I got my first glimpse of the Rhine through the window of an omnibus. From so prosaic a look-out, I may be excused for remarking, (what I might not have done, perhaps, from the embrasure of a ruined castle,) that it was a very ordinary looking river, with low banks, and of about the breadth of the Susquehannah at Owego. A party of beer-drinkers, bearded and piped, sitting under a bower of dried branches in front of a tavern, were all that I could see at the moment that looked either picturesque or poetical. This was on the way from the rail-road station to the Hotel at Cologne. As it was the only view I had of the Rhine that does not compel admiration, I seize the opportunity to disparage it.
In _doing_ the curiosities of Cologne with a guide and a party, I found nothing not thrice told in the many books. Fortunately for the traveller, things newly seen are quite as enjoyable, though ever so far gone beyond a new description. I relished exceedingly my ramble through the narrow streets, and over the beautiful cathedral, and I puckered my lips with due wonder at the sight of the bones of the “Eleven Thousand Virgins” in the Convent of St. Ursula. Alas, that, of any thing loveable, such relics may have been a part! There was no choice, I thought, between the skulls—yet there must have been differences of beauty in the flesh that covered them.
I was lucky enough to bring the moonlight and my eyes to bear on the cathedral at the same moment—the half-filled horn of the Queen of Stars pouring upon the fine old towers, a light of beautiful tenderness, while I strolled around them once more in the evening. The cathedral of Cologne looks, indeed, a lovely confusion. And quite as lovely, I fancy, to eyes that have no knowledge of how window and pinnacle put their Gothic legs, ultimately, to the ground. I believe in Gothic. I am sure, that is to say, that these interlaced points and angles have a harmony in which lies architectural strength; and with this unexamined creed in my mind, like capital in bank, I give to impressions of beauty, unlimited credit. This is sometimes the kind of trust with which we admire poetry. There is many a strain of Byron’s, learned by heart for the music that it floats with, the meaning alone of which would not have immortalized it for a nameless poet.