THE JORDAN 338
THE CONCORD 344
THE TAGUS 350
THE RHINE
VICTOR HUGO
I love rivers; they do more than bear merchandise--ideas float along their surface. Rivers, like clarions, sing to the ocean of the beauty of the earth, the fertility of plains, and the splendour of cities.
Of all rivers, I prefer the Rhine. It is now a year, when passing the bridge of boats at Kehl, since I first saw it. I remember that I felt a certain respect, a sort of admiration, for this old, this classic stream. I never think of rivers--those great works of Nature, which are also great in history,--without emotion.
I remember the Rhone at Valserine; I saw it in 1825, in a pleasant excursion to Switzerland, which is one of the sweet, happy recollections of my early life. I remember with what noise, with what ferocious bellowing, the Rhone precipitated itself into the gulf whilst the frail bridge upon which I was standing was shaking beneath my feet. Ah! well! since that time, the Rhone brings to my mind the idea of a tiger,--the Rhine, that of a lion.
The evening on which I saw the Rhine for the first time, I was impressed with the same idea. For several minutes I stood contemplating this proud and noble river--violent, but not furious; wild, but still majestic. It was swollen, and was magnificent in appearance, and was washing its yellow mane, or, as Boileau says, its “slimy beard,” the bridge of boats. Its two banks were lost in the twilight, and though its roaring was loud, still there was tranquillity.
Yes, the Rhine is a noble river--feudal, republican, imperial--worthy, at the same time, of France and Germany. The whole history of Europe is combined within its two great aspects--in this flood of the warrior and of the philosopher--in this proud stream, which causes France to bound with joy, and by whose profound murmurings Germany is bewildered in dreams.
The Rhine is unique; it combines the qualities of every river. Like the Rhone, it is rapid; broad, like the Loire; encased, like the Meuse; serpentine, like the Seine; limpid and green, like the Somme; historical, like the Tiber; royal, like the Danube; mysterious, like the Nile; spangled with gold, like an American river; and, like a river of Asia, abounding with phantoms and fables.
Before the commencement of History, perhaps before the existence of man, where the Rhine now is there was a double chain of volcanos, which on their extinction left heaps of lava and basalt lying parallel, like two long walls. At the same epoch the gigantic crystallizations formed the primitive mountains; the enormous alluvions of which the secondary mountains consist were dried up; the frightful heap, which is now cold, and snow accumulated on them, from which two great streams issued, the one--flowing towards the north, crossed the plains, encountered the sides of the extinguished volcanos, and emptied itself into the ocean; the other, taking its course westward, fell from mountain to mountain, flowed along the side of the block of extinguished volcanos, which is now Ardâche, and was finally lost in the Mediterranean. The first of those inundations is the Rhine, and the second the Rhone.
From historical records we find that the first people who took possession of the banks of the Rhine were the half-savage Celts, who were afterwards named Gauls by the Romans. When Rome was in its glory, Cæsar crossed the Rhine, and shortly afterwards the whole of the river was under the jurisdiction of his empire. When the Twenty-second Legion returned from the siege of Jerusalem, Titus sent it to the banks of the Rhine, where it continued the work of _Martius Agrippa_. The conquerors required a town to join Melibocus to Taunus; and Moguntiacum, begun by Martius, was founded by the Legion, built by Trajan, and embellished by Adrian. Singular coincidence! and which we must note in passing. This Twenty-second Legion brought with it Crescentius, who was first that carried the Word of God into the Rhingau, and founded the new religion. God ordained that these ignorant men, who had pulled down the last stone of His temple upon the Jordan, should lay the first of another upon the banks of the Rhine. After Trajan and Adrian came Julian, who erected a fortress upon the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle; then Valentinian, who built a number of castles. Thus in a few centuries, Roman colonies, like an immense chain, linked the whole of the Rhine.
At length the time arrived when Rome was to assume another aspect. The incursions of the Northern hordes were eventually too frequent and too powerful for Rome; so, about the Sixth Century, the banks of the Rhine were strewed with Roman ruins, as at present with feudal ones.
Charlemagne cleared away the rubbish, built fortresses, and opposed the German hordes; but notwithstanding his desire to do more, Rome died, and the physiognomy of the Rhine was changed.
