He pulled out his watch, made a gesture of despair. "I have to leave town in one little half-hour; and there are yet seventeen rooms you have not seen. You shall not leave Copenhagen till you have seen. Do you promise?"
I believe if I had not promised I should be still standing in the halls of the Rosenborg. When I finally said, "Yes, I promise," he wrung my hand again, and said,--
"Now we are good friends, we shall be all good friends. I will show to you all Rosenborg. Do you promise?"
"Yes," I said, "I promise," and drove away, leaving him standing on the sidewalk, his steel blue eyes flashing with determination and fire, and a smile on his face which I shall not forget. Never before did I see such pa.s.sionate, fierce fulness of life in a man whose hair was white.
I promised, but I did not go. From the Rosenborg I drove to the Museum of Northern Antiquities,--from five to seven of that day being my only chance of seeing it at all. By the time I had spent two hours in the hurried attempt to see the most interesting things in this second collection, my brain was in a state of chaos, and I went back to my hotel with a sense of loathing of museums, only to be compared to the feeling one would have about dinners if he had eaten ten hearty ones in one day. One does not sleep off such an indigestion in one night.
The next morning, nothing save actual terror could have driven me into a museum; and as my n.o.ble Dane was not present to cow me into obedience, I had energy enough to write him a note of farewell and regret. The regret was indeed heartfelt, not so much for the museum as for him. I would have liked to see those blue eyes flash out from under the gray eyebrows once more. I too felt that we would be "good friends,--good."
Now I will try to tell you a little of the little I remember of the Rosenborg. I only got as far as Frederick IV."s time, 1730. Many of the most beautiful things in the museum I did not see, and of many that I did see I recollect nothing, especially of all which I looked at while I was in disgrace with the guide; I might as well not have seen them at all.
One little unpretending thing interested me greatly: it was a plain gold ring, with a small uncut sapphire in it; round the circle is engraved, "Ave Maria gr. [gratiosissima]." It was given by King Christian to his wife, Elizabeth, on their wedding-day, Aug. 12, 1515,--three hundred years and two weeks before the day I saw it. It lay near the great Oldenborg drinking-horn, and few people would care much for it by the side of the other, I suppose. Then there was another bridal ornament of a dead queen,--it had belonged to Dorothea, wife of Christian III.,--a gold plate, four or five inches square, with an eagle in the centre, bearing an escutcheon with the date 1557: on the eagle"s breast a large uncut sapphire; over the eagle, an emerald and a sapphire; and under it, a sapphire and an amethyst, all very large. There are also pearls set here and there in the plate.
This was given to the city of Copenhagen by the queen, to be worn by the daughters of the richest and most honored of the Danish people on their wedding-day. It was for many generations kept and used in this way, but finally the custom fell into disuse; and now the Copenhagen brides think no more of Queen Dorothea at their weddings, than of any other old gone-by queen,--which is a pity, it seems to me, for it surely was a lovely thought of hers to ally her memory to the bridals of young maidens in her land for all time.
There was in this room, also, Frederick II."s Order of the Elephant, the oldest in existence, and held in great veneration by people who esteem ornaments of that sort. It is much less beautiful than some other orders of less distinction. The elephant is a clumsy beast, carve him never so finely, enamel him all you will, and call him what you like.
There is also here the Order of the Garter, of that same king--twenty-six enamelled red roses on blue shields held together by twists of gold cord; diamonds and pearls make it splendid, and that bit of gospel truth "Evil to him that evil thinks," is written on it in rubies, as it deserves to be written everywhere.
This Frederick must have been a gay fellow; for here stands a gla.s.s goblet, five inches in diameter, and fifteen high, out of which he and his set of boon companions fell to drinking one day on wagers to see who could drink the most, and scratched their names on the gla.s.s as they drank, each man his mark and record, little thinking that the gla.s.s would outlive them three centuries and more, as it has; and is likely now, unless Rosenborg burns down, to last the world out.
