XX

ROYAL DUTIES AND INTERESTS

BEING at Lowther Lodge on the 21st of May, I was sent for by the Crown Princess of Germany, who was most kind and gracious. “I have read all your books. I always buy them as soon as ever they come out, and I have so much wished to see you.” She told me that she had been to Hurstmonceaux to visit my mother’s grave, and that she had one of her strong presentiments as to the place coming back into our family, adding, “And I do so hope it will.” She talked of the dear Madame de Bunsen with the greatest affection, and then of the many branches of the Bunsen family. When my little audience of about ten minutes was over, she said with great sweetness, “I am afraid I am keeping you much too long from all your other friends.” She pressed me to come to stay with her at Potsdam. I said that I was going to Berlin to visit the Bunsens. She said, “Oh, but you must come to me; I can show quite as many things, and I can certainly show you a great many more people than the Bunsens can.” I said that I feared my visit to Berlin would be during her approaching absence in Switzerland. She said, “Well, you can go to the Bunsens in the summer when I am away, and then in the winter you can come again to see me: Berlin is not so very far off.”

As spring advanced my Life of the Baroness Bunsen was so far completed as to be ready for the inspection of her children. I therefore decided to take it to them in Germany. Feeling how impossible it would be to meet all the various wishes and tastes of such a hydra-headed family, I determined only to feel bound by the wishes of the two unmarried daughters, Frances and Emilia, and any one of their brothers whom they might choose. They selected George.

Early on June 1, I went to Bonn. The place struck me much from its being so embowered in green and flowers. In a villa thus surrounded I found the well-known authoress Fräulein von Weling,[280] whom I surprised in bargaining for ready-plucked chickens at her door. She is a very interesting person, received me with that cordial simplicity which is so charming in Germans, and in a minute had put on her bonnet to go with me to the cemetery by a quiet walk through nursery-gardens. The churchyard itself is half hidden in pinks and roses. In the centre stands an old chapel of extreme beauty, transferred stone for stone by the King of Prussia from a solitary position in the fields. Buried in flowers is the grave where the dear friends of my childhood rest side by side. Close by is that of their brother-like friend, the noble old Brandis, his invalid wife, and his son Johannes. Farther off, but still near, are the graves of the old Arndt, Niebuhr and his Gretchen, Schumann, and the widow and son of Schiller. Then we went to Bunsen’s house, with the three-windowed room where he died, the garden with its view over the Rhine to the Sieben Gebirge, and the pavilion where he gave his last birthday feast.

It is a long ascent of an hour and a half from Neuwied through orchards and meadows radiant with wild-flowers to Segenhaus, standing on the crest of the mountain, which is literally “the House of Blessing” to all around it. The beautiful spacious rooms, full of books and pictures, look down over a steep declivity upon an immense view of the Rhineland. The Princess came in immediately with a most warm welcome—a noble, beautiful woman in a black dress, something like that one sees in pictures of Spanish Queens-Dowager, with snow-white hair drawn back under a long black veil. After a life of love, having lost all those who gave its greatest charm, she still finds much happiness in making herself the mother of her people, and the centre of good to the Rhineland from her high forest-home. After a few minutes spent in explaining the towns in the vast map-like view below us, she said, “There is a lady here who is anxious to make your acquaintance, and who was delighted to hear that you were coming: it is the Queen of Sweden.” At that moment the doors were thrown open, and the Queen entered—of middle age, with a beautiful expression, and possessing, with the utmost regal dignity, the most perfect simplicity and even cordiality of manner. She desired me to sit by the Princess upon a divan facing her. She said that I must consider her at once as a friend; that, in a life of great troubles, the “Memorials” had been her greatest comfort; that she never went anywhere without them; that my mother had been for several years the intimate friend to whom she always had recourse, and in whose written thoughts she could always find something which answered to her own feeling and the difficulty of the moment. She asked after “Mary Lea,” and how old she was now. She also talked much and naturally of my Bunsen work, and entirely entered into all the difficulties of meeting the views of so large a family of varying dispositions.

