The Overland Monthly/Volume 5/A Day on the Weser

A DAY ON THE WESER.

OURISTS who pass through Europe in the old, beaten track, consiuer Germany sufficiently "done" when the Rhine has been navigated, and the larger cities—Berlin, Dresden, Munich —visited. Of the lovely scenery, lying a little apart from the highway of common travel, nothing is seen or said; and there are spots on the less well-known Weser River, that possess all the beauty and all the charm of romance and tradition, for which the river Rhine is so highly vaunted.

I have in my mind the territory lying on either side of the Weser River, from Nienburg upward to the pass of Porta Westphalica—an enormous cleft in the Weser Mountains, made there, centuries ago, by the water of the Weser breaking through the rocks, and pouring its volumes through this forced channel into the lower-lying land. Just below the pass is the ancient city of Minden, one of the strongest fortresses of modern times, and said to have been the residence of Wittekind, the old Saxon Chief, in the days of the dim, gray Past.

But of Wittekind and Minden, more anon: it is to an old, half-ruined, halfmodernized castle, on the banks of the Weser, that I wish to take you at present. Situated on the right of the river, as you come up from Nienburg, it is not more than six or eight miles from here to Minden. Jutting out into the stream, its vaults and dungeons built partly under the water, it is further encompassed by a moat, several hundred feet wide, on the north side, which still extends quite a distance beyond the present limits of the court-yard proper, ere it makes a sharp curve, and loses itself in the fields, which have been formed by filling in the

moat, during our "utilitarian" century. On the south side, the place was protected by immense walls, which, partly leveled years ago, have been transformed into terraced gardens, where the fragrant lilac, the gaudy tulip, and the sweetbreathed hyacinth nod, and wave, and dream, just above the loop- holes in the walls, that once echoed to the shout of the mailed vassal, or the moan of the shackled prisoner; but now peacefully hold the stores of grain, and gardenfruit, the rich acres bear to the present tenant of the old stronghold.

A passing glimpse that I caught of the round tower, at the north-west corner of the building, had shown me the figures "1549," in splendid Gothic characters, over the low-browed entrance-door; and this date alone, I thought, would warrant my attempt at a description of the place. A prince-bishop's seat originally, it was built at a time when the highest power of the state was in the hands of the prelates—the strength of this now ruined fortress, and the breadth and extent of the domains formerly under contribution to it, proving how mighty this, of all bishoprics, must have been. It is said that, at times, when the walls of Minden were not considered strong enough to withstand storm and attack of the enemy, to ¢Azs place were brought the prisoners and treasures the Lord- bishop was most anxious to hold. Under the terraces, that now give so picturesque an appearance to the south side of the castle, were the casemates, the magazines, and the stables for those mighty war-horses which we look upon with such delight, in the pictures still to be seen in the building. The loopholes that I have already noticed ap pear in two different tiers, upon two sides of the building: under the terraces and around the corner, above the river, from where the brazen tongues of the cannon could leap out across the water, where still more territory was to be protected from the enemies of the prelate reigning within the walls. A specimen of what these walls were, is still to be seen at the end of the building forming the corner where the river flows into the moat. It is colossal, and would furnish ample material for full five miles of sea-wall around Fort Point.

In Luther's time, the town, with the castle of Petershagen, was a place of much greater size than at present; and, next to the bishopric of Bremen, it played a most important part in the religious wars; as, indeed, at all times previous to the dismantling of the fortifications, the fastness must have been a terror to the besieging host. Let us go to the

upper terrace, in front of the main en

trance (of the present day). It is said that all the land in sight, from this point, on this side of the river and that, at one time belonged to the lprd of the castle; and the peasants farming it were in duty bound to deliver their tithes into his granary. Highly favored were these peasants, when, by paying, in money and fruits, their tithes for ten years in advance, at one time, they were afterward at liberty to keep for themselves what they had raised by the sweat of their brow. Not only every tenth sheaf of grain in the field was claimed from the peasant, I am told, but a certain number of eggs from the hens in his barnyard, and sausages and hams from the "porker" he had fatted and killed; and, besides this, he must leave his own ground unplowed and unsowa, till "his lordship's" farms and gardens had been put in order by the peasant and his work-cattle. Jurisdiction and law-making were also in the hands of these little kings, who judged and sentenced their Vor. V— 16,

subjects before the courts established on their domains. Only since 1848 has this oppression been done away with; long after the time of the prince-bishops, every civil officer under the King who occupied the castle still claimed a certain amount of tithes, and unpaid labor, from the peasants living within a certain distance of the castle.