The thing I would rather own, of all this Frederick"s possessions, would be one--I would be quite content with one--of the plates which Germany sent to him as a present. They are red in the middle, with gold escutcheons enamelled on them; the borders are of plain clear amber, rimmed with silver,--one big circle of amber! The piece from which it was cut was big enough to have made the whole plate, if they had chosen, but it was more beautiful to set it simply as a rim.
Nothing could be dreamed of more beautiful in the way of a plate than this.
I told you in my last letter what a stamp Christian IV. had left on the capital of his kingdom. I fancy, without knowing anything about it, that he must have been one of the greatest kings Denmark ever had; at any rate, he built well, planned well for poor people, worked with a free hand for art and science, fought like a tiger, and loved--well, he loved like a king, I suppose; for he had concubines from every country in Europe, and no end of illegitimate princes and princesses whom he brought up, maintained, and educated in the most royal fashion. He lived many years in this Rosenborg; and when he found he must die, was brought back here, and died in a little room we should think small to-day for a man to lie mortally ill in; but he lived only one week after he was brought back, and it was in winter-time, so the open fireplace ventilated the room.
The upper half of the walls is covered with dark green moire silk, with gold flowers on it; the lower half is covered with paintings, many portraits among them; and in places of honor among the portraits, the king"s favorite dogs, Wild-brat and Tyrk.
Here are his silver compa.s.ses and his ship hand-lantern; the silver scales in which he weighed out his gold and silver; a little hand printing-press, dusty and worn, with the bra.s.s stamp with his monogram on it,--his occupation in rainy days of leisure. Here, also, are the tokens of his idle moments,--a silver goblet made out of money won by him from four courtiers, who had all betted with him, on one 6th of February, which would be first drunk before Easter. These were the things that I cared most for,--more than for the splendors, of which there were closets full, gla.s.s cases full, tables full: goblets of lapis lazuli, jasper, agate, and crystal, gold and silver; lamps of crystal; cabinets of ebony; orders and rings and bracelets and seals and note-books and clocks and weapons, all of the costliest and most beautiful workmanship; rubies and diamonds and pearls, set and sewed wherever they could be; a medicine spoon, with gold for its handle and a hollowed sapphire for its bowl, for instance,--the sapphire nearly one inch across. One might swallow even allopathic medicine out of such a spoon as that: and I dare say that it was when she was very ill, and had a lot of nasty doses to take, that Madame Kirstin--one of the left-handed wives--got from the sympathizing king this dainty little gift. "C" and "K" are wrought into a monogram on the handle, which is three inches long, of embossed gold. Another sapphire, clear as a drop of ocean water with sunlight piercing it, and one inch square, is in the same case with the medicine spoon. A chalice, with wafer-box, paten, and cup, all of the finest gold, engraved, enamelled, and set thick with precious stones, has a gold death"s-head and cross-bones on the stem of the chalice; and the eyes of the death"s-head are two great rose diamonds, which gleam out frightfully.
Another gold chalice has on its under side a twisted network of Arabesque, with sixty-six enamelled rosettes, all openwork on it.
In the room called Christian"s workroom is a set of caparisons for a horse,--saddle, saddle-cloth, housing, and holsters, all of black velvet, sewn thick, even solid, with pearls and gold, rubies, sapphires, and rose diamonds. The sight of them flashing in sunlight on a horse"s back must have been dazzling. These were a wedding present from King Christian to his son.
