George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

Chapter 5:

• Florence.
-- Pisa. -- Lucca. -- Milan. -- Venice. -- passes of the Alps. -- Wordsworth. -- Heidelberg.

Florence, May 6.—. . . . Having letters to them, I gave the evening to the Bonapartes. Louis—Count of St. Leu-lives in a good palazzo, Lunga Arno. I was received by two gentlemen in waiting, and found him in his salon; a fat, plethoric, easy old gentleman, nearly a fixture in his elbow-chair. He talked well enough, and very good-naturedly, about everything except French politics, in relation to which he was bitter, and accused the present government of a want of bonne foi et loyaute, accusations which sounded oddly from one of his name and kindred. Several persons came in, and I should think he leads an agreeable life here, in rather pleasant society. But I was vexed to have one Italian address him as Sua Maesta. The goodtem-pered Count cared so little about royalty when he was really a king, that I do not think he ought to permit himself to be poorly flattered now with the buried title.

At the Countess Survillier's—the wife of Joseph—I found much the same state of things, but perhaps a little more air of lady—like comfort and a little less ceremony. She is feeble, and is only seen wrapped in shawls on her sofa, where her daughter, the Princess Charlotte, is devoted to her. Everything about her seemed gentle and in good taste, and her manners were excellent. The Princess is plain in person and face, but has vivacity in conversation, and a good deal of talent in the arts. She is the widow of that son of Louis who died of wounds received in the insurrection of 1831, and is much loved and [88] valued by her family for her good qualities. Several persons came in while I was there, and among them the Princess Jablonowski, whom I knew formerly as the beautiful Anna Jouberton.¹ She has been married twice, the first time to Prince Ercolani, and a few years ago to her present husband, and is still a fine-looking person, though in feeble health. She seemed to like to remember the olden times of her early youth.

But I did not stop long, for the Princess Charlotte told me that the Marchioness Lenzoni would not receive after to-night, and that she expected me. So I accompanied her there, and found Niccolini, Forti, two or three artists, and a room full of other similar people, all very pleasant, and stayed there till eleven o'clock.

May 15.—. . . . The evening I spent with a small party at the Prince de Montfort's,—Jerome Bonaparte's,—who lives here in more elegance than any of his family, and in excellent taste. His beautiful daughter did the honors of the house with grace, but there is a shade of melancholy over her fair features not to be mistaken. She was engaged to be married to her cousin Louis, who attempted that foolish insurrection last autumn at Strasburg, and who is now in America, having given his parole not to return for ten years, without the consent of France.² . . . .