I almost hated the old, stubborn-looking thing, while listening to the stories of wrongs and cruelties practiced here, under the cloak of religion and cover of the Bishop's hat. And still a flood of sunshine streams into my heart with the memory of a bright, June morning, spent under the linden-trees on the upper terrace. Three hundred years old were these trees, and fastened with iron chains to the walls beyond, so that the wind should not tear them from their time-honored places. Heine says that the Linden should be the emblematical

'tree of the Germans, for every leaf of

the foliage is heart-shaped. Not the foliage of these hoary giants alone made them dear to me, though it was very, very beautiful to see the shadow of each leaf, as it moved in the soft wind, falling on, and playing hide-and-seek with, the gray, moss-covered statues, that stood in the niches of the wall.

The ivy clung fast to the wall, and around the pedestal of the stone figures; and the shadow of the linden-leaves flaked the deep niches, and the forms of the gods and nymphs, who had watched, with their sightless eyes, the growth of the once slim striplings, now pelting them with green leaves and snowy blossoms. Not the foliage alone attracted me toward the linden-trees; but the soft, vibrating music of an AZolian harp, hidden among the branches.

Like a new revelation seemed the poetry of Uhland, Wolfgang Miiller, Mosen, Arentschild, as I stood under the lindentrees on the terrace, and my eye roamed.

"Weit hin Uber's sonnige Land,"

and well I understood the passionate grief, the bitter Aeimweh, that has dug an early grave for so many a German exiled from his native land.

Directly before me, as I stand with my back toward the river, is a long flight of stone steps leading from the upper terrace to the garden below, from whence we can reach the dusty highway. A row of Italian poplars borders the road on either side, forming a magnificent avenue from the castle to the town. Instead of stepping out on the highway, we will turn to the left, which brings us in view of the moat. Alas for romance! The moat, where not filled in, has been turned into a harbor, which fishermen now utilize in their calling. And here we are before the round tower with the Gothic inscription, "1549," above the entrance. Before we ascend the stairs, let us turn a moment, to look at the old stone-trough by the pump in the court-yard. The pump is an innovation— quite a recent affair, in fact, not more than fifty years old; but the well itself was dug when the castle was first built, and is so deep (I quote tradition) that "if you let yourself down to the water's surface, you can see the stars in the noon-sky." (Now I don't vouch for the truth of this, or any other thing that was told me; but if any one doubt it, he had better go to the spot and try the experiment—the place is not hard to find.) This square courtyard was once the parade-ground: on two sides it is inclosed by the building; the third side looks toward the harbor; and the fourth, looking toward the highway now, was formerly likewise protected by a moat. When on the upper terrace, awhile ago, I thought the building was but two stories above the vaults and cellars; here I count four stories above me. The mystery is solved thus: The terraces themselves form the roof of the casemates and magazines that extend so far out on the south side. Originally

the main building had been five stories

high; but the upper story was destroyed by fire two hundred years ago, and the subjects of the bishopric, attempting a revolution about the same time, refused to rebuild it in its former style; then later, in the present century, the old roof became so dilapidated that it was found necessary to remove it—a roof of modern red tiles taking its place, and detracting greatly from the antique appearance of the castle. Two of the largest halls are each forty feet wide by one hundred feet long, and twenty-four feet high. In the uppermost hall were held the assemblages of the people belonging to the bishopric, and owing tithes to it. Viewing the lofty hall, I could not help thinking how much I should have liked to witness a gathering of all these peasants, artificers, and tradesmen. Abject as the slavery of that class of people looks to us at this distant time, they must have possessed not only strength and integrity of character, but a certain sturdy independence; for did not Luther spring from this stock and race? Schloss Petershagen was built when stone-cutting, stone-masonry, and architecture in general, were flourishing: this (north) side of the building exhibits traces of great, but fast-decaying beauty. The long, balustraded galleries and heavy, carved cornices seem to frown darkly on the crowd of plebeian children at play on the green brink, near their father's fishing-nets; and the old tower above looks as though it felt deeply the humiliation of having been "taken down a peg," and brought under the same roof with the rest of the building, in 1828. If we enter the lower story here, we will find the old kitchen, spacious in dimensions, and paved, of course, with flags; next to it was the brewery, and, across the court-yard, the chapel, the granary, and the wine-vaults on the same floor. To judge from the size and capacity of these different institutions, I should say that the garrison might have

