Kitabı oku: «Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864», sayfa 12
Some specimens of the Anastatica have been carried to this country by travellers. One, in the cabinet of Fisher Howe, Esq., of Brooklyn, and brought by him from Jericho fourteen years ago, still retains its remarkable habit; and another, older still, is in the possession of Dr. Eames.
Among the plants which exhibit curious phases of hygrometric action might be cited some of the Fig Marigolds (Mesembryanthemum); also the Scaly Club Moss (Lycopodium). The latter, after being thoroughly withered, will, if laid in water, gradually expand, turn green, and assume the appearance of a thriving plant. When again dried, it becomes a brown, shrunken mass, capable, however, of being revived ad libitum.
Some species of Fungi also exhibit a similar property—and all have observed with what promptitude the various pine and larch cones cover their seed in a storm, or even when it 'looks like rain.' I remember being once not a little puzzled in trying to open a drawer that some weeks before had been filled with damp pine cones. Upon becoming dry, each individual had attempted a humble imitation of the genii in the 'Arabian Nights,' expanding to its fullest extent, only to be subjugated by being cast again into the water.
Some of the Algæ exhibit properties similar to that of the Club Moss; and a marine plant known as the Californian Rock-rose is still more curious. Clinging closely to the rocks, and feeding upon some invisible debris, or, like certain orchids, drawing its sustenance from the air (for the rocks upon which it grows, sometimes are lifted far above the water), it attains an enormous size, being in some instances as large as a bushel basket. It is not without a certain jagged beauty of contour, resembling, more than anything else, clusters of Arbor Vitæ branches cut out of wet leather, and meeting in the centre. Once torn from its stony bed, the Rock-rose curls up into an apparently tangled mass of network, having the general outline of a rose, but it will at any time, upon being immersed in water, assume its original appearance. I have seen a fine specimen of this plant open and close, for the hundredth time, years after it had been taken from the rock.
The Hygrometric Ground Star (Geastrum hygrometricum), found in many portions of Europe, is well known; nearer home, we have a variety (Geastrum Saratogensis) differing in some respects from its transatlantic relative, which is of a warm brown color, and flourishes in gravelly soil.
The American variety grows abundantly in the drifting sands of Saratoga County, N. Y. It has no stem or root, excepting here and there a fine capillary fibre by which it clings to the ground. When dry, it contracts to a perfect sphere, is rolled by the wind across the sand, and (according to the account given by Dr. Asa Fitch, who has had a specimen in his possession for twenty years) shakes a few seeds from the orifice at its summit at each revolution. This seed ball also possesses the power of opening when moistened, changing its spherical form to that of an open flower about two inches in diameter. When opened, it displays eight elliptical divisions, resembling petals. These are white as snow on the inside, and traversed by a network of small irregular cracks, while their outer surface resembles kid leather, both in color and texture.
The Ground Star differs in habit from the 'Resurrection Flower,' which never yields its seed unless expanded by moisture (if Dr. Deck's theory be correct), and is not nearly as intricate or beautiful in construction as the oriental relic. Indeed, to this day, the 'Resurrection Flower,' as one must call it for want of a better name, remains without a known rival in the botanical world. From time to time, brief notices concerning it have been published; and where writers, sometimes without having seen the original, have claimed the knowledge or possession of similar specimens, they have become convinced of their mistake on personal inspection. Even the plants alluded to in a short account, given eight years ago, in a leading New York periodical, as being the same as the 'Resurrection Flower,' proved, on comparison by Dr. Eames, to be entirely different.
Although it is by no means certain that the plant in Baron Humboldt's collection, and that owned by Dr Eames, are the only individuals of their kind in existence, the fact of their great rarity is well established. As far as I have been able to ascertain, there is but one 'Resurrection Flower' in America.
That new plants might be obtained from this lonely representative of its race few can doubt; but to this day the germs exposed so temptingly at each awakening, have never been removed. Old as it is, it has never done its work, the only seeds it has sown being those of inquiry and adoration in the minds of all who have witnessed its marvellous powers.