In this room also are several suits of Christian"s clothes,--jerkin, trousers, and mantle, in the fashion of that day, dashing enough, even when made of common stuffs; but these are of cloth of gold, silver moire, black Brabant lace, trimmed in the most lavish way with gold and silver laces, and embroidered with pearls and gold. There is a suit of dirty and blood-stained linen hanging in one of the locked cabinets which does him more credit than these. It is the suit he wore at the great naval battle where he lost his eye. A sh.e.l.l exploding on the deck, a fragment of it flew into his face and instantly destroyed his right eye. His men thought all was lost; but he, seizing his handkerchief, clapped it into the bleeding socket, and fought on. One reads of such heroic deeds as this with only a vague thrill of wonder and admiration; but to see and touch the very garments the hero wore is another thing. This old blood-stained velvet jerkin is worth more to the Danish people than all the scores of bejewelled robes in the Rosenborg; and I think there are literally scores of them.
Next to Christian IV. came Frederick III.; and in his reign the rococo style ruled everything. Three rooms in the Rosenborg are devoted to the relics of this king"s reign; and a great deal of hideous magnificence they hold, it must be confessed,--cabinets and tables and candlesticks and ceilings and walls, which are as jarring to the eye as the Chinese gong is to the ear, and appear to be just about as civilized. But the rococo had not yet spoiled everything. The jewelled cups and boxes and spoons and miniatures are as beautiful as ever; a set of gla.s.s spoons with handles of gold and of agate and of crystal; the gold knives and forks that Frederick III. and his queen used to travel with. In those days when you were asked to tea you carried your own implements; ivory cups, gold goblets, and goblets of crystal, a goblet made out of one solid topaz, and a great tankard made of amber,--these are a few of the little necessaries of every-day life to Frederick"s court. His motto was "Dominus providebit;" it is on half of his splendid possessions,--on his mosaic tables and his jewelled canes and pomade boxes; everywhere it looms up, in unwitting but delicious satire on the habit Frederick had of providing for himself, and most lavishly too, all sorts of superfluities, which the Lord never would think of providing for any human being!--such, for instance, as a jewel box of silver, with fifteen splendidly cut crystals let into the sides, so that one can look through into the box and see on the bottom a fine bit of embossed work, the picture of the Judgment of Paris. Around these crystals sixty-two large garnets are set, and these again are surrounded by wreaths of flowers and leaves in embossed work, set thick with more diamonds than could be counted.
A very pretty thing in its way, to stand on a dressing-table and hold the kind of rings worn at this time by the kind of persons who reigned in Denmark! Another pretty little thing he had,--not so useful as the jewel-box, but in far more perfect taste,--was a crystal goblet, in shape of a sh.e.l.l, resting on the back of a bending Cupid. Eight beautiful heads are cut on the sides of this cup, and there is standing on its curling base a winged boy. Its translucent shades and shadows are beautiful beyond words. It is said to be the most beautiful specimen in the world of work in pure crystal. The topaz goblet and the amber tankard, however, would outrival it in most eyes.
I longed to see the topaz cup held up to the sun, filled with pale wine. I believe you could _hear_ it shine! The third of the rooms devoted to Frederick and his reign is called the Marble Chamber, and is a superb icy place; floor and walls all marble. In cabinets in this room are some of Frederick"s clothes,--every-day clothes, such as dark brown cloth, ornamented down every seam with gold and silver lace; and a dress of his queen"s, the only dress of a woman which has come down from that age. It is one solid ma.s.s of embroidery in gold and gay colors on silk, stiff as old tapestry; loops of faded pink ribbon down the front, and a long jabot of old point lace all the way down the front. There are also a sword and sword-belt, and a gun bearing the initials of this lady. The gun has a medallion of ivory let in at the b.u.t.t end, with her initials, "S. A.," and her motto, "In G.o.d is my hope." There is something uncommonly droll in these mottoes of faith in G.o.d"s providing, inscribed on so many articles of luxury by people who must have certainly spent a good part of their time in providing for themselves.
In the last part of the seventeenth century things in Denmark were more and more stamped by the French influence. Christian V., who succeeded to Frederick III., had spent some time in the court of Louis XIV., and wanted to make his own court as much like it as possible. So we find, in the rooms devoted to Christian V."s reign, tapestries and cabinets which might all have come from France. One of the saloons is hung with superb tapestry, all with a red ground; and the tables and mirrors and chairs are all gilded and carved in the last degree of fantastic decoration. This red room used to be Christian"s dining-room; and the plate-warmers still stand before the fireplace,--two feet high, round, solid silver, every inch engraved.