May 16.—It being a plain duty of courtly civility, we went to-day to pay our respects to Prince Maximilian and the Princess Amelia. . . . . They are now in villeggiatura at Castello, a small villa of the Grand Duke, three or four miles from the city. The drive to it was beautiful, . . . . and everything is now in the freshness and luxuriance of spring . . . . . They received us with kindness and empressement, and talked upon subjects which they knew would be agreeable to us. I was struck, however, with their air and manner when they spoke of the present meeting of the Diet or Estates in Saxony, which is an innovation brought in by the Constitution of 1831. Their countenances fell at once, and their tone was as of something unpleasant; for though the Diet has never done anything that could annoy the reigning family, and though Prince Max, and especially his daughter, [89] are persons of truly good sense, the instincts of aristocracy could not be quite suppressed. There is not a drop of its blood in Europe that does not tingle at the name of a representative government. The Grand Duke having desired me to let him know when I should be here again, I desired the French Minister to give notice to the Master of Ceremonies, . . . and I suppose he knew from the Saxons that I was to visit them to-day. While, therefore, we were quietly talking, a Court messenger came in, and announced that the Grand Duke would receive me immediately if I would come to Petraia. another little villa a quarter of a mile off. . . . . . The annunciation produced quite a stir, for it made it necessary for the Saxon princes to dismiss us at once . . . . However, there had been some talk of our seeing a prospect, and the Princess Amelia hurried us up stairs— through servants' halls, antechambers, and once through a room where women were ironing clothes—to a saloon, where we could see the city, the valley of the Arno, and a long stretch of the river and of the richest country in the world. But we could stop only an instant to enjoy it . . . We drove up the hill to Petraia, which we found an old building that had belonged to the Medici, modernized and fitted up as for a common family. Nothing announced the presence of the Prince but the guards. A livery servant showed me up stairs to the antechamber, and while he went to make known to the Grand Duke that I was there, I looked into a little ancient chapel, with some pretty good frescos in it, and a very good copy of the Madonna della Impannata . . . . . The Grand Duke received me in a little room which he uses as a cabinet de travail, with bare walls, no carpet, and only a few chairs, and a table with papers and portfolios on it, for the whole of its furniture. . . . . After the first formal compliments were over, I spoke of the Maremme. It is a favorite subject with him, for he has spent immense sums of money to rescue them from the malaria, and do, on that part of the coast, what Peter Leopold did for the now beautiful Val di Chiana. He talked well about it, but it remains still doubtful whether his treasure and labors have not been thrown away. Taking up Dr. Baird's French ‘History of American Temperance Societies,’ he made many inquiries about them; said there was very little intemperance in Tuscany; spoke of spirituous liquor as an unnatural, artificial, noxious beverage, but treated wine, like a true Italian, as a gift of God, and one of the comforts and consolations of life, as healthy, and as nourishing. Coming accidentally upon the subject of the Medici, he spoke with great interest and admiration of Lorenzo; said [90] there were great quantities of his letters on public affairs, and many to his friends, in the archives of the state here, those on public affairs being generally in cipher; that they were almost all written with his own hand; and that Lorenzo was so laborious in his habits, that he had found seventeen such, written in a single day, most of them long, and some important. Of the poetry, he said he had published all he could find, except such portions as were indelicate, which he felt it a duty to suppress; and he ended by saying he should send me a copy of it, having still, he added, two or three left. The whole literary credit of the work he attributed to the Abbe Fiacchi,³ and said he was himself only a collaborator, directed how it should be printed, and that one hundred and fifty copies should be struck off. He intended, after this, to have published the letters of Lorenzo; but just at that moment he came to the government, by the death of his father, and so the project has been given up.

While this conversation was going on the Grand Duchess sent to him twice, to say it was time to go to dinner with Prince Max, . . . . but it was plain he liked to talk about Lorenzo, and he had his talk out. At last, at the end of an hour, he dismissed me in the usual form, and I went to the grounds behind the chateau, where Mrs. T. had been sketching . . . . . Just as we were going to our carriage, the Duke came along on foot, with his secretary. He stopped an instant, and pointed out to us a little villa near, where Varchi lived, and wrote his ‘Istorie Fiorentine’; and then, as the Grand Duchess came by, he got into the carriage with her and drove off.

May 18.—We went to the gallery this morning, and after going for a short time through its principal rooms, . . . . we sat ourselves down to the collection of original drawings by Perugino, Raffaelle, etc., and had a luxurious hour over them . . . . . Afterwards we drove and climbed to San Miniato in Monte, a grand old church long since deserted, where we found old pictures and frescos in abundance, . . . . and a magnificent view of the ever-beautiful valley of the Arno, and the ever-picturesque Florence . . . . . When shall I see the like again?

We dined in the evening at the French Minister's, where everything was as tasteful and as comfortable as possible, and where we met the Belgian Minister, Count Vilain Quatorze, and his wife; the [91] Sardinian, Count Broglia di Monbello; Mr. Abercrombie, son of the Speaker of the House of Commons; the Duke de Dino, Talleyrand's nephew and heir; and two or three other persons. . . . . Mr. Abercrombie, who was formerly at Berlin, talked about the private dislikes of Ancillon and Humboldt in a very amusing manner.

On first leaving Florence for the North, Mr.Ticknor and Mrs. Ticknor made a visit of one night to the Marchea Lenzoni, at her villa at Certaldo.

Just before entering the last [the modern village of Certaldo], the Medici arms, over rather an imposing gateway, informed us that we had reached the villa of the Marchioness Lenzoni, who had invited us to come and pass a day with her, and see whatever remained of Boccaccio's time, all of it being on her estates.

She received us very kindly, and settled us at once in excellent and comfortable rooms. She then sent for her fattore,—or man of business,—for the priest of the place, and for a Florence lawyer, and put us into their hands to show us what we wanted to see in Certaldo, being herself a little indisposed. We passed through the lower village, . . . . and then, climbing a precipitous hill, entered the little nest of stone houses where Boccaccio's fathers lived, and where he himself died and was buried. Everything seemed still to belong to the Middle Ages, so primitive was the look of the houses and the people.