The Princess took me away to see her own room with her family portraits and photographs. She spoke of her daughter, the Princess of Roumania,[281] “in her terrible position between Russia and Turkey.” Then she said, “I want to prepare you for something. At my daughter’s court there is a blind Roumanian noble who has an only daughter. She is deaf and dumb. I could not bear that they should never communicate, so I have taken her home with me, and I am teaching her to speak by making her hold her hand on my throat as I speak very slowly; and she is already learning, and, though it takes almost all my time, I am already rewarded by her making sounds which are intelligible to me.” When we went back into the other room, the young lady was there, a most strange being, making sounds inarticulate, but intelligible to the Princess. When she saw that the Princess was going to speak, she rushed across the room and held her hand on her throat, which had an almost terrible effect, like garrotting.

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Sophie. Queen of Sweden and Norway.
Sophie.
Queen of Sweden and Norway.

After tea the Queen ordered her donkey, which was brought round by a handsome Swedish chasseur. We went out into the forest. The Queen rode: the Princess led the donkey: I walked by the side, and only the chasseur followed. We actually went on thus for three hours, through beautiful forest glades with exquisite sylvan views, the whole reminding me of descriptions in Auerbach’s “Auf der Höhe.” The Queen never ceased talking or asking. She wished to know the whole story of my mother’s trances at Pau, of Madame de Trafford, of Prince Joseph Bonaparte—“a sort of cousin of my husband’s.” She talked much and most touchingly of her own life and its anxieties. “What I feel most,” she said, “is the impossibility of ever being alone. I have much happiness, much to be thankful for, but I feel that what one has really to look forward to must come after death, and I do not wish to live.” With her truly “la grandeur est un poids qui lasse,” as Massillon said. When alone with her sister at the Segenhaus in the quiet forest-life, she finds most happiness, and they live in a higher world, mentally as well as physically. As we went down a steep bank the donkey stumbled, and the Queen cried out. “Pardon me that I have seemed to be afraid,” she said; “I have been so very ill, that my nerves are quite shattered;” and in fact a severe illness, long supposed to be mortal, had at this time obliged her for several years to leave Sweden in the winter, to be under a great doctor at Heidelberg. She asked me to come to Norway to visit her. “You must also know my husband,” she said, “and my four sons, my four blessings of God.” She repeatedly expressed her wish that I should be at Rome in the winter with the Prince Royal. “I am sending him out to learn his world.” She asked most warmly after Lea, and sent a message to her—“I know her so well.” She also desired I would give her tender sympathy to Hilda Hare,[282] “For can I not feel for her? my second boy is at sea.” She gave a charming description of her first tour through Norway to her coronation. “I sat in my carriole by myself, and a peasant sat upon the little portmanteau behind which held my things, and told me all about the places and people.” We walked on and on through the vast woods, with lovely glimpses of country through the open glades, and masses of huge foxgloves where the wood was cut down, and one really forgot the queen, the almost tête-à-tête of three hours with a queen, in the noble great-souled woman, whose high ideal of life and all that it should be seemed for the time to ennoble all the world to one.

At the top of a high declivity the Princess unlocked a small gate. Within, in a little circular grove of lime-trees, were two marble crosses over the grave of the Prince of Wied and his martyr-like son Otto.[283] “And here,” said the Princess very simply, “is my grave also.” The plan of these green mausoleums has been adopted by the present family, and two more are planted to be ready for two generations.

Behind the palace of the Princess is the great white château of Monrepos, where her son lives with his wife, who is Princess Royal of the Netherlands. Above the lower range of windows is a line of huge stags’ heads, trophies of the chase of some former prince in the forest. The House of Wied are “ehenwürdig,” and so may always marry royalty.

I said something about never having seen the kitchen-garden of a German house, so when we came home the Princess took me to hers. The Queen then walked with us. The Princess prunes and grafts her own roses, &c., but she seems to have no perception whatever of any beauty in wild-flowers. We went in, and I was shown to a room, whence I came down to that in which the court ladies were assembled. It was rather formidable, but the Countess Ebba von Rosen, dame du palais of the Queen, talked pleasantly in English. Doors were thrown open, and the Queen and Princess entered and we went in to supper. The Queen made me sit by her: the four court ladies sat opposite: the Princess, on the other side of the Queen, made tea. Thick slices of bread and butter, like those of English school-feasts, and mutton-chops were handed round. When we went into the other room, I wrote down some names of books as desired, and then at 9.30 took leave. The Princess most cordially invited me to return, and the Queen again pressed me to visit her in her own country. The vision of the Queen’s serene noble face as she took leave has ever since remained with me, and I parted from both the royal sisters with a stronger feeling of affectionate regard than I have ever felt towards any one else upon so short an acquaintance.”

