Day after day passed in this manner, and probably you will say how stupid, how tiresome, all this must have been: so it would, doubtless, to one less gifted with the organ of assimilation or who has not, like me, endured the tedium of a soiree at Lady ------‘s.
At length my friend arrived, and after a few days spent in excursions to The Hague and the Palace in the wood, we set off in order to reach Cologne in time for the musical festival.
We left Rotterdam at night on the steamboat, and the following morning found us slowly stemming the current of the rapid Rhine, whose broad surface and unwooded banks gave an air of bleakness and desolation which more than once drove me from the deck to the warm stove of the cabin, crowded as the cabin was with smoking and singing Hollanders on the way to the Festival. Once I ascended the rigging to get a more extended view of the surrounding country: I might as well have remained below. A vast flat track of land, intersected by canals and studded with an occasional solitary windmill, was all the eye could compass, and then it was that I felt the full force of Goldsmith’s _mot_ that “Holland looks like a country swimming for its life.” Nothing breaks the dull monotony of a voyage on the lower Rhine except the sight of some vast raft of timber, peopled by its myriads of inhabitants, dropping down the current.
We passed several towns: but variety of Dutch city, Dutch lady, and Dutch ship, is only a slight deviation from an established scale of proportions.
Of my fellow-travellers I can tell you nothing. I had no means of cultivating their acquaintance; they spoke French (and doubtless they had a right to do so) after a manner of their own, but were as unintelligible to me as Kant’s metaphysics or Mr Montague’s directions for dancing the new galopades.
As an illustration of the peculiarity of pronunciation, they tell of a Fleming commencing, I believe, one of Beaumarchais’ plays with the line--
“Hélas! je ne sais pas quel cours je dois prendre”;
“Monsieur, prenez la poste et retournez en Flandre.”
Never was Parisian at Potsdam more thoroughly _ennuyé_ than I was during this voyage of two days. It was near night when I was roused from slumber by the boat’s arrival in Cologne. I had been dreaming of all sorts of things and people,--visions of mulled wine and Mozart, beefsteaks and Beethoven, flitted through my mind in all the mazes of mad confusion; and with the valorous resolution of realising at least one part of my musings in the shape of a hot supper and a flask of Nierensteiner, I went up on deck, when my friend came to meet me with the disastrous intelligence that there was not an unoccupied room or bed in the town. The good supper, the Nierensteiner, and the soft bed on which I had rolled by anticipation, faded like the baseless fabric of a vision.