Of Boccaccio's house,—which belongs to Mad. Lenzoni,—there is now remaining a tower, and a series of small rooms running up three stories on each side of it, all most cheerless and uncomfortable, --according to our present standard of comfort,—but truly marking his times. Mad. Lenzoni has put some old furniture in it, the fragments of his tombstone, the early editions of his works, and a very good fresco of Boccaccio himself, by Benvenuti, the best of the living Florentine artists. The whole is in excellent taste, and cared for as such a spot ought to be; Mad. Lenzoni's intention being to fill the principal room with whatever may best serve to recall the memory of the great man who died in it. We went to the church where he lies buried, and where is the tablet he erected to his father; to the vicar's house, which is just as it was in the fourteenth century; and, indeed, walked over most of the little town, and through its precipitous streets, finding everything curious, and very little to remind us of days less recent than Boccaccio's. The views from the top of the tower and from all the heights about are fine. [92]

In the evening we had a specimen of the genuine Italian villeggiatura that was curious. Mad. Lenzoni, as the lady of the land, opens her saloon every evening to all her tenants who are of condition to be received in it; a great pleasure to them, and the only one of the sort, no doubt, that they get in the year. . . . . . As soon as the clock struck eight they appeared; the Florence lawyer, the schoolmaster, the priest of the upper and the priest of the lower villages, the doctor, his wife and her sister. They were all respectable people, who came in their every-day dresses and in the simplest manner, to enjoy themselves at the great lady's conversazione. But it was all done in a very businesslike way. As soon as they came in, two or three packs of well-used cards were produced, and everybody played except Mad. Lenzoni, the doctor,—who from fatigue slept a good deal,—and ourselves. But there was talk enough besides, and things went on evidently according to a very settled system until ten o'clock, when they all went together, . . . . having passed an evening very much to their satisfaction, I think, though one in which not the slightest refreshment was offered to them . . . .

May 21.—Mad. Lenzoni had a good deal of fever in the night, and being too unwell to get up this morning, we took our breakfast by ourselves, and then went to her chamber and made our adieus to the kind old lady in her bed, which was covered with the letters the post had just brought her. . . . .

Few persons visited the old Etruscan and medieval towns in the western part of Tuscany forty years ago; but Mr. Ticknor stopped to enjoy the remarkable and interesting antiquities of San Gimignano and Volterra, and did not reach Pisa until the 23d of May.

Pisa, May 24.—Carmignani, the principal jurist in this part of Italy,—to whom I had a letter,—came to see me this morning. He is about sixty years old, plain in his person, simple in his manners, and very frank in his conversation, at least on political subjects. He was much acquainted with Mazzei, who left him his literary executor; but he does not seem to have valued him very highly, except as an extremely amusing person who had seen much of the world, and passed through a great many remarkable adventures from the time he fled from the Inquisition in Pisa, about 1770, to the time when he quietly returned there in 1800. He died, I think, about [93] 1816. Carmignani readily promised to send me his memoirs and papers to look over, and see what I can find in them . . . .

The evening was made pleasant to us by a visit from Rosini, the author of the ‘Monaca di Monza,’ of ‘Luisa Strozzi,’ etc.,—a round, easy, good-natured, vain, and very agreeable person, about as old as Carmignani; somewhat jealous, as an author, of the reputation of Manzoni, Grossi, and the rest of his successful contemporaries, and extremely frank in suffering it to be seen. He is full of anecdote, and talked about Mad. de Stael and Schlegel at the time they were here in 1815-16, of Manzoni, and of himself. He seems extremely well pleased that the ‘Monaca di Monza’ has gone through eighteen editions, and declares that he is no imitator of Manzoni or anybody else; for that in 1808 he had made collections for an historical romance on the times of Erasmus, in which Lorenzo dea Medici, and the coterie around him at Florence, were to have been introduced; that he showed his materials and his plan to his friends at the time, and went so far as to get a head of Erasmus to be engraved for the frontispiece, but was turned aside from his project by the times and his friends. He talked, too, a good deal of politics, and as freely as Carmignani, but with less discretion and good sense.