Whether the pretty oriental tale of its origin be true or not—and it requires an oriental faith to believe it in the face of contradictory evidence—none can gaze upon that little emblem of 'Life in Death'—so homely and frail, and yet so beautiful and so eternal—without peculiar emotion.
What drooping, weary soul, parched with the dust of earth, but sometimes longs to be forever steeped in that great Love in which it may expand and bloom—casting its treasures upon Heavenly soil,—and glowing evermore with the radiance of the Awakening.
RECOGNITION
Now in the chambers of my heart is day,
And form and order. A most sacred guest
Is come therein, and at his high behest
Beauty and Light, who his calm glance obey,
Flew to prepare them for his regal sway.
Now solitude I seek, which once, possessed,
I fled; now, solitude to me is blessed,
Wherein I hearken Love's mysterious lay,
And hold with thee communion in my heart.
That thou art beautiful, thou who art mine—
That with thy beauty, Beauty's soul divine
Has filled my soul, I muse upon apart.
In the blue dome of Heaven's eternity,
Rising I seem upborne by thoughts of thee.
THE SEVEN-HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY OF A GERMAN CAPITAL
Most of our countrymen look upon Germany as all one. The varieties of outlandish customs, costumes, and dialects observed among our emigrant population from that land are little noticed, and never regarded as marking districts of the fatherland from which they severally sprung. One of the most fruitful themes of pleasant humor and biting sarcasm in our periodical literature and in the popular mouth, is the ignorance betrayed by enlightened foreigners, and especially foreign journalists, in regard to the geography of our country; as though America were, par excellence, THE land, and on whatever other subject the world might, without meriting our contempt, fail to inform itself, our country, not only in its glorious history and more glorious destiny, but in the minuter details of the picture, must be understood and acknowledged. This charge of ignorance is not unfounded. Often have I been not a little amused when an intelligent German has inquired of me as a New Yorker, with the sure hope of news from his friend in Panama, or another to learn how he might collect a debt from a merchant at Valparaiso, or a third to be informed why he received no answers to letters addressed to friends in Cuba, and so on. But if the tables were turned upon us, there is no point on which we should be found open to a more fearful retribution than on this. I know an American gentleman of education—and he told me the story himself—who applied at Washington for letters to our diplomatic representatives in Europe, and who had sufficiently informed himself to be on the point of sailing for several years' residence abroad, and still, when letters were handed him for our consul-general at Frankfort and our minister in Prussia, asked, with no little concern, whether a letter to our minister in Germany could not be given him. I knew a correspondent of a New York journal fearfully to scourge a distinguished German for his ignorance of American geography. The same person, after months of residence in Munich, having about exhausted the resources which it offered him for his correspondence, gave a somewhat detailed account of the affairs of Greece, in which he referred to King Otho as brother of King Lewis of Bavaria, although almost any peasant could have told him that the latter was father to the former.
Indeed, there is nothing strange about this, unless it be that any one should deem himself quite above the class of blunders which he satirizes. It is less to be wondered at that one should continue to hurl his satiric javelins at those who commit the same class of errors with himself, since he seldom becomes aware of his own ridiculous mistakes. In regard to Germany, our people know but its grand divisions and its large cities; and of its people among us but their exterior distinctions, and mainly those offered to the eye, arrest attention. We meet them as servants or employés in kitchens, shops, and gardens, and on farms, or as neighbors, competitors, or associates in business. At evening we separate, and they go to their own domestic or social circles, where alone the native character speaks itself freely forth in the native language and dialect. There only the homebred wit and humor freely flow and flash. There the half-forgotten legends and superstitions, the utterance of which to other ears than those of their own people is forbidden—perhaps by a slight sense of shame, perhaps by the utter failure of language,—together with the pastimes and adventures of their native villages or districts, are arrested in their rapid progress to oblivion, as they are occasionally called forth to amuse the dull hours or lighten the heavy ones of a home-sick life in a foreign land. Could we but half enter into the hearts of the peasant Germans who move among us, and are by some regarded as scarcely raised in refinement and sensibility above the rank of the more polished domestic animals of our own great and enlightened land, we should often find them replete with the choicest elements of the truly epic, the comic, and the tragic.