held out a good long siege, when vats and bins were well filled, which, I feel sure, the gentlemen who wore the mailcoat over the priestly robe took good care of. Near the kitchen is a heavy, well-secured door: the entrance to the dungeons and cellars underground. Only the upper tier'of these cellars is now in use: they are remarkably well finished and well preserved; but the entrance to the dungeons below has been closed, to prevent accidents, since the stairs leading down have crumbled away, and there is no safe passage to reach them. Standing where one of these had formerly existed, a stone thrown below will raise a ghostly clatter among the chains and other remnants of a barbarous past. I am assured in all sincerity that the good Bishops once seated here had a humane trick of bringing their prisoners into these dungeons, fettering them to the chains fastened in the walls for this purpose, and leaving them there to die the easiest way they could. Here, also, is the entrance to a subterranean passage extending from here all the way under the river to a monastery—Lokkum— some two miles away on the other side. When hard besieged, this passage, the entrance to which was not generally known, afforded the Bishops safe retreat to their faithful allies across the stream.

"That was the romantic age," I said to myself as I emerged from the lower world, and my eye passed along the two wings of the house, and rested on the "year of our Lord 1549." But the thing looked grand, it is not to be denied: huge blocks of stone, piled smoothly over each other, and graceful devices in cornice and balustrade, hewn out of the same imperishable material, weatherstained and often dismantled, but glorious still amid the dust of the past and the irreverent light of the new, realistic day. Fallen greatness! Departed glory! I can not help drawing a little sigh as I begin to mount the stone-steps

(deeply scooped out, every one, from the "tramp of ages") of the round tower; and I hang my head a little as I think of the white-haired lady, once the mistress of these echoing halls and broad corridors, who has long since found a home on our own shore, and had charged me, particularly, to visit her old heimath in the Vaterland. I drop my eyes, partly because it makes me sad to think of all the changes that have passed over her venerable head, partly because I had been told that this particular tower was the habitation of one particular ghost, often seen on the narrow gallery running around the tower above, by people who had the hardihood to look up while mounting the winding staircase. A wide gallery connected the tower with large, old-fashioned rooms in the upper, inhabitable story of the castle, with windows looking out on the Weser. I was conducted to the best room, and invited to a seat on the divan, in the windowsill. If this sounds like a "traveler's story," I must remind the reader that the walls of the castle were the width of any ordinary-sized room, and a little table and two chairs found room there, besides the divan I occupied. My kindly entertainers always took their afterdinner coffee here; and as they dispose of dinner early in this country, we had still a long, pleasant afternoon before us, and I prepared to listen with eager attention to all that was told me about Petershagen and the surrounding country.

There was at least one tie between me and these people: the love for the gray-haired lady whose home this had been. It was her brother, by the way, who at the breaking out of the last German war was Adjutant-General to the Elector of Hesse; and, loyal to his Prince, was taken prisoner with him and held captive in the Fortress of Mindeny only an hour's drive from here. And it was her father who, in 1809, when

the little band of patriots under Schill fought that desperate fight for Germany's liberation, and were defeated, captured, court-martialed, and sentenced to death at Braunschweig, saved the youngest of the number by assisting him to escape. The Baron, I must explain, was a French officer at this time, by virtue of the Captain's commission he held from Napoleon's brother, Jerome, King of Westphalia; and these men were rebels against the existing Government, so that he risked his own life in saving that of Schill's youngest officer. Bitterly he must have felt the French yoke, when Schill's men, sentenced to death by a court-martial of their own countrymen, who wore the French uniform, were led forth to execution; and in honor to his memory and his ashes, be it said that, according to the printed records I have read, he, and he alone of all the German officers forced to serve under the usurper, had the courage to withhold his consent from the murder of these men.

And yet farther back into the past we traveled, while the sunshine was dancing on the stream gliding by below, and the tones of the wind-harp came sweeping around the heavy walls and into the open window. Across the Weser all was beauty and repose: green meadows covered with peacefully grazing cattle; clumps of trees dotting the valleys and the banks of the stream; hills in the hazy distance, and the picturesque ruins of what had once been the residence of the steward of the Petershagen domains (the Koppel) in the immediate foreground. The air was balmy; the thin, white clouds floating in the sky threw light shadows on the beautiful German earth; and, when I think back of the land so far behind me now, I break out into Heine's pathetic lament:

"O Deutschland—meine ferne Liebe! Gedenk' ich deiner, wein' ich fast."

