Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home/Place XVI
THE RHINE.
My dear C.,
We have been waiting for fine weather, that being an indispensable element in a party of pleasure, for an excursion down the Rhine, and this morning we set off, the girls and myself, without any attendant of mankind; an elegant superfluity, as we are beginning to think.
While Francois was getting our billets, we, eager to secure the best places in the diligence, jostled past the Germans, who stood quietly awaiting the conductor's summons; and when, ten minutes after, our fellow-passengers were getting in, offering to one another precedence, the conductor came to us and said, "Ah, ladies, you are placed; I had allotted better seats for you." Was not this an appropriate punishment for our selfish and truly national hurrying? I could give you many instances of similar offences committed by ourselves and other travellers among these "live-and-let-live" people. There is a steam navigation company on the Rhine, who have three boats ascending and descending daily; this enables you to pay your passage to a certain place, and avail yourself of each boat or all, as suits your convenience. You are at liberty, at any point you please, to quit the steamer, ramble for two or three hours on the shore, and then proceed on your expedition. We are descending the river rapidly; the current runs at the rate of six miles an hour.
The big Russian princess, who is a sort of "man of the sea" to us, is flourishing up and down the deck with two of her suite, one on each side, as if to guard her from contact with the plebeian world. Every look and motion says "I do not love the people." The royal brood may wince, but they must submit to the democratic tendencies of the age. These steamers and rail-cars are undermining their elevations. I have not, as you know, my dear C., any vulgar hostility to those who are the heirs of the usurpations of elder times—"the accident of an accident"—but when I see a person, radically vulgar like this woman, queening it among those who are her superiors in everything but this accidental greatness, my Puritan blood and republican breeding get the better of my humanity.
We are passing the chateau of Johannisberg—a castle of Prince Metternich, an immense white edifice which, as we see it, looks much like a Saratoga hotel. It is on a gently-sloping hill, covered with vines which confessedly produce the best Rhine wine. "The extent of the vineyard is," Murray says, "fifty-five acres. Its produce in good years amounts to about forty butts, and has been valued at 80,000 florins." This vineyard was formerly attached to the Abbey of St. John; and a genial time, no doubt, the merry monks had of it. Would they not have regarded the modern tabooing of wine as the ne plus ultra of heresy? But, poor fellows! their abbey and their wine were long ago secularized, and have fallen into the hands of military and political spoilers. Napoleon made an imperial gift of these vineyards to Marshal Kellerman, and in 1816 they again changed hands, being presented to Metternich by the Emperor of Austria. I have drank wine bearing the name of Johannisberg in New-York, but I have been told by a person who had tasted it at Metternich's table, that it is only to be found unadulterated there. Murray informs us that they permit the grape to pass the point of seeming perfection before they gather it, believing that the wine gains in body by this, and that so precious are the grapes that those which have fallen are picked up by a fork made for the purpose.
We met a countryman to-day who has been travelling through France and Italy with his sister, "without any language," he says, "but that spoken on the rock of Plymouth," which, true to his English blood, he pronounces, with infinite satisfaction, to be the best, and all-sufficient. He is a fair specimen of that class of Anglo-American travellers who find quite enough particulars, in which every country is inferior to their own, to fill up the field of their observation. He has just crossed the deck to say to me, "I have let them know what a tall place America is; I have told them that an American steamer will carry 2000 people and 1000 bales of cotton, and go down the river and up twice as fast as a Rhine steamer." He has not told them that a Rhine steamer is far superior in its arrangement and refinement to ours. These little patriotic vanities are pleasant solaces when one is three thousand miles from home—but truth is better.