How seldom do the people of different lands and languages learn to understand each other—become so well acquainted as to appreciate each other's most engaging traits? The German emigrant seeks a home among us, and desires to identify himself with us. The costume of his native district is thrown off as soon as he needs a new garment, often much sooner. His language is laid aside except for domestic use and certain social and business purposes, as soon as he has a few words of ours. These words serve the ends of business, and rarely does he ever learn enough for any other purpose. The other parts of the man remain concealed from our view. He is to us a pure utilitarian of the grossest school. His pipe suspended from his mouth, his whole time given to his shop, his farm, or his garden, and to certain amusements unknown to us, he is deemed to vegetate much like the plants he grows, or to live a life on the same level with that of the animal he feeds, incapable of appreciating those higher and more refined pleasures to which we have risen—in other words, the true type of dulness and coarseness. An intelligent Welshman once told me that he could not talk religion in English nor politics in Welsh. So with the Germans among us. Their business and politics learn to put themselves into English, their religious, domestic, and social being remains forever shut up in the enclosure of their mother tongue, and from this we rashly judge that what they express is all there is of them. We have never considered the difficulty of transferring all the utterances of humanity from their first and native mediums to foreign ones. It is easy to learn the daily wants of life or the formal details of business in a new language. Here words have a uniform sense. But the nice shades and turns of thought which appear in the happiest and most delicate jets of wit and humor, and which form the great staples of pleasant social intercourse, depend upon those subtile discriminations in the sense of words which are rarely acquired by foreigners. One may have all the words of a language and not be able to understand them in sallies of wit. How nicely adjusted then must be the scales which weigh out the innumerable and delicate bits of pleasantry which give the charm to social life! The words to relate the legends connected with the knights and castles of chivalry, saints, witches, elves, spooks, and gypsies, the foreigners among us never acquire, or at least never so as to have the ready and delicate use of them in social life, until their foreign character has become quite absorbed in the fully developed American, and the taste, if not the material for picturing the customs and legends of the fatherland are forever gone.
It is mainly North Germany with whose institutions we have become more or less familiar through our newspaper literature, and the numbers of students who have from time to time gone thither for educational purposes. Some acquaintance has also been made with Baden and Wirtemberg, in South Germany, as these principalities have a population mainly Protestant; and Heidelberg, at least, has been a favorite resort for American students. But the same is not true of Catholic South Germany. Munich's collections and institutions of art—mainly the work of the late and still living King Lewis I.—have, indeed, become generally known. Mary Howitt, in her 'Art Student in Munich,' has given us some graphic delineations of life there. The talented and witty Baroness Tautphoens has done us still better service in her 'Initials' and 'Quits,' in relation both to life in the capital and in the mountains; yet the character, institutions, and customs of the people remain an almost unexplored field to the American reader.
In the middle of the twelfth century Munich was still an insignificant village on the Isar, and had not even been erected into a separate parish. About this time Henry the Lion added to his duchy of Saxony, that of Bavaria, and having destroyed the old town of Foehring, which lay a little below the site of Munich on the other side of the river, transferred to the latter place the market and the collection of the customs, which had till then been held by the bishops of Freising with the imperial consent. The emperor Frederic I., in the year 1158, confirmed, against the remonstrances of Bishop Otho I., the doings of Henry. The duke hastened to surround the village with a wall and moat to afford protection to those who might choose to settle there, and in twenty years it had become a city. But the duke fell into disgrace with the emperor, and the latter revoked the rights he had granted; but this was like taking back a slander which had already been circulated. The effect had been produced. Munich was to become a capital.
