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those of an American city, but there is one antique pile, some parts of which we may easily imagine go back to the reign of Gunther. It is the cathedral, — one of the most ancient in Germany, as beautiful as venerable. The rounded arches speak of a time when, as yet, the Gothic was not; upon the blackened pinnacles and quaint ornaments of buttress and keystone have gazed in turn the men of nearly thirty generations. As you enter within the sombre shadows, it will be thrilling to you if you can go back in imagination to its earliest time, and make yourself feel that the figures of the old poet had once some real existence here. What massiveness in the columns, and how heavily majestic the rounded arches turn, high overhead, in the dusky gloom, which sunbeam can never reach! What dim, religious light! How worn the pavement, from the pressure of knees which have bent here and then mouldered, in a succession whose length we strive in vain to compass! The minstrel must have known the pile; try to believe that Siegfried and Kriemhild, and the fierce-glancing Hagen knew it too. There, in the space before the portal, Kriemhild and Brunhild strove for precedence, the outburst of haughtiness for which a hero died and a whole race must at length fall. Here knelt Kriemhild, while as yet she was lovable; and here lay the slain Siegfried, in his gem-incrusted coffin, the beauty not yet effaced on brow and form.

But grandest of all is the Rhine. The German has thrust forward his frontiers and taken the stream into the heart of the Fatherland. It flows, as it

were, from first to last through his history; for there is not a generation to which its banks have not been memorable. It flows through his poetry from first to last; the minstrel of the Nibelungen Lied gives the name throughout his strophes in thousandfold affectionate repetition, as a lover murmurs the name of his darling. It reverberates in the songs of every age, and never was the German lyre more enamored of it than to-day. The Rhine, the glorious Rhine! It would seem, sometimes, as if the German would take it bodily into his arms. I saw once a performance of "Rhein-Gold," the prelude to the great trilogy of Wagner, "The Ring of the Nibelungen.' Above me sat, in his ornamented box, the king of Bavaria, who had given the artist carte-blanche for his representation among the revenues of his kingdom. At first, in some indescribable way, as the curtain rose, the Rhine seemed flowing past us on the stage. We looked into its deeps as into the sides of an aquarium. Far upward toward the roof the sunlight seemed to glitter on the wavelets of the surface; the weeds below swayed to the shouldering current; the fair spirits, with whom legend peoples its abysses, swam white-armed before us, singing amid their buoyant curvings, now floating to the surface, now sinking slowly to the depths. And what glittered at the bottom? It was a mysterious treasure, like the Nibelungen hoard, won by Siegfried in his youth, brought afterward to Kriemhild, at Worms, thrown at length into the stream between Worms and Lorsch by Hagen, the knowledge of its hiding-place perishing from the

earth with him! They had taken the beloved river bodily, as it were, into their arms, and from prince and people went up a shout of joy.

A few months upon its banks, and even a stranger will catch, by contagion, something of the glow. I have leaped across it high up at the pass of the Splügen, where it makes its way, a thread-like rill, from its parent glacier. At its mouth I sailed out upon its waters to the dark North Sea. Midway in its course I have crossed it at Strassburg, where score upon score of armies have passed, —some east, some west; some shouting victors, some groaning vanquished, in the mighty series from the time when the chief of the Marcomanni went over it to meet Julius Cæsar, to the passage of the crown prince of Prussia on his way to Weissembourg and Wörth. But I love to remember it best as I saw it from a high hill of the Odenwald. The crag on which I stood might have echoed the horn of Siegfried, as he joyfully hunted on the morning of his death. The April rain-drops on grass and foliage shone like the jewels that fell from his shield, as in his death-struggle he smote at his murderer. Far below in the plain lay the city of Worms, the cathedral looming dark against the sky. The great river trailed some leagues of its length at my feet, and at one loop the setting sun made it glow with a ruddy splendor. It was as if the treasure of the Nibelungen were shining up to me from its secret caves. "It shall be forever hidden!" were the last words of Hagen, as he fell beneath the sword Balmung ; but I can almost fancy it was a gleam from the red

gold, and the flash of the mysterious jewels, that was revealed to my gaze that night. The light of sunset faded, and lo! in the East, through the horizon mists, weaponed with splendor, vindicated her dominion in the gathering night, the solemn moon. There, glorious in silver light, whispering among the reeds of its margin, lapping lightly the barks upon its breast, the river passed grandly on into mystery, even as on the night when it swept beneath the corpse of murdered Siegfried, borne across to his waiting wife, the oars dipping slow, repentance on the faces of the retinue, the spear of Hagen yet fixed in the heart it had sundered!

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CHAPTER IV.

GUDRUN.

run

It has been judged fit to give to the epic of Gud- written about the year 1250 — the name of the German Odyssey, as the Nibelungen Lied has been called the German Iliad. The name is a convenient one. Of the two poems, the Nibelungen Lied is the most warlike and tragic, and, in general, possesses superior interest. Gudrun is somewhat softer in character, though by no means wanting in pictures of strife; the most prominent figures are those of women; domestic life is portrayed; there is much restless wandering to and fro, often recalling the adventures of the prince of Ithaca. As in the case of the Nibelungen Lied, the name of the writer of Gudrun has not come down to us. This much can be said with certainty: that he had for the basis of his work, as did the writer of the companion-piece, old legends and lays. The influence of some of the poets of his time can be traced in his verses, but, before all, the Nibelungen Lied was his model, which is believed to have been written about fifty years before. There are several allusions in the poem which make it certain that the minstrel was a wandering singer of the people; from the language, scholars believe him to have

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