I gazed with the awe due
to a great man whose name is known to all the cultured world; and to me
much more than the name; for I had read, as before mentioned, his "Life
of Jesus" when I first went to Princeton.

Dr. Kerner took to me greatly, and said that I very much reminded him, in
appearance and conversation, of what his most intimate friend, Ludwig
Uhland, had been at my age; and as he repeated this several times, and
spoke of it long after to friends, I think it must have been true,
although I am compelled to admit that people who pride themselves on
looking like this or that celebrity never resemble him in the least,
mentally or spiritually, and are generally only mere caricatures at best.

On our return we climbed into an old Gothic church-tower, in which I
found a fifteenth-century bell, bearing the words, _Vivas voco_, _mortuos
plango_, _fulgura_ _frango_, and much more--

"The dead I knell, the living wake,
And the power of lightning break!"

which caused me to reflect on the vast degree to which all the minor uses
and observances of the Church--which are nine-tenths of all their
religion to the multitude--were only old heathen superstitious in new
dresses. The bell was a spell against the demons of lightning in old
Etrurian days; to this time the Tuscan peasant bears one in the darkening
twilight-tide to drive away the witches flitting round: in him and them
"those evening bells" inspired a deeper sentiment than poetry.

In a village, Rucker, finding the beer very good, bought a cask of it,
which was put on board the little Neckar steamboat on which we returned
to Heidelberg. And thus provided, the next evening he gave a "barty" up
in the old castle, among the ruins by moonlight, where I "assisted," and
the _lager_ was devoured, even to the last drop.

I soon grew tired of the family dinners with the Frau Inspectorinn and
the Herr Inspector with the _one_ tumbler of Neckar wine, which I was
expected not to exceed; so I removed my dining to the "Court of Holland,"
a first-class hotel, where O. and the other Americans met, and where the
expectation was not that a man should by any means limit himself to one
glass, but that, taking at least one to begin with, he should
considerably exceed it. This hotel was kept by a man named Spitz, who
looked his name to perfection.

"Er spitzt betrubt die Nase,"

as Scheffel wrote of him in his poem, _Numero Acht_, the scene of which
is laid in the "Cou