Bishop Otho's successor would gladly have destroyed the infant city and the bridge which had been the making of it. In consequence, however, of his early death, this beneficent purpose toward his see of Freising remained unexecuted. The next successor continued the same policy. He built a castle with the design of seizing the trading trains which should take the road to Munich, perhaps deeming this the best way of magnifying his office as a leader in the church militant. But before he could achieve his purpose of cutting off all supplies from the rival town, and turning trade and tribute all to his own place, a new defender of the rising city had sprung up in the house of Wittelsbocher—the same which still reigns over the kingdom of Bavaria,—and the matter of the feud was finally adjusted by the quiet surrender of the bridge and the tolls to the city.
The imperial decree, therefore, of 1158, must be regarded as having laid the foundation of Munich as a city, and accordingly the seven hundredth anniversary of its founding was celebrated in the year 1858. I shall place a notice of this fête at the head of the list of those which occurred during my residence in that capital.
It was a part of the plan that the ceremony of laying the foundation of a new bridge over the Isar should be performed by the king. This was deemed specially appropriate, because the springing up of the city had depended upon a bridge over the river to draw thither the trade which had gone to the old Freising. This occurred on Sunday, and I did not see it. I never heard, however, but that his majesty acquitted himself as well in this stone mason's work as he does in the affairs of court or state—just as well, perhaps, as one of our more democratic Chief Magistrates, accustomed to splitting rails or other kinds of manual labor, would have done. I took a walk with my children at evening, and met the long line of court carriages returning, followed by a procession on foot, the archbishop, with some church dignitaries, walking under a canopy and distributing, by a wave of the hand at each step of his progress, his blessing to the crowds which thronged both sides of the broad street. Some, perhaps, prized this more than we did, but I do not suppose that there was anything in the nature of the blessing or in the will of the benevolent prelate to turn it from our heretical heads.
The other parts of this celebration consisted in dinners, plays in the theatres, a meeting at the Rathhaus, at which were read papers on the development of Munich for the seven hundred years of its existence, and a procession, the whole occupying about a week. I shall only notice specially the procession, and in connection with it the art exhibition for all Germany, which closed at the same time, having been in progress for three months; for the two greatly contributed to each other.
The illustrated weekly, published at Stuttgart by the well-known novelist Hacklaender, under the title of Ueber Land und Meer, refers to these festivities in the following terms:
'Munich, the South German metropolis of art, was, during the closing days of September, transformed into a festive city. The German artists had assembled from all parts of the country, that they might, within those walls, charmed by the genius of the muses, wander through the halls in which the academy had collected the best works of German art, and take counsel upon the common interests, as they had formerly done at Bingen and Stuttgart. The artists and the magistracy vied with each other in preparing happy days for the visitors—an emulation which was crowned with the most delightful results. The artists' festival, however, was but the harbinger to the the city of the great seventh centennial birthday festival of the Bavarian capital, which had been so long in preparation, and was waited for with such impatience. Concerts and theatres opened the festal series. Services in all the churches of both confessions consecrated the coming days, and the laying of the foundation of the new bridge over the Isar, leading to the Maximilianeum, formed, historically, a monumental memorial for the occasion. Favored by the fairest of weather, the city celebrated the main festival on the 27th of September. It was a historical procession, moved through all the principal streets of the city, and caused departed centuries to pass in full life before the eyes of the citizens and the vast assemblage of strangers there present. It was no masquerade, but a true picture of the civilization of the city, from its first appearance in history to the present day—'a mirrored image,' says a chronicler of the festival, 'of times long since gone by.
'The twelfth century opened the procession—representations of the present time in science, art, and industry, as developed under the reigns of Lewis and Maximilian, which have been so promotive of all that is great, closed it up. But one voice was heard in regard to the success of this festival.'
