and his
companions--visitors naturally conspicuous, amid the crowd of peasants
around them--and for some hours was upon their traces. After unclean
town streets the country air was a perfume by contrast, or actually
scented with pinewoods. One seemed to breathe with it fancies of the
woods, the hills, and water--of a sort of souls in the landscape, but
cheerful and genial now, happy souls! A distant group of pines on the
verge of a great upland awoke a violent desire to be there--seemed to
challenge one to proceed thither. Was their infinite view thence? It
was like an outpost of some far-off fancy land, a pledge of the reality
of such. Above Cassel, the airy hills curved in one black outline
against a glowing sky, pregnant, one could fancy, with weird forms,
which might be at their old diableries again on those remote places ere
night was quite come there. At last in the streets, the hundred
churches, of Cologne, he feels something of a "Gothic" enthusiasm, and
all a German's enthusiasm for the Rhine.

Through the length and breadth of the Rhine country the vintage was
begun. The red ruins on the heights, the white-walled villages, white
[143] Saint Nepomuc upon the bridges, were but isolated high notes of
contrast in a landscape, sleepy and indistinct under the flood of
sunshine, with a headiness in it like that of must, of the new wine.
The noise of the vineyards came through the lovely haze, still, at
times, with the sharp sound of a bell--death-bell, perhaps, or only a
crazy summons to the vintagers. And amid those broad, willowy reaches
of the Rhine at length, from Bingen to Mannheim, where the brown hills
wander into airy, blue distance, like a little picture of paradise, he
felt that France was at hand. Before him lay the road thither, easy
and straight.--That well of light so close! But, unexpectedly, the
capricious incidence of his own humour with the opportunity did not
suggest, as he would have wagered it must, "Go, drink at once!" Was it
that France had come to be of no account at all, in comparison of
Italy, of Greece? or that, as he passed over the German land, the
conviction had come, "For you, France, Italy, Hellas, is here!"--that
some recognition of the untried spiritual possibilities of meek Germany
had for Carl transferred the ideal land out of space beyond the Alps or
the Rhine, into future time, whither he must be the leader? A little
chilly of humour, in spite of his manly strength, he