Conclusion

With this legend we close on a brighter and more hopeful note than is usually associated with legends of the Rhine. The reader may have observed in perusing these romances how closely they mirror their several environments. For the most part those which are gay and buoyant in spirit have for the places of their birth slopes where is prisoned the sunshine which later sparkles in the wine-cup and inspires song and cheerfulness. Those, again, which are sombre and tragic have as background the gloomy forest, the dark and windy promontory which overhangs the darker river, or the secluded nunnery. In such surroundings is fostered the germ of tragedy, that feeling of the inevitable which is inherent in all great literature. It is to a tragic imagination of a lofty type that we are indebted for the greatest of these legends, and he who cannot appreciate their background of gloomy grandeur will never come at the true spirit of that mighty literature of Germany, at once the joy and the despair of all who know it.

Countless songs, warlike and tender, sad and passionate, have been penned on the river whose deathless tales we have been privileged to display to the reader. But no such strains of regret upon abandoning its shores have been sung as those which passed the lips of the English poet, Byron, and it is fitting that this book should end with lines so appropriate:

     Adieu to thee, fair Rhine! How long delighted
     The stranger fain would linger on his way!
     Thine is a scene alike where souls united
     Or lonely Contemplation thus might stray;
     And could the ceaseless vultures cease to prey
     On self-condemning bosoms, it were here,
     Where Nature, nor too sombre nor too gay,
     Wild but not rude, awful yet not austere,
     Is to the mellow Earth as Autumn to the year.

     Adieu to thee again! a vain adieu!
     There can be no farewell to scene like thine;
     The mind is colour’d by thy every hue;
     And if reluctantly the eyes resign
     Their cherish’d gaze upon thee, lovely Rhine!
     ’Tis with the thankful heart of parting praise;
     More mighty spots may rise, more glaring shine,
     But none unite in one attaching maze
     The brilliant, fair, and soft,—the glories of old days.

     The negligently grand, the fruitful bloom
     Of coming ripeness, the white city’s sheen,
     The rolling stream, the precipice’s gloom,
     The forest’s growth, and Gothic walls between,
     The wild rocks shaped as they had turrets been,
     In mockery of man’s art: and there withal
     A race of faces happy as the scene,
     Whose fertile bounties here extend to all,
     Still springing o’er thy banks, though Empires near them fall.