May 25.—Carmignani, who cannot receive visits at his house, because it is undergoing great repairs, came to see me again this morning, and sent me Mazzei's Memoirs of himself and a quantity of letters and papers from Franklin, Jefferson, the King of Poland,—Stanislaus, —whose Charge d'affaires he was at Paris, Abbe Mably, John Adams, etc. It all looked very curious, some of it quite piquant; but I could only read a little, for it is a large folio volume of about four hundred closely written pages. What I did read, however, gave me the impression that Mazzei was a mere adventurer.⁴ Carmignani talked very well about him, as well as about everything else. [94]

He [Carmignani] entered into the discussion with Rosini, etc., about the line in Ugolino,—

Poscia, piu chel dolor, pote il digiuno,

but there, I think, he took the wrong side; though with Niccolini, perhaps, he would rather err than go right with Rosini. Both, however, are such good-natured men that their literary difference has not broken their personal good-will.

After he was gone I went to see Rosini, whom I found in a literary chaos of books and manuscripts. He showed me a long poem he is now writing on the war of Russia in 1812; the beginning of a history of painting in Italy, to serve as a pendant to Cicognara's ‘History of Sculpture’; a quantity of odes, sonnets, and other melanges, about all which he talked with the most good-humored vanity; and the first part of a romance on the subject of Ugolino, about which he talked with more reserve, but to which, I suspect, he feels that he intrusts a good deal of his reputation. When we had talked an hour or more, he went out with me, . . . . and to the cathedral, where I left him to hear his mass. But he soon rejoined me in the Campo Santo, and we had an interesting walk round its fine cloisters and by its extraordinary monuments of ancient art, about which he has written so pleasant a book. . . . .

Lucca, May 27.—We had to-day, between Pisa and Lucca, one of the most beautiful, nay, I may say delightful, drives that we have had in Europe; the weather perfectly fine and the country sufficiently broken on our right to be picturesque, while in the plain through which we passed the cultivation was so luxuriant—the trees, the whole way, hung with the young and graceful vines in all the freshness of their spring vegetation—that it seemed as if the entire land had just been arrayed for a fete . . . . . Lucca stands delightfully, in the midst of a plain almost unrivalled for fertility, with hills that surround it in every variety of form and character; . . . . and the rich and exact cultivation comes up to the very walls themselves. . . . . The people, though the population is the most dense in Europe,—being 456 to the square mile for the whole territory,—looked comfortable and well-off, so abundant are the resources of its soil, where to-day we have frequently seen, in the same fields, the olive, the vine, wheat, and sometimes figs, and mulberries for silk cultivation, added . . . . At the old Church of the Dominicans . . . . are two pictures by Fra Bartolomeo,—one the Virgin imploring mercy for the people of Lucca; and the other, God the Father, and St. Mary Magdalene and St. Catherine beatified in his [95] presence. Few works of art by any artist are equal to them. We went twice to see them, and stayed long each time. The cathedral is a grand old building, erected 1060-70. Its front is covered with a rich and gorgeous sculpture of minute labor, . . . . and over the doors are bas-reliefs by John of Pisa, and Nicholas. Inside, not only its bold and solemn style throughout is effective, but there are interesting works of art,—very interesting. A Madonna by Ghirlandajo is excellent; two kneeling angels in marble on the altar of the sacrament, by Civitelli, 1470,—whose works are hardly found except here and in this neighborhood,—and a St. Sebastian, also by him, in 1484, are marvellous for the time when they were produced, and beautiful and full of deep meaning for any age. An altar-piece by John of Bologna, with the figures of the Saviour and St. Peter on one side and Paul of Lucca on the other,⁵ is one of the few satisfying representations of the Saviour I have ever looked upon, or perhaps I should rather say one of the few that do not offend the feelings when you look at it. It is of 1579. . . . . We went, too, to the palace where the Duke of Lucca has, not a large collection of pictures, but an admirable one, distributed through a few beautifully furnished rooms, where they can be seen in good lights and with great comfort. Among them are Raffaelle's Madonna of the Candelabra,—a fine work, but not among his best or purest; Gherardo della Notte's incomparable Christ before Pilate, etc., . . . . really quite an admirable collection. It was the last thing we saw in Lucca, which we left with regret, so beautiful is the situation of the town itself, and so many beautiful things does it contain.