But when the ice of the cold, German

winter melts under the first soft breath

of spring, the scene is altogether different. Then the angry river, throwing off its winter fetters, covers the banks with its muddy waves, and climbs impatiently up to the broad windows of the upper story of the castle; and at such a time it was, long ago, after this domain had passed from the ecclesiastical grasp into the hands of profane rulers, that the lord of the castle had committed the wife of his bosom to the cold embraces of the roaring flood, thus furnishing the round tower with the ghost to which every old tower in this country is entitled. The reason assigned for this ungallant conduct on the part of the "stalwart Knight" was his overweening affection for some other fair one; but tradition says that the spirit of the wife so summarily dispatched gave him little leisure to dream of his new charmer— the spirit having contracted the unpleasant habit of cowering at the foot of his bed every night he attempted to pass in the castle after his "dark deed."

I leaned far out of the window, to see how deep below me was the Weser; and was told that the present height of the castle was 140 feet. Under the window I again saw the two tiers of loop-holes that ran around two sides of the building, and formerly, in continuation, for a mile or two down the stream, in walls and fortifications long since crumbled into dust. Below these loop-holes were other openings through which a spare light was admitted into some of the upper dungeons; in the lower there was eternal night. During the Seven Years' War and the Thirty Years' War, Petershagen held its own; and there is not a foot of ground for miles around to which there is not some historical interest attached: the very ground still yielding to the plowman at labor in the field its hidden treasures of stone-axes and other war implements used by the native Saxons against the Roman invaders. Iron was not known in this Northern Germany —called Saxony then—at that time;

and the swords used by Charlemagne and his warriors were of Roman workmanship. Above Minden, the place is still seen where Wittekind, after his conversion to Christianity, and his own baptism, drove his hordes of pagans—men, women, and children—into the Weser, anxious that they, too, should enjoy the blessing forced upon him at the point of the sword. And when, in turn, other hordes of unbelievers persecuted him and his Christianized people, and he was hard beset, and famishing with thirst on the mountain high above the Weser, his charger, pawing the ground impatiently, struck a spring of clear water that gushed out of the rock, and is still to be seen close by the Wittekind Chapel, on the Margerethen Cluse, at the present day.

Somewhere about this period —750800—three of the churches to be seen here, and within sight of each other—all three built on rising ground above the river, placed in a triangle, an equal distance between them, equal in height and dimensions, their altar to the south and the steeple to the north—are said to have been built by Charlemagne and Pepin the Short, his father. Indeed, all churches up to the sixteenth century were built so as to front in this manner; and until very lately, the Germans held to the custom of burying their dead with the face furned south—toward Palestine. Still one step can we go backward, while onthisground. Thereare burial-mounds found here, and all through Lower Saxony, Thuringia, and toward the Netherlands, built by the Huns, always containing a set number of graves—the largest invariably facing the North Star. But these graves do not hold hideous skeletons: only urns with ashes, and sometimes a few little pieces of bone. The bodies were all burned, and the ashes consigned to earthenware urns, which vary in size according to the rank the person held in life.

Retracing our steps to more modern

times, we find that some of the most decisive battles were fought on this ground in 1762, during the Seven Years' War. The enemy was defeated here, and the whole French artillery driven, or rather decoyed, into a deep bog, where every man and horse of the outfit perished. The feat is said to have been accomplished in this manner: Native German guides were pressed into service by, the enemy, to stretch ropes through a dangerous, swampy territory, by which the vanguard could find the narrow path by night: the intention of the French being to occupy a certain point with their artillery, from where they could surprise the German troops by their fire in the morning. But the guides found means to communicate with some German peasants, and these changed the direction the ropes indicated, so that one gun after another, and horseman after horseman, found a silent grave in the treacherous swamp. Sometime later, Swedes, Prussians, and their English allies fought a battle on the Haller Haide, near Petershagen, and lay encamped in the neighborhood a full season. Up to the present time old flint-lock muskets, horseshoes, and cannon-balls are found on this ground, where the former site of the trenches and breastworks is now to be plainly traced, and even old coins and golden trinkets, finger-rings, and so forth, occasionally fall into the hands of the more fortunate.

Nor has Petershagen been bare of the light which a royal countenance sheds over every thing in a monarchy like this. It is well known, and still the boast of this once important town, that King Frederic the First held Court here, once a year, in the ancient manor-house lying at the other extreme end of the town—a stately place called Bessel's Hof—not so old as Schloss Petershagen, but with a larger number of old paintings, and better-preserved works of art than the other can boast of. Formerly it was the seat of a Prussian Landgrave.