Already, as I before mentioned, an unperceived germ was sprouting in the Rhingau. Religion, that divine eagle, began to spread its wings, and deposited among the rocks an egg that contained the germ of a world. St. Apollinaire, following the example of Crescentius, who, in the year 70 preached the Word of God at Taunus, visited Rigomagum. St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, catechized Confluentia; St. Materne, before visiting Tongres, resided at Cologne. At Trèves, Christians began to suffer the death of martyrdom, and their ashes were swept away by the wind; but these were not lost, for they became seeds, which were germinating in the fields during the passage of the barbarians, although nothing at that time was seen of them.
After an historical period the Rhine became linked with the marvellous. Where the noise of man is hushed, Nature lends a tongue to the nest of birds, causes the caves to whisper, and the thousand voices of solitude to murmur; where historical facts cease, imagination gives life to shadows and realities to dreams. Fables took root, grew, and blossomed in the voids of History, like weeds and brambles in the crevices of a ruined palace.
Civilization, like the sun, has its nights and its days, its plenitudes and its eclipses; now it disappears, but soon returns.
As soon as civilization again dawned upon Taunus, there were upon the borders of the Rhine a whole host of legends and fabulous stories. Populations of mysterious beings, who inhabited the now dismantled castles, had held communion with the _belles filles_ and _beaux chevaliers_ of the place. Spirits of the rocks; black hunters, crossing the thickets upon stags with six horns; the maid of the black fen; the six maidens of the red marshes; Wodan, the god with ten hands; the twelve black men; the raven that croaked its song; the devil who placed his stone at Teufelstein and his ladder Teufelsleiter, and who had the effrontery to preach publicly at Gernsbach, near the Black Forest, but, happily, the Word of God was heard at the other side of the stream; the demon, Urian, who crossed the Rhine at Dusseldorf, having upon his back the banks that he had taken from the sea-shore, with which he intended to destroy Aix-la-Chapelle, but being fatigued with his burden, and deceived by an old woman, he stupidly dropped his load at the imperial city, where that bank is at present pointed out, and bears the name of Loosberg. At that epoch, which for us was plunged into a penumbra, when magic lights were sparkling here and there, when the rocks, the woods, the valleys, were tenanted by apparitions; mysterious encounters, infernal castles, melodious songs sung by invisible songstresses; the frightful bursts of laughter emanating from mysterious beings,--these, with a host of other adventures, shrouded in impossibility, and holding on by the heel of reality, are detailed in the legends.
At last these phantoms disappear as dawn bursts in upon them. Civilization again resumed its sway, and fiction gave place to fact. The Rhine assumed another aspect: abbeys and convents increased; churches were built along the banks of the river. The ecclesiastic princes multiplied the edifices in the Rhingau, as the prefects of Rome had done before them.
The Sixteenth Century approached; in the Fourteenth the Rhine witnessed the invention of artillery; and on its bank, at Strasbourg, a printing-office was first established. In 1400 the famous cannon, fourteen feet in length, was cast at Cologne; and in 1472 Vindelin de Spire printed his Bible. A new world was making its appearance; and, strange to say, it was upon the banks of the Rhine that those two mysterious tools with which God unceasingly works out the civilization of man,--the catapult and the book--war and thought,--took a new form.
The Rhine, in the destinies of Europe, has a sort of providential signification. It is the great moat which divides the north from the south. The Rhine for thirty ages, has seen the forms and reflected the shadows of almost all the warriors who tilled the old continent with that share which they call sword. Cæsar crossed the Rhine in going to the south; Attila crossed it when descending to the north. It was here that Clovis gained the battle of Tolbiac; and that Charlemagne and Napoleon figured. Frederick Barbarossa, Rudolph of Hapsbourg, and Frederick the First, were great, victorious, and formidable when here. For the thinker, who is conversant with History, two great eagles are perpetually hovering over the Rhine--that of the Roman legions, and that of the French regiments. The Rhine--that noble flood, which the Romans named _Rhenus superbus_, bore at one time upon its surface bridges of boats, over which the armies of Italy, Spain, and France poured into Germany, and which, at a later date, were made use of by the hordes of barbarians when rushing into the ancient Roman world: at another, on its surface it floated peaceably the fir-trees of Murg and St. Gall, the porphyry and the marble of Bale, the salt of Karlshall, the leather of Stromberg, the quicksilver of Lansberg, the wine of Johannisberg, the slates of Coab, the cloth and earthenware of Wallendar, the silks and linens of Cologne. It majestically performs its double function of flood of war and flood of peace, having, without interruption, upon the ranges of hills which embank the most notable portion of its course, oak-trees on the one side and vine-trees on the other--signifying strength and joy.