Milan, June 7.—When we were fairly established, I went out to see if I could find some persons whom the cholera had kept out of the city when we were here last autumn; and I was doubly pleased, not only to find the Marquis and Marchioness Litta in their palace, but to learn that Manzoni—who has recently been married again— is still in town; that all the Trotti family are here; and that the Marchioness Arconati is on a visit to them from her exile in Belgium. I therefore went to the Trotti Palace this evening, where I found the old Marquis, above eighty years old, with the Marchioness, almost equally old, surrounded by their children and grandchildren and [96] friends in the happiest and simplest manner. Mad. Litta was there [one of the daughters]; Mad. Arconati [another daughter], always intellectual and agreeable; and several of the friends and relations of Count Confalonieri; and I had a very pleasant visit of one or two hours.

June 10.—. . . . One morning Mad. Arconati, with her brother, the Marquis Trotti, and two or three other persons, took us out to an old and deserted villa of the Marquis Trotti, and showed us there a very large establishment for raising silk-worms, the great staple of this part of Lombardy . . . .

. . . . Two evenings we spent at Manzoni's, whose house is the only one in Milan, I am told, where society is freely received. His wife was ill, and we did not see her, but his venerable mother was there, his daughters, and a few of his friends, the Casatis, Baron Trechi, and some others. Among them was one of Confalonieri's brothers, whom I met at Prince Metternich's last summer. Both evenings were very agreeable, for it was impossible not to feel that the people were kind and good.

Manzoni talked well, and upon subjects where he might have been excused from talking at all, because it would have been no discredit to him to have been ignorant; such as the commercial difficulties in the United States, which he regarded in their most important point of view, their moral effect on the people; the slave question, on which he is a thorough abolitionist, so far as to hold that it is our duty at once to do something which shall insure emancipation at some future time, however remote, so that the principle should be now acknowledged.

Of his timid sensitiveness I have heard many more striking facts: such as, that he does not like to be in any sort of solitude, not even to go alone to say his prayers in church; that he makes no visits, because he does not know whom he may meet, etc. Yet with all this he has a high and even bold sense of duty, and not a little moral courage, maintaining his liberal opinions on all occasions with frankness. His popularity as a writer is extraordinary. Nothing like it has been known in Italy for a century; nor has any man since Alfieri produced so striking an effect on the popular feeling. Traces of the ‘Promessi Sposi’ are found everywhere, from the Pitti Palace where the Grand Duke is having a room painted in fresco with designs from it—to the chintz on the sofas and chairs in the taverns, which are often covered with its story. Of the editions of it there seems to be no end. Meantime, he himself loses nothing either of the [97] simplicity or shyness of his character; and the timidity, which seems to be based in a sort of principle and persuasion with him, is in no degree affected by his fame and success, unless, indeed, it be rather increased by them.

Mad. Arconati, who has been intimate with him from childhood, says he has drawn his own principles and character in the last speech of Adelchi, where he says, among other things in the same tone, that he has lived in a state of the world where it has been necessary either to do or to suffer wrong.

But such evenings as we spent at Manzoni's are spent by few in Milan. The great ambition of the Milanese ladies is to have a fine equipage with which to drive in the beautiful public promenade, and a box at the opera to go to afterwards. We tried them both. We drove with the Littas two evenings, just at sundown and twilight, and saw the fashion of the city, perhaps from two to four hundred equipages, driving round rapidly for a little while in the really noble space arranged for it on the old ramparts, . . . . and then stopping for a little time in the middle, where the gentlemen on horseback and friends on foot or in other carriages come and speak to them. Many of the equipages were very rich and tasteful, . . . . and the whole show was very brilliant and graceful. The last evening we were in Milan we went for an hour to the Marquis Trotti's, and found the same circle of children and friends gathered around the courtly old gentleman that I saw there the first evening. After staying there a little while we went to the opera, for which Mad. Litta had sent us the key to her box . . . .