Caskets of amber, of ivory; drinking-horns,--one-third horn and two-thirds embossed silver,--bowls and globes of wrought silver, hunting-cups of solid silver made to fit into deer"s antlers and with coral k.n.o.bs for handles; closets full of fowling-pieces, pistols, silver-sheathed hunting-knives, falcon hoods set with real pearls and embroidered in gold,--orders of all sorts known to Denmark; elephants and St. Georges in silver and crystal and cameo; gold jugs, gold beakers, bowls of green jade, with twisted snakes for handles and dragons" heads at bottom; goblets of solid crystal, of countless shapes and sizes,--one in shape of a flying-fish borne by two dolphins; onyx and jasper and agate and porcelain, made into no end of shapes and uses;--these are a few of the things which "G.o.d provided"
for this Danish king and queen. One of these rooms is hung with tapestries of lilac silk and gold moire, embroidered with gold and silver threads and colors. These were provided by Frederick himself, who brought them from Italy.
But you don"t care a fig who brought the things, or when they were brought; and perhaps you don"t care very much about the things anyhow.
I dare say they do not sound half as superb as they were; but I must tell you of a few more. What do you think of a room with walls, ceiling, and a large s.p.a.ce in the centre of the floor all of plate gla.s.s, the rest of the floor being of exquisite mosaic in wood; and of a coat of crimson velvet embroidered thick with silver thread, to be worn with a pale blue waistcoat, also embroidered stiff with silver thread; and of cups cut out of rubies; and a great bowl of obsidian set with rubies and garnets; and of topazes big enough to cut heads on in fine relief? There are hundreds and hundreds more of things I have not mentioned, and hundreds of things I did not see even, in the rooms I walked through; and there were seventeen rooms more into which I did not even go. If I had, I should have seen twelve superb tapestries, 12 feet in height, by 10 to 20 feet broad, each giving a picture of a battle, and all strictly historical; the Royal Font, of solid embossed silver, inside which is placed at every christening another dish of gold; one whole room full of the costliest and rarest porcelain from all parts of the world,--here is the splendid and famous "Flora Danica" service. I saw at a porcelain shop a reproduction of this service, every article bearing some Danish flower most exquisitely painted. A great platter heaped full of wild roses was as lovely as a day in June. Here also are the Danish Regalia, kept in a room hung with Oriental carpets, and with a floor of black and white marble. "In the middle of the floor a pyramid arises behind clear thick plate gla.s.s, from the flat sides of which, covered with red velvet, the rays of gold and precious stones flash upon us, whilst the summit is adorned by a magnificent and costly crown." This sentence is from the catalogue written by my friend the n.o.ble Dane, and is a very favorable specimen of his English. Bless him, how I do wish I had gone back to that museum! At this distance of time it seems incomprehensible to me that I did not. But that day I felt as if one more look at the simple door of a museum would make a maniac of me. So this is all I can tell you about the famous Rosenborg. And with the others I will not bore you much, for I have made this so long; only I must tell you that in the Ethnographic, which is in some respects, I suppose, the most valuable of them all, having five rooms full of _Prehistoric_ antiquities from the stone, bronze, and early iron ages in every part of the world, and twenty or thirty rooms more full of characteristic things,--dresses, implements, ornaments, weapons, of the uncultivated savage or semi-savage races, also of the Chinese, Persians, Arabians, Turks, East Indians, etc.;--in this museum I found a most important place a.s.signed to the North American Indian; and Dr. Steinhauer, the director of the museum, a man whose ethnographical studies and researches have made him known to all antiquarians in the world was full of interest in them, and appreciation of their n.o.ble qualities, of their skill and taste in decoration, and still more of the important links between them and the old civilizations. Here were portraits of all the most distinguished of our Indian chiefs; a whole corridor filled with gla.s.s cases full of their robes, implements, weapons, decorations; several life-size figures in full war-dress: and their trappings were by no means put to shame, in point of design and color, by the handsomest trappings in Rosenborg; in fact, they were far more wonderful, being wrought by an uncivilized race, living in wildernesses, with only rude paints, porcupine quills, and gla.s.s beads to work with. My eyes filled with tears, I confess, to find at last in little Denmark one spot in the world where there will be kept a complete pictorial record of the race of men that we have done our best to wipe out from the face of the earth,--where historical justice will be done to them in the far future, as a race of splendid possibilities, and attainments marvellous, considering the time in which they were made. Here was a superb life-size figure of a Blackfeet warrior on his horse; the saddle, trappings, etc., are exactly the same in shape and style as an old Arab saddle used hundreds of years ago. On the warrior"s breast is a round disk of lines radiating from a centre, in gay colors, of straw and beads, of a device identical with a rich Moorish ornament; the same device Dr.
