castle was stretched a network of kerria japonica, a mass of yellow flower.
On March 2, 1689, the French blew up the glorious castle, the finest achievement of the Renaissance domestic architecture in Germany, perhaps in all Europe.
A charming gate remains intact at the Castle of Heidelberg, erected in honour of Elizabeth Stuart. This disagreeable woman was idealized and became a theme of romantic devotion among the Protestant princes of Germany, and the Puritan nobility and gentry of England. There are two portraits of her by Honthorst in the National Portrait Gallery, that represent her as a very charming young woman; another by Janz van Mieseveld shows her expressionless and unattractive. A full length of her by Honthorst after she was Queen of Bohemia is not idealized, and does not show her as one possessed of any fascination.
After a few weeks spent in Heidelberg we started for Berne and thence travelled to Lucerne, where we remained from May 22nd to June 19th. We went up the Rigi, where I was laid up with congestion of the lungs.
It is singular that the Swiss wood-carvers have not progressed in a century, but continue to cut the same uninteresting and inartistic salad-forks and spoons, brackets, paper-cutters, chalets and little bears. They have not originated any good style whatever. This marks an incapacity for art in the race. They make good waiters, pastry-cooks, confectioners, et voilà tout!
From Lucerne we went on to Thun, where we remained till October 23. The town commands, beyond the lake, the snows of the Flowerless Alp—cold, grey, unsmiling.
It seemed to me, even as a child, that passing out of a Catholic Canton into one that was Calvinistic or Zwinglian was like going from a vision of Monte Rosa to a view of the Flowerless Alp. Of course at the time I knew nothing about the religions, save their outward aspect and their effect upon the people who had embraced them, or had been crushed under them; and it did appear to me as though the entire atmosphere and aspect were changed. The people seemed different, and what perhaps impressed me as a child especially was, that in a Catholic Canton there were paintings, picturesquely planted chapels, wayside shrines, and crucifixes—a thousand objects appealing to the eye