The interest and enjoyment of two delightful days at Como were much increased by the unexpected presence of Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Robinson for a part of the time. At Bergamo, ‘the birthplace of Bernardo Tasso and of Tiraboschi, and the spot whence comes that peculiar Bergamesque dialect which, in the person of Harlequin or Truffaldino, amuses all Italy,’ another cordial meeting with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Robinson occurred; but after breakfasting together the parties separated, Mr. Wordsworth going to the Lago d'iseo, Mr. Ticknor to the Lago di Garda, promising a reunion at Venice. There our party arrived first, on the 17th of June.

Venice, June 17.—It seemed very strange to us to come into a city so silent and yet so grand; magnificent in its palaces and [98] churches, but looking deserted; with streets of water, over which men glide noiselessly as spectres; . . . . and with houses that seem to have no foundation, as you step in and out of them. . . . . We rowed about in our gondola like Turks, ate ices and drank sherbets in St. Mark's Square with the thousand other gay idlers, . . . . and went home late, only to listen to music from the gondoliers and thoughtless minstrels, who seemed to fill the summer night with their harmony. The whole was purely Venetian. . . . .

June 22.—. . . . We finished the evening, as usual, with a lounge in St. Mark's Square, where we had the pleasure of being joined by Wordsworth and Robinson, who arrived this afternoon, and talked very agreeably of their adventures. They found nobody at Iseo who remembered anything about Lady Mary Montagu's residence at Louvere.⁶

June 23.—. . . . In the evening we had the genuine gondolier music of the country. We procured four or five gondoliers, who went in one gondola, while we went in others, . . . . and embarking just at dark, rowed down the Grand Canal towards the Lagune. As soon as we were fairly in motion they began to sing. They took at first Tasso, and began in a sort of recitative, and in their soft Venetian dialect, to chant the episode of Armida. . . . . They were themselves much excited by it, and stood up and gesticulated as if they were improvisating. At first it did not produce much effect, but the recurrence of the same melody in the recitative soon got the command of our feelings, and it became striking . . . . . Wordsworth, who was with us, enjoyed it very much, and we were all put into a sort of spirit of reverie by it. The gondoliers evidently enjoyed it. . . . . We stopped them at the end of an hour and asked them for some of their national airs. With these, too, they were quite ready, and sang a great many of them, intermingling them occasionally with parts of operas, which the whole of them sang with much spirit. It was a beautiful evening, and we rowed about, over towards the Lido . . till after eleven o'clock. . . . .

June 24.—We passed almost a long day in the Doge's Palace, giving it entirely to the pictures there, which seem the more astonishing and admirable the more we see them. At two o'clock we saw the [99] doves fed. . . . Wordsworth was with us in the evening, and we had an excellent dish of talk. . . . .

June 26.—We left Venice this morning with less reluctance than we otherwise should have done, if the weather had not of late been so warm that we begin to be impatient to get into the mountains, where we have the project of making, in company with Gray and Cogswell, a somewhat long and whimsical, but as we hope agreeable journey of a few weeks. . . .

The ‘whimsical journey’ was, in fact, a voyage en zigzag through different passes of the Alps; out of Italy by the Brenner; in again over the Stelvio, and down the lovely Valtelline to the Lake of Como; out once more by the Spluegen; through the Via Mala and over the Arlberg to Innsbruck,—a course suggested by Mr. Wordsworth as the best way of seeing and enjoying the Alps. Mr. Ticknor reviews the experiences of these three weeks as follows:—

Innsbruck, July 16.—. . . . I do not know that we could have done more in the same time to see what is grand and solemn, or graceful and gentle, in the valleys and mountain-passes of the North of Italy, the Tyrol, and the portions of Switzerland we did not visit last year . . . . I feel, indeed, now as if I were well enough acquainted with the mountain-country between Vienna and Marseilles; for with our visits to Upper Austria and Switzerland last summer, added to my former passages of the St. Bernard and the Maritime Alps on horseback, I have made seven passages of the Alps,—namely, part of the Brenner, the whole of the Stelvio, the Splu:;gen, the Arlberg, the Simplon, the St. Bernard, and the Corniche,—and seen all the principal lakes, mountains, and valleys on each side of them. Of all this, the lakes of Upper Austria are the most winning and satisfying as lakes, except the Lake of Como, which is of the same sort; the Tyrol is the most picturesque country, and its people, their costumes and houses, the most curious and striking; the Ortler Spitz, the Jungfrau, and the Mont Blanc are the grandest of the mountains; the Valtelline and the valley of the Inn the loveliest of valleys and at the same time the grandest; the Mandatsch Glacier the most solemn of the glaciers, and next after this, the Glacier of Grindelwald and the Mer de Glace. . . . .