“Mrs. de Bunsen[284] was very amusing in her account of the crowded musical festival at Baireuth. When they complained that there were not enough carriages there, a native replied, ‘Pardon me! of carriages there are quite enough, but of people there are too many.’

“In and out, whilst I have been here, has come the next neighbour—‘the Herr Major.’ He is quite a character, and devotes his whole life to his garden. From Holland he—a poor man—ordered some fruit-trees for a very large sum, but they have been a total failure and have borne nothing. The other day Charles, driving with him, passed these trees, and knowing they were a sore subject, turned his head the other way and pretended not to see them. ‘Oh, thank you, dear friend; I appreciate what you are doing,’ said the Herr Major, enthusiastically clasping his hand. When the boys of Mosbach stole his fruit, he put up an electric wire on the wall which caused a bell to ring in his bedroom whenever any one got over it. A few nights ago the bell rang violently; the Herr Major took his stick and rushed down the garden in his night-shirt: it was only his own bulldog, which had jumped over the wall to pay a visit to a friend in Mosbach. Another time, when his fruit was stolen, the Herr Major issued a placard offering a reward of a hundred marks to any one who would deliver up the thief. The placard was read by two men sitting outside a beer-house, who were the men who had stolen the fruit. They immediately agreed upon their course of action; one man delivered the other up to justice, and he was sentenced to pay ten marks or to three days’ imprisonment; the other claimed the hundred marks, of which they had ninety to divide and to spend in drinking for whole days together to the health of the Herr Major.”

“June 15.—I have had a charming week at Herrenalb, whither Charles and Theodore de Bunsen accompanied me. It was a real pleasure to be again with the dear Frances and Emilia de Bunsen, who are so like sisters to me, and the kind pleasant Sternbergs. We were occupied almost entirely with my book, the sisters taking it in turn to talk over all the different parts, but there were also delightful intervals of forest rambles, and sittings out under the old apple-trees with Emilia. Reinhold von Ungern Sternberg came for the Sunday with Herr von Klüden, the ‘Bräutigam’ of his sister Dora. The place is just what my sweetest mother would most have enjoyed for a summer residence—no grand scenery, but very high forest-clad hills all round the rich green meadows, with the crystal Alb tossing through them. The village of quaint black and white houses clusters round the old-fashioned inn and the water-cure establishment in the buildings of the suppressed monastery, of which a beautiful ruin of red sandstone—‘The Paradise’—still stands in the churchyard. In all directions are well-kept walks and drives, and comfortable seats at every picturesque point. The people are most friendly and primitive, all the men taking off their hats, and all greeting strangers with a friendly ‘Morgen’ or ‘Tag.’

“I spent four hours at Heidelberg, and revisited all our old haunts, the gardens most lovely in their luxuriance of green. Thence I had intended to go to Weimar to visit the Grand Duchess, but at Eisenach received a telegram from her lady-in-waiting, the Countess Kalkreuth, to put off my visit, as they were gone off to Berlin, the Empress Augusta being sister of the Duke of Weimar. A wet morning at the Wartburg and an afternoon at Erfurth brought me to Jena. There my cousin Alexander Paul met me at the station, a pleasant, fat, frank Prussian officer, with a face very like that of the first Napoleon.[285]

“There is much charm in this old town of Jena and its simple population, increased by the five hundred students of the university. The houses of Schiller, Alex. v. Humboldt, &c., have inscriptions in honour of those who lived there: the streets wind picturesquely around the old Schloss and its gardens, and the trumpet still sounds every quarter of an hour from the tall grey tower of the noble old church. From my own window in Alexander’s house in the Cahl’sche Allée, I see on one side a robber castle, on the other a wonderful old church of the time of the ‘Heilige Bonifacius.’

“On Thursday afternoon we went to Dornberg, where three castles crown the cliff above the village with a narrow terrace running in front of them along the edge of the precipice. One castle is occasionally inhabited by the Grand Duke; another, very old and picturesque, was given by Carl August to Goethe, and having been inhabited by him in the last years of his life, still contains much furniture of his time: the third was the palace of—the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.

