Scope and Content
To Mrs Colenutt
17 Katherinen Strass,Frieburg in Breisau,Germany
My dear friend,
Here I am at last in a German pension on the borders of the Black Forest. After torturing myself with the spur for weeks, I did at last summon up courage to put myself on board the boat for Flushing last Saturday night. I was not sick, but four persons at sea in one cabin, three of them snoring and one meditating from eleven o'clock to seven, is a spectacle which ought to move the gods to pity – that is to say for the meditative one. The next day I reached Bonn; slept in a bedroom overlooking the Rhine, and on the following day went up the Rhine to Mayence. This took us about ten hours. Oh, that marvellous river! The banks are wonderful enough, but what excited me more than anything was just what excited me so much before, and that is that is the rushing broad mass of greenish yellow water, the loveliest colour, and pouring along with such silent mighty force! Your husband would have been greatly interested in the vine culture. The Rudesheimer mountain is actually terraced right up to the top with retaining walls to keep the precious earth from slipping. It must have cost hundreds of pounds an acre. The Johannisberg, which we also saw, f the value of £8,000 from 40 acres.
At Mayence we stayed a night and aid a visit to Heidelberg on the Tuesday, saw the castle and the country round. Inside the castle they show you Luther's wedding ring, a sacred and symbolic object. There are curiosities and portraits innumerable. The castle itself is one of the most exquisite examples of the Renaissance architecture in Germany – that is to say what remains of it, for everything noble in Germany is in ruins. The land has been the battlefield of heroes and robbers generation after generation down to the time of the French Revolution. One of these heroes or robbers during the Revolutionary epoch sent the best part of Heidelberg castle aloft with gunpowder.
From Hedelberg down to Freiburg in about seven hours. Willie had an introduction to two of the professors here, one of whom recommended us to a most excellent pension where we live in perfect cleanliness and on very good food for about 33 shillings a week apiece, including board and lodging. This is not dear, is it? It is one of the brightest, cheerfulest places you ever saw, and with the loveliest country around it. Half an hours walk from our house takes you up to the top of the Schlossberg, from which you see all the broad plain of the Rhine. The Schwarzwald mountains and the still loftier Vosges in the distance. A half days walk, I am told, will bring us to the Feldberg face to face with the Alps.
Everything is strange, novel and foreign. Baden is a Catholic district. Crucifixes stand by the roadside. The mighty minster, unsurpassed in all Germany for Gothic delicacy, is Catholic, and all day long priests are doing something; what, I do not know. Baden too is a land of grapes. We walk through vineyards. We live at a height of about a thousand feet above the sea, and the exhilaration of the air in indescribable. It is not a Bethesda pool but a Bethesda mountain. We are emphatically in Germany. Freiburg owns about 30,000 people, but it has all the culture of London, a university, a medical school, higher schools for boys and girls, and the education is about half what it costs in England. Emphatically too in Germany because of the military ways of the people. These I do not like. Soldiers are everywhere. Every waiter has been through the army and walks erect as if on drill. Of course this has its attractive side, but I lean rather to our muddled unsoldierlike anarchic England, for the rigidity of the German Bureaucracy is begetting a terrible series of difficulties – socialism and what not.
This letter is written in patches. Last night I saw the sunset from the Rosskopf, a mountain near here overlooking the Rhine plain, the Rhine itself and the Vosges in the extreme distance. It was such a
sight such that if a man had seen it once, he might well say he had not lived in vain. The whole level district through which the Rhine flows was flooded with golden sunlight, and the Vosges were very dim yellow or yellowish cloud colour rising right into the sky. Halfway between them and us was the mountain Kaiserstuhl in dark purple. Our own land is beautiful, but this was a new order of beauty not to be preconceived, and adding to one's estimate of natures capacity. On our way home we came to a shrine miraculously endured with the power of curing sore eyes. The cure lies in the spring in the crypt. It is extraordinary to see such education and such credulity lying side by side. I fancy, though, they do not mix. The education we owe to Luther and the wedding-ring I saw, and the credulity to the old man at Rome; and the educated are mostly not Papists. At least the majority of the devout in the minister and churches are poor peasants. What a dreadful garrulous gossip I am. I am afraid I have bored you, but my sheet, happily for you, is ended. Best love to all the children and your dear husband. Willie sends his best love.
Ever yours,
W.Hale White