Steinhauer pointed out to me on a medicine-bag of the Blackfeet tribe.
Here was a figure of a chief of the Sacs and Foxes, in full array; by his side the portrait of his father, with the totem of the tribe tattooed on his breast. With enthusiasm Dr. Steinhauer pointed out to me how in one generation the progress had been so great that on the robe of the son was set in a fine and skilful embroidery the same totem which the father had rudely tattooed on his breast. Here were specimens of the handiwork of every tribe,--of their dresses, of their weapons; those of each tribe carefully a.s.sorted by themselves. Dr.
Steinhauer knew more, I venture to say, about the different tribes, their race affinities and connections, than any man in America knows to-day. When I told him a little about the scorn and hatred which are felt in America towards the Indians, the indifference with which their fate is regarded by the ma.s.ses of the people, and the cruel injustice of our government towards them, he listened to me with undisguised astonishment, and repeated again and again and again, "It is inexplicable; I cannot understand."
You can imagine what a thrilling pleasure all this was to me. But it was marred by the keenest sense of shame of my country, that it should have been left for Denmark alone to keep a place in historical archives for a fair showing and true appreciation of the "wards of the United States Government."
I might fill another letter with accounts of the "Collection of Northern Antiquities;" but don"t be frightened: I won"t, only to tell you that it is far the largest and most complete in Europe. And you may see there a specimen of everything that has been made, wrought, and worn in the way of stone, bronze, iron, or gold and silver, in the north countries, from the rude stone chisel with which the prehistoric man pried open his oyster and clam sh.e.l.ls at picnics on the sh.o.r.e, and went away and left his sh.e.l.ls and "openers" in a careless pile behind him, so that we could dig them all up together some thousands of years later, down to the superb gold bracelets worn by the strong-armed women who queened it in Norway ten centuries ago. It is a great thing for us that those old fellows had such a way of flinging their ornaments into lakes as offerings to G.o.ds, and burying them by the wheelbarrow-full in graves. It wasn"t a safe thing to do, even as long ago as that, however; for there are traces in many of these burial-mounds of their having been opened and robbed at some period far back. In one of the rooms of this museum are several huge oak coffins, with the mummied or half-petrified bodies lying in them, just as they were buried sixteen hundred years ago. The coffins were made of whole trunks of trees, hollowed out so as to make a sort of trough with a lid; and in this the body was laid, with all its usual garments on. There is an indescribable and uncanny fascination in the sight of one of these old mummies,--the eyeless sockets, the painful cheekbone, the tight-drawn forehead; they look so human and unhuman at once, so awfully dead and yet somehow so suggestive of having been alive, that it stimulates a far greater curiosity to know what they did and thought and felt, than it is possible to feel about neighbors to-day.