“Yesterday we went a fatiguing excursion to Schwartzberg, the palace of the Prince of Rudolstadt, by which we saw the finest parts of Thuringia. A railway took us to Schwarza, where, in a ball on the top of the church steeple, is a dart thrown by a Cossack as the Russian army passed through Germany. Thence we took an omnibus to the little Chrysopraz Hotel at Blankenberg, where, after beer and brown bread and butter under the trees, we walked up the Schwarzthal to Oppelei, where a Swiss cottage has been built by the Prince to indemnify a forester, whose daughter he had made his mistress! Hence, by a steep path, we ascended the Treppstein, whence there is a lovely view over the hollow in the forest-clad mountains, in the midst of which the great castle of the Prince of Rudolstadt rises above the little town. The Prince is not unpopular, though his life has an Eastern license. On the day when he succeeded to his tiny sovereignty he happened to be at Berlin. ‘Bonjour, souverain,’ said the Emperor when he met him, and, when he took off his hat—‘Pray put on your crown.’

“To-day we have been in a different direction, by rail to Roda, a charming little Thuringian town, and thence by carriage to the Fröhliche Wiederkunft, the old moated castle built by Friedrich Johann, father of Friedrich der Weise, on the spot where he met his family on his return from a long captivity abroad. The old Princess Therèse of Saxe-Altenbourg now lives there, she and her sisters—the Queen of Hanover, the Grand Duchess of Oldenbourg, and the Grand Duchess Constantine of Russia—having been daughters of the old Duke Josef, by whom the castle was restored. The news of the King of Hanover’s death had just arrived. ‘How many tears,’ said the old man who showed the castle, ‘did the old Duke my master shed in that chair over the King’s misfortunes.’ The story of the founder is most quaintly told in paintings on panels round one of the rooms, and there are pictures and memorials of Luther and of Friedrich Johann and his wife Sibylla over and over again.”

“June 23.—A vision of many great towns is all that I carry away from the varied journey which has brought me to Hildesheim—the old cities of Wittenberg and Eisleben, with their glorious works of Lucas Cranach and varied memorials of Luther and Melancthon: Magdeburg, great and noisy, with its dull, restored cathedral: Halberstadt, also restored, but glorious in spite of its injuries, and with intensely picturesque streets of old houses: the romantic beauty of imperial Goslar: stately Quedlinburg, where German princesses constantly reigned as abbesses: beautiful Thale, at the entrance of the Harz, with its exquisite combination of wood and rock and water: Brunswick and its many market-places, full of old houses: dull Hanover, with the great deserted gardens of Herrenhausen.

“Aunt Marcia (Frau Paul von Benningsen[286]) and my cousins Jane and Clementine met me here at the station.”

“Berlin, June 27.—My visit at Hildesheim had much of quiet interest. The town is wonderfully picturesque, and I was glad to make acquaintance with my cousins, who are perfectly grandes dames and highly educated young ladies, though they cook and do almost all the housework themselves. I drew in the early mornings, and went to dinner each day with them at 12.30.

“The Hildesheim churches are magnificent, but spoilt, ruined, by so-called restoration—the old pavements torn up, the old ornaments removed and replaced by tawdry and vulgar imitation of Munich wall-painting.

“On Monday George de Bunsen met me with his carriage at the Berlin station, and brought me through the Thier-Garten, like a bit of wild forest, to the charming airy Villa Bunsen, standing in its own garden on the extreme outskirts of the town. Here I have a most luxurious room, filled with royal portraits, and every possible luxury. We dined al fresco on the broad terrace amid the flowers. On the next evening there was a party of about fifty people—tea, and the garden and terrace lighted up, a very pretty effect; the ladies in bright dresses, the men with uniforms and orders, moving and sitting amongst the shrubs and flowers, amid which endless little supper-tables were laid at a late hour. Many were the historic names of those to whom I was introduced—Falk of the Falk laws, Mommsen the historian, Austin the poet, Mohl, and many ministers and generals. I found also Arthur Balfour, and many waifs and strays of old acquaintance. The ‘Congress’ is going on, but excites little or no general interest, and is scarcely mentioned here, German affairs being far too important.

“Berlin interests me extremely, though without preparation it can be of small interest. It is almost entirely modern. In the sixteenth century it must have been a tiny electoral town, the houses encircling the old Schloss by the Spree in the time of the Great Elector, whose statue, a grand though rococo work, stands close by on the bridge. Friedrich I., who got a kingdom by bribery, added the enormous castle, which, ludicrous as it then was in a kingdom of five millions, is now satisfactory in a kingdom of twenty millions. Close by, Frederick the Great built two domes, merely as features in the distant view of an otherwise featureless city, and to these his son added buildings which turned them into churches. Under Friedrich Wilhelm III. and IV. the great classical revival took place and endless fine buildings arose. The library is one of the few buildings which date from Frederick the Great. The architects were an endless time disputing over the designs, and at last he said, ‘Damn you all, don’t waste any more time; this commode opposite me is of a very good design, copy that,’ and accordingly the design of the commode was copied.

