants working in the fields, I should not have been astonished to see them vanish into mist or sink into the ground.

And yet from the ruined castle of the Weibertreue Kerner pointed out to us a man walking along the road, and that man was the very incarnation of all that was sober, rational, and undream-like; for it was David Strauss, author of the “Life of Jesus.” And at him too I gazed with the awe due to a great man whose name is known to all the cultured world; and to me much more than the name; for I had read, as before mentioned, his “Life of Jesus” when I first went to Princeton.

Dr. Kerner took to me greatly, and said that I very much reminded him, in appearance and conversation, of what his most intimate friend, Ludwig Uhland, had been at my age; and as he repeated this several times, and spoke of it long after to friends, I think it must have been true, although I am compelled to admit that people who pride themselves on looking like this or that celebrity never resemble him in the least, mentally or spiritually, and are generally only mere caricatures at best.

On our return we climbed into an old Gothic church-tower, in which I found a fifteenth-century bell, bearing the words, Vivas voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango, and much more—

“The dead I knell, the living wake, And the power of lightning break!”

which caused me to reflect on the vast degree to which all the minor uses and observances of the Church—which are nine-tenths of all their religion to the multitude—were only old heathen superstitious in new dresses. The bell was a spell against the demons of lightning in old Etrurian days; to this time the Tuscan peasant bears one in the darkening twilight-tide to drive away the witches flitting round: in him and them “those evening bells” inspired a deeper sentiment than poetry.

In a village, Rücker, finding the beer very good, bought a cask of it, which was put on board the little Neckar steamboat on which we returned to Heidelberg. And thus provided, the next evening he gave a “barty” up in the old castle, among the ruins by moonlight, where I “assisted,” and the lager was devoured, even to the last drop.

I soon grew tired of the family dinners with the Frau Inspectorinn and the Herr Inspector with the one tumbler of Neckar wine, which I was expected not to exceed; so I removed my dining to the “Court of Holland,” a first-class hotel, where O. and the other Americans met, and where the expectation was not that a man should by any means limit himself to one glass, but that, taking at least one to begin with, he should considerably exceed it. This hotel was kept by a man named Spitz, who looked his name to perfection.

“Er spitzt betrübt die Nase,”

as Scheffel wrote of him in his poem, Numero Acht, the scene of which is laid in the “Court of Holland.” Here a word about Scheffel. During the following semester he was for months a daily table-companion of mine at the Bremer-Eck, where a small circle of students—quorum pars fui—met every evening to sup and kneip, or to drink beer and smoke and sing until eleven. Little did I dream in those days that he would become the great popular poet of his time, or that I should ever translate his Gaudeamus. I owe the “Court of Holland” to this day for a dinner and a bottle of wine. It is the only debt I owe, to my knowledge, to anybody on earth.

It was resolved among the Americans that we should all make a foot-excursion with knapsacks down the Rhine to Cologne. It was done. So we went gaily from town to town, visiting everything, making excursions inland now and then. We had a bottle or two of the best Johannisberg in the very Schloss itself—omne cum prætio—and meeting with such adventures as befell all wandering students in those old-fashioned, merry times. The Rhine was wild as yet, and not paved, swept, garnished and full of modern villas and adornment, as now. I had made, while in America, a manuscript book of the places and legends of and on the Rhine, with many drawings. This, and a small volume of Snow’s and Planché’s “Legends of the Rhine,” I carried with me. I was already well informed as to every village and old ruin or tower on the banks.

So we arrived at Cologne, and saw all the sights. The cathedral was not then finished, and the town still boasted its two-and-seventy stinks, as counted by Coleridge. Then we returned by steamer to Mainz, and thence footed it home.

Little by little I rather fell away from my American friends, and began to take to German or English associates, and especially to the company of two Englishmen. One was named Leonard Field, who is now a lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; the other was Ewan P. Colquhoun, a younger brother of Sir Patrick Colquhoun, whom I knew well, and as friend, in after years, until his recent death. I always, however, maintained a great intimacy with George Ward, of Boston, who became long after a banker and Baring’s agent in America. In one way and another these two twined into my life in after years, and led to my making many acquaintances or friends.

I walked a great deal all about Heidelberg to many very picturesque places, maintaining deep interest in all I saw by much loving reading of Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Uhland’s collection of old German songs—his own poems I knew long before—the Nibelungen and Hero-Book, and a great variety of other works. I had dropped the Occulta, and for a year or two read nothing of the kind except casually the works of Eckhartshausen and Justinus Kerner. I can now see that, as I became healthy and strong, owing to the easy, pleasant existence which I led, it was best for me after all. “Grappling with life” and earnestly studying a profession then might have extinguished me. My mental spring, though not broken, was badly bent, and it required a long time to straighten it.

Colquhoun was only eighteen, but far beyond his years in dissipation, and well-nigh advanced to cool cynicism. With him I made many an excursion all about the country. Wherever a Kirclweih or peasants’ ball was to be held, he always knew of it, and there we went. One morning early he came to my rooms. There was to be a really stunning duel fought early between a Senior and some very illustrious Schläger, and he had two English friends named Burnett who would go with us. So we went, and meeting with Rücker at the Pawkboden, it was proposed that we should go on together to Baden-Baden. To which I objected that I had only twenty florins in my pocket, and had no time to return home for more. “Never mind,” said Colquhoun; “Rücker has plenty of money; we can borrow from him.”