I never see half a dozen of these mummies together without wishing they would sit up and take up the thread of their gossip where they left it off,--so different from the feeling one has about live gossips, and so utterly unreasonable too; for gossip is gossip all the same, and nothing but an abomination in any age, whether that of Pharaoh or Ulysses Grant. If I did not feel a dreadful misgiving that you had had enough museum already, and would be bored by more, I really would like to tell you about a few more of these things: a necklace, found in a peat bog by a poor devil who had begged leave to cut a bit of turf there to burn, and to be sure he found eleven beautiful gold things of one sort and another. The necklace is very heavy to lift. I asked permission to take it in my hands. I laid it around my neck, and it would have hurt to wear it ten minutes. It was a great snake coil of solid gold, the body half as big as my wrist! If Queen Thyra wore it, she must have been a giantess, or else have had a wadded "chest protector" underneath her necklaces. She and her husband, King Gorm, were buried in two enormous mounds in Jutland, some fourteen hundred years ago. The mounds were so high that they nearly overtopped the little village church; and yet, at some time or other, robbers had burrowed into them, and carried off a lot of things, so that when the mounds were scientifically excavated, few relics were found. Stealing from that sort of grave seems to make the modern methods of body-s.n.a.t.c.hing quite insignificant. Even A. T.
Stewart"s body would have been safe if it had been in a mound as high as the church steeple.
Now I must tell you a little more about Harriet. She leaves me to-morrow, and I shall grieve at parting with the garrulous old soul.
Niobe, I call her in my own mind; for she melts into tears at the least emotion. I am afraid n.o.body has ever been very good to her; for the smallest kindness touches her to the quick, and she cannot refrain from perpetually breaking out into expressions of fondness for me, and grat.i.tude, which are sometimes tiresome. The explanation of her good English is that her parents were English, though she was born in Copenhagen, has lived there all her life, and married a Dane when she was quite young. He was a tradesman, and they lived in comparative comfort, though, as she said, "we never could lay up a penny, because we always sent the children to the best schools; and for ten children, ma"am, it does take a heap of schooling!"
Of the ten children, six are still living; and Harriet, at sixty-four, has thirty-six grandchildren. When she first came to me she looked ten years older than she does now. Good food, freedom from care, and her enjoyment of her journey have almost worked miracles on her face.
Every morning she has come out looking better than she did the night before. I see that she must have been a very handsome woman in her day,--delicate features, and a soft dark brown eye, with very great native refinement and gentleness of manner. Poor soul! her hardest days are before her, I fear; for the daughter with whom she lives, and for whom she works night and day, is the wife of that worthless fellow, our commissionnaire. He is a drunkard, and not much more than four fifths "witted." Harriet is pew-opener at the English church, and gets a little money from that; the clergyman is very kind to her, and she has the promise of a place at last in a sort of "Old Lady"s Home"
in Copenhagen. This is her outlook! I must send you the verses she presented to me yesterday. I had left her alone for the greater part of the forenoon, and she took to her pen for company. That was the way Katrina used to amuse herself when I left her alone. I always found her sitting with her elbows on the table, a pile of scribbled sheets in front of her, her hair pushed off her forehead, and a general expression of fine frenzy about her. Katrina"s English did not compare with Harriet"s at all; that is, it was not so good. I liked it far better. It was one perpetual fund of amus.e.m.e.nt to me; but I think Katrina had more nearly a vein of genius about her, and she was not sentimental; whereas Harriet is a sentimentalist of the first water,--no, of the "seventy thousandth"!
PARIS, September 19.
I kept my letter and brought it here to tell you about Ole Bull"s funeral, full accounts of which reached the H----"s just before we left Munich on the 9th. It was a splendid tribute to the dear old man; I shall always regret that I did not see it.
His home is on a beautiful island about sixteen miles from Bergen. If it were only possible to make you understand how much more the word _island_ means in Norway than anywhere else!