After a week at Munich—where they again met Mr. Wordsworth [100] and Mr. Robinson–they parted not only from these English friends, but from their Boston fellow-travellers, Gray, Cogswell, and Ward, and went on to Heidelberg, where they remained nearly four weeks, ‘as a pause and rest after just three months of uninterrupted travelling and sight-seeing.’ Of his acquaintance and interests there, Mr. Ticknor writes thus:—

Creuzer, the classical scholar, whom I knew here twenty years ago, seemed to me little changed. Schlosser, the historian, is in manner just what his books might lead one to suppose,—decided, and a little bruyant, strong and genial, if not good-natured. He lives quite by himself, and is probably the most quarrelsome of the very quarrelsome professors here; but to me, who entered into none of their manifold feuds, he was pleasant.

Ullmann, the principal theological professor, is a quiet little man, with a good deal of knowledge in elegant literature, who was very much disposed to be useful to me, and at whose house I met agreeable people, more luxuriously entertained than is common in professors' houses in Germany.

But Mittermaier, a man just fifty years old, is more a man of the world, notwithstanding his great learning, than any of them. He is President of the Chamber of Deputies in Baden, and therefore a man of a good deal of political consequence in this part of Germany; and his frank and popular manners form rather a striking contrast to those of his caste generally. Besides this, however, he is a laborious and successful professor, and his works on the criminal law have given him reputation throughout Europe. His house is probably the most agreeable, for personal intercourse, in Heidelberg, since there is a greater variety of persons found there than is found elsewhere. . . . .

In all these families intercourse was simple, according to the German notions of simplicity; but in all of them—except Ullmann's— the ladies of the family seemed to have a good deal of the household work to perform. At Mittermaier's, in particular, it was curious to see the daughters bring in the evening lights, and set and serve two rather large supper-tables, assisted by a single waiting-girl.

We knew, too, the old Baron Malchus and his daughter. The old gentleman was Minister of Finance to Jerome Bonaparte when he was King of Westphalia, and afterwards to the King of Wurtemberg; and he used to make us rather long visits, and talk, much at large, of the days of his power and dignity. I have seldom found a person who had such an immense mass of statistical details in his [101] head, and as he has kept up a good deal of intimacy and influence, with not only the Bonapartes, but the Wurtembergers, since his abdication of public affairs, he has a great deal of pleasant and useful matter-of-fact conversation. Some of his accounts of the Bonapartes, of their present state and condition, . . . . showed how completely this great family has come to point a moral and adorn a tale; how completely it has sunk beneath the fears of the potentates whom it formerly displaced from their thrones, and treated as puppets and slaves.

Our most agreeable acquaintance, however, was the family of the Marquis Arconati, who has taken a house at Heidelberg for the summer, to be near his only child, who is at the University here. They came to see us, with Berchet, the morning after our arrival, and during our whole visit treated us as old friends. It was a great pleasure to us, for Mad. Arconati has few equals, among her sex, for intelligence and a perfectly uniform and simple elegance of manners. We dined with them twice, and were much with them besides, and count upon the pleasure of meeting them again in Paris. At their house we met Quinet, who, I hear,—for the first time,—is to be numbered among the living French poets of some note; a man about five-and-thirty, with a good deal of self-sufficiency; au reste, with something epigrammatic and smart in his conversation. . . . .

On the way to Paris in the autumn,—having left Heidelberg on the 24th of August,—the party stopped at Frankfort and Wiesbaden. At Bonn,—

I had an agreeable meeting with my old friend Welcker, kind and learned as ever, liberal in his politics, so as to be obnoxious to the Prussian government, but so true and honest in his character that no government ought to fear or dislike him. A part of the evening I spent with August von Schlegel, where I met Tourgueneff, a learned Russian, Secretary of the St. Petersburg Academy, and a great admirer of Dr. Channing. It was very agreeable, but Schlegel in his old age is more of a fat than ever. He can talk with comfort of nothing but himself.