The plan was to let representatives of the people for this whole period of seven hundred years pass before the eyes of the spectators in the fashions and costumes of their respective ages, bearing the implements or badges of their several guilds or professions. The preparation had been begun months beforehand. Artists had been employed to sketch designs. The best had been selected. The costumes were historical. We see sometimes in every part of our country, costumes extemporized from garrets for old folks' concerts and other like occasions, but generally they do not correspond with each other, or with the performances. The result is committed to accident. The actors wear what their meagre wardrobes of the antique furnish. The wider the divergence from present fashions the better. Chance may bring together the styles of a dozen successive periods, and render the whole without coherence. In such an exhibition our interest is felt simply in the grotesque. It shows us how a countenance familiar to us is set off by a strange and outlandish costume. It represents no history. Such was not this procession. Its front had twelfth century costumes of peasants, burghers, and even the ducal family. So down to the very day of the festival; for statues of the present royal family on open cars closed up the long line. It did not seem indeed quite right that the successive ages of the dead should pass before us living, and the living age alone lifeless. In one part of the procession was an imperial carriage of state drawn by six horses, a man in livery leading each horse, with all the necessary footmen, outriders, and outrunners. The whole was antiquity and novelty happily combined. The costumes and insignia of all classes, with the tools and implements of all handicrafts, from the day when Duke Henry and Bishop Otho, seven hundred years before, had had their petty bickerings about the tolls of a paltry village, down to the present day, the whole transformed into a living panorama, and made to pass in about four hours before the eye.
To set forth great things by small, a bridal pair remove from the East and settle in our Western wilds. In a score of years they return to their native place, wearing the very garments in which they had stood up and been pronounced husband and wife. The picture is equal to a volume of history and one of comedy, the two bound in one. But here, instead of a score of years we have a score of ages, reaching back to a period farther beyond that great popular movement in which modern society had its birth, than that is anterior to our own age. If all the costumes, fashions, implements, and tools of the house, the shop, and the field, insignia and liveries, from those of the first Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, down to those of New York's belles, beaux, and beggars of the present day, should be made to pass in review before us, how absurdly grotesque would be the scene! That veritable 'History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrick Knickerbocker,' has perhaps shaken as many sides and helped digest as many dinners as almost any book since Cervantes gave the world his account of the adventures of his knight Don Quixote, and yet this great historical work hints but a part of that picture, though doubtless greatly improved by the author's delicate touches, which would pass before us in a procession illustrating two centuries of New York's history. Using such hints, the reader may partially judge of the impression made by this setting forth of seven centuries of a capital of Central Europe, and yet one can hardly tell, without the trial, whether he would rather smile at the grotesqueness of the pageant, or be lost in the profound contemplation of the magnificent march of history reënacted in this drama.
This procession spoke but to the eye. It was but a tableau, dumb, though in its way eloquent. It detailed no actions; it only hinted them. It simply presented the men who acted, clad in the outward garb, and bearing the tools and weapons of their day. The cut of a garment, the form of a helmet or halberd, a saddle or a semitar, a hoe or a hatchet, or the cut of the hair or the beard, may speak of the heart and soul, only, however, by distant hints. But just as the representation is less distinct and detailed, is it a mightier lever for imagination to use in raising again to life centuries which had long slept in the dust. The superstructure of history, indeed, which we should rear upon such a basis, would be wide of the truth on one side, just as the narratives and philosophical disquisitions which come to us under that name are on the other. History generally relates those things in which all ages have been most alike—the same which have 'been from the beginning and ever shall be'—the intrigues of courts and of diplomacy—varied mainly by the influence of the religion of the Bible, as at first persecuted, then rising by degrees to a rank either with or above the state, and becoming a persecuting power, and then finally modifying and softening down the native rudeness of the human race, until mutual and universal tolerance is the result; court life, diplomacy, and war, however, remaining and still to remain the perpetual subjects of historical composition. But between this elevated range and the humble one of burghers' tools and costumes, lies a boundless field of aspect, variegated with all the forms which checker social and domestic life. Oh!—thought a little group of American spectators occupying a room near the corner of Ludwig and Theresien streets—could we but rend the veil of time which conceals Munich's seven hundred years of burgher and peasant life, how odd, how rude a scene would present itself! The reader's fancy may make the attempt. I will aid a little if I can, and there was indeed some material furnished in addresses prepared for that occasion, and in some other papers which have come into my hands.