But it is not. To those of you who know the sort of mountain pasture in which great hillocks of moss and stone are thrown up, piled up, crowded in, in such labyrinths that you go leaping from one to the other, winding in and out in crevice-like paths, never knowing where moss leaves off and stone begins,--where you will strike firm footing, and where you will plunge your foot down suddenly into moss above your ankles; and to those of you who love the country and the spring in the country so well that you know just the look of a feathery young birch-tree on the first day of June, and of slender young spruce-trees all the year round, it is enough to say that if you take a dozen miles or so of such a pasture, and make the hillocks many feet high, and then set in here and there little hollows full of the birches, and a ravine or two full of the young spruces, and then launch your hillocks and birches and spruces straight out into deep blue sea, you"ll have something such an island as there are thousands of on the Norway coast. Ole Bull"s home was on such an island as this, and he had made it an ideally beautiful place. Eighteen miles of pathway he had made in the labyrinths of the island; had brought soil from the sh.o.r.e, and set gardens in hollows here and there. The house is a picturesque and delightful one; and in the great music-room, nearly a hundred feet long, there he lay dead, two days, in state like a king, with steamers full of sorrowing friends and mourning strangers coming to take their last look at his face. The king sent a letter of condolence to Mrs. Bull, and the peasants came weeping to the side of his bed; from highest to lowest, Norway mourned. On the day of the funeral, after some short services at the house, the body was carried on board a steamer, to be taken to Bergen. The steamer was draped with black and strewn with green. I believe I have told you of the beautiful custom the Norwegians have of strewing green juniper twigs in the street in front of their houses whenever they have lost a friend. No matter how far away the friend may have lived, when they hear of his death they strew the juniper around their house to show that a death has given them sorrow. It was a commentary on human life (and death!) that I never went out in Bergen without seeing in some street, and often in many, the juniper-strewn sidewalks. As the steamer with Ole Bull"s body approached the entrance of Bergen harbor, sixteen steamers, all draped in black, with flags at half-mast, sailed out to meet it, turned, and fell into line on either side to convoy it to sh.o.r.e. Bands were playing his music all the way. At the wharf they were met by nearly all Bergen; and the body was borne in grand procession through the streets, which were strewn thick with juniper from the wharf to the cemetery, at least two or three miles. The houses were all draped with black, and many of the people had put on black. The golden wreath which was given him in San Francisco was borne in the procession by one of his friends, and a procession of little girls bore wreaths and bouquets of flowers. The grave was hidden and half filled with flowers; and last of all, after the body had been laid there,--last and most touching of all, came the peasants, crowds of them, gathering close, and each one flinging in a fern leaf or a juniper bough or a bunch of flowers. Every one had brought something, and the grave was nearly filled up with their offerings. It is worth while to be loved like that by a people. Whatever scientific critics may say of Ole Bull"s playing, he played so that he swayed the hearts of the common people; and his own nation loved him and were proud of him, just as the Danes loved Hans Christian Andersen, with a love that asked no indors.e.m.e.nt and admitted no question from the outside world. The school of music to which Ole Bull belonged has pa.s.sed away; but what scientific art has gained the people have lost. It will never be seen that one of these modern violinists can make uneducated people smile and weep as he did. The flowers that are dying on his coffin are all immortelles. Such blossoms as these will never again be strewn by peasant hands in a player"s grave.
It took two days to come from Munich to Paris,--two hard days, from seven in the morning till six at night. We broke the journey by sleeping at Strasburg, where we had just one hour to see the wonderful cathedral and its clock. The clock I didn"t care so much about, though the trick of it is a marvel; but the twilight of the cathedral, lit up by its great roses of topaz and amethyst, I shall never forget as long as I live. In my next letter I will tell you about it. But now I have only time to copy Harriet"s verses, and send off this letter. Here they are:--
DENMARK.