The people of that little village on the banks of the Isar were but the owners and tillers of the barren soil. Nearly a century (1238) after Henry the Lion had surrounded it with walls, and a local magistracy had been chosen; when two parishes—those of St. Peter and St. Mary—had been already long established, we find a schoolmaster signing, doubtless by virtue of his office, a certificate of the freedom of a certain monastery from the city customs. That the school teacher must, ex officio, sign such papers, spoke volumes. How few could have had the learning, for it must indeed be done in Latin. And then the history of the city runs nearly a century back of this date. What was the burgher life of that first century of Munich's history? It is but the faintest echo that answers. Schools there were at that day and long before. Nay, the cloister schools were already in decay; but more than three hundred years were yet to elapse before the rise of the Jesuit schools. Three hundred years! How can we, of this age of steam, estimate what was slowly revolving in society in those years? In 1271 we find an order of the bishop of Freising requiring the parish rector to have a school in each parish of the city; half a century later than this we meet documentary evidence that school teaching had assumed a rank with other worldly occupations, and was no longer subject to the rector of the parish. If I could but set the reader down in a school room of that day, I might forego any attempt to portray the times; but, alas! I cannot. He would, however, doubtless see there groups of boys—for I half suspect that this was before girls had generally developed the capability of learning—the faces and garments clean or smutty, showing the grade of social progress which had been gained, for we may presume that the use of soap and water had been to some extent introduced, and if so, I have erred again, for the dirty and the ragged did not go to school. These could do without education. We should see, too, the beaming or the dull and leaden eye—if, indeed, the eye spoke then as now—proclaiming the master's success or failure. And then the schoolmaster, the chief figure in the group, would be found to have the otium cum dignitate, and especially the former, in a higher sense than is now known. And what was the staple information which circulated among the people? Of this we know more. It was made up of adventures of knights, miracles wrought by the host, by crucifixes and Madonnas, and apparitions of saints, leading some emperor or prince to found a church or monastery—a kind of history which few churches or other religious institutions want. If there was less of life in the humanity of that age than we have at present, there was as much more in other things; for even those holy pictures and statues could move their eyes and other parts. They found various ways of expressing approbation of the pious, and frowning upon scoffers. Crucifixes and Madonnas, carried by freshets over barren fields, brought fertility. The devil, too, figured more largely in the narratives of days before printed books formed the basis of education. He generally appeared in the persons of giants and witches, which latter were his agents by special contract. Their freaks had all shades of enormity, from the slight teasing of the housewife in her baking and churning to the peril of life and limb and endless perdition. The devil sometimes coming in one of these forms endangered the lives of the quiet people of the city by formally dismissing the watch between the hours of eleven and twelve o'clock at night. So hundreds of things which he has become too genteel in our day to practise.
The founding of the city was near the close of that great movement known as the crusades. What a world of material these furnished to be used in popular education! The feats of knights, instead of assuming distinct forms and being stereotyped and told to them in books, were surrendered to the popular mouth for preservation and propagation. Saints, angels, and demons attached themselves from time to time to these circulating myths. Original characters often dropped out, and the discrimination of the wisest believer in the real and ideal, became confused. Then came the period of the Hussite war. This gave rise to many a miracle of divine judgment. The Bohemian mocker of the holy mass, or of some wonder-working statue of the Virgin, is pursued with divine vengeance. The Jews—how suggestive the name, in the history of mediæval Europe, of mystery, miracle, and murder!—were early allowed to settle in Munich. They were assigned to a particular street. In the year 1285 a story was started—it had been long stereotyped, and editions of it circulated in every part of Christendom—of the murder of a Christian child. A persecution of the Jews was the result—one hundred and forty were burned in their own houses—and the poor Israelites must doubtless suffer without redress, although many of them were then, as they now are, bankers and brokers to the spiritual and temporal lords. Not far from the same time the ducal mint was destroyed, because the people were enraged to find the metal in their coin growing alarmingly less. For this the city must pay a fine.