When again in your own bright land you are, And with all that dearly you love, And at times you look up at the Northern Star That stands on the sky above, Remember, then, that near forgot, Here, near the Gothic strand, There is on the globe a little spot,-- "T is Denmark, a beautiful land.
Now at harvest time from there you flew, Like the birds from its tranquil sh.o.r.e; They return at springtime, kind and true: May, like them, you return once more!
Dear Mrs. Jakson, I remain your humble and thankful servant, HARRIET.
Poor thing! when she bade me good-by she began to shed tears, and I had to be almost stern with her to stop their flow. "Tell your husband," she said, "that there"s a little creature in Denmark that you"ve made very happy, that"ll never forget you," and she was gone.
In about ten minutes a tap at the door; there was Harriet again, with a big paper of grapes and a deprecating face. "Excuse me, ma"am, but they were only one mark and a half a pound, and they "re much better than you"d get them in the hotel. Oh, I"ll not lose my train, ma"am; I"ve plenty of time." And with another kiss on my hand she ran out of the room. Faithful creature! I shall never see her again in this world, but I shall remember her with grat.i.tude as long as I live.
Surely nowhere except in Norway and Denmark could it have happened to a person to find in the sudden exigency of the moment two such devoted servants as Katrina and Harriet; and that they should have both been rhymers was a doubling up of coincidences truly droll.
Paris is as detestable as ever,--literally a howling and waste place!
Of all the yells and shrieks that ever made air discordant, surely the cries of Paris are the loudest and worst. My room looks on the street; and I should say that at least three different Indian tribes in distress and one in drunken hilarity were wailing and shouting under my windows all the time! As for the fiacre-men,--how like _fiasco_, _fiacre_ looks written!--they drive as if their souls" salvation depended on just grazing the wheel of every vehicle they pa.s.s. When two of them yell out at once, as they go by each other, it is enough to deafen one.
III.
Dear People,--I couldn"t give you a better ill.u.s.tration of what happens to you in foreign countries when you pin your faith on people who are said to "speak English here," than by giving you the tale of how I went from Copenhagen to Lubeck. To begin with, I explained to the porter of the Konig von Denmark Hotel, who is one of the English-speaking _attaches_ of that very good hotel, that I wished, in going to Lubeck, to avoid water as much as possible. I endeavored to convey to him that my horror of it was in fact hydrophobic, and that I could go miles out of my way to escape it. He understood me perfectly, he said; and he explained to me a fine route by which I was to cross island after island by rail, have only short intervals of water between, and come comfortably to Lubeck by eight in the evening, provided I would leave Copenhagen at 6.45 in the morning, which I was only too happy to do for the sake of escaping a long steamboat journey. So I arranged everything to that end; explained to the one waiter who spoke English that I must have breakfast on the table at 5.40, as I was to leave the house at 6.15. He understood perfectly, he said. (I also commissioned him to buy a pound of grapes for my lunch-basket; the relevancy of this will appear later.) I then carefully explained to the worthy old lady who had promised for a small consideration to take me to Munich, that she must be on the spot at six, with her luggage; and that she was on no account to bring anything to lift in her hands, because my own hand-luggage would be all she could well handle. Then I asked for my bill, that it might be settled the night beforehand, to have nothing on hand in the morning but to get off. This was doubly important, as the landlord had promised to change my Danish money into German money for me,--the Danish bankers having no German money. They so hate Germany that they consider it a disgrace, I believe, even to handle marks and pfennigs.
The clerk, who also "speaks English," said he understood me perfectly; so I went upstairs cheerful and at ease in my mind. In half an hour my bill arrived; and I sent down by the waiter, who spoke "a leetle"
English, five hundred Danish crowns to pay my bill, and have four hundred crowns returned to me in marks. Waited one hour, no money; rang, same waiter appeared.
"Where is my money?"
"Yees, it have gone out; it will soon return. He is not here."
Waited half an hour longer; rang again.