“Last night we went late to the Zoological Garden. The most interesting thing was a solemn congregation of ibises listening in a row, each bird with one foot in the air, and its head attentively on one side, to an ibis preacher, who never ceased a continuous discourse to them, standing on a stone. The elephant is said to be five hundred years old; what a solemn silent witness! Apropos of the future of beasts, George de Bunsen talked much of the absence of all allusion to any future in the Old Testament—that it grew up, partly in the Talmud, partly in the Apocryphal writers, in what Luther beautifully calls ‘the great empty leaf between the Old and New Testaments.’

“June 30.—The day after I last wrote, I went with the Bunsens and Mr. Waddington, the French Minister[287] (come for the Congress of Berlin) to Charlottenbourg. The palace there is charming—the large gardens, the groves of orange-trees in tubs, the great lawns sweeping away into woods, and above all the mausoleum in one of the thick groves, with the tombs of Queen Louisa and her husband. Hither the old Emperor and all the royal family come still once a year, on the anniversary of her death, to look upon the beautiful form of his young mother, snatched away in the very zenith of beauty and popularity, not living to see the re-establishment of the kingdom in whose cause she sacrificed her life. Exquisitely, perfectly beautiful is the intense repose of her lovely countenance, in what I must ever feel to be the most beautiful and impressive statue in the world. The statue of the King is very fine too, but in her angelic presence he is forgotten. And such was the feeling for her, that though he did not marry again for many years after he had lost her in his youth, his people at first would not believe it, and then never forgave it. Mr. Waddington felt nothing in the presence of this sublime statue. ‘Yes, it is very clever, it is a very clever figure indeed,’ he said. Never was any remark more completely out of tune, making it difficult for one to believe in the great power of the man.

“The next day I went to Potsdam—quite a place by itself in the world, with its endless great ultra-German palaces and stiff gardens, arid and dusty, though surrounded by many waters. Without Carlyle’s ‘Frederick the Great,’ they would be mere dead walls enclosing a number of costly objects; illuminated by the book, each room, each garden walk, thrills with human interest. In the Residenz Schloss are the rooms in which Frederick the Great passed his winters, with massive silver furniture and priceless ornaments, amid which the portrait of Wilhelmina in her childhood is a touching feature. In the Garrison Kirche is the tomb of the great king. The terrace at Sans Souci, in this dried-up land, is quite lovely with its fountains and orange-trees. Close behind is the famous windmill.

“At the end of the hall were some folding-doors closely watched by two aides-de-camp, till the rapping of a silver stick was heard from a distant pavement, when the doors were flung open, and Count Eulenborg came out, preceding the Prince and Princess. She immediately went up to Mrs. Grant (General Grant’s wife) and several other ladies, and then began to go the round of the guests. I had more than my fair share of her kindly presence. ‘Oh, Mr. Hare, I am so glad to see you again so soon. How little I expected it, and how sad the causes which have brought it about!’ And she went on to speak of how, at our last meeting, the Duchess of Argyll had been sitting with her at tea, and how three days after she died. ‘And for me it was only the opening act of a tragedy,’ she said. She talked of the shock which the news of the attack upon the Emperor was to her, coming to her in the picture-gallery at Panshanger, and of her hurried journey to him. The Crown Prince came up then, and led her away to dinner. Mrs. Grant was on his other side (General Grant, a very vulgar officious man, was also there). I had been directed to a place near the Archbishop and Bishop of Armenia, but as they only spoke Armenian, I was glad that a very handsome, agreeable aide-de-camp eventually took his place between me and them. The dinner was excellent, in a huge long marble hall, with windows opening to the ground on the terrace above the flower-garden. Occasionally I met a bright kindly smile as the Princess looked to see how I was getting on. There were about fifty guests, servants waiting noiselessly, not a footfall heard.

“After dinner we all went out on the terraces, and there the Crown Princess had the goodness to come again to me. She talked of all I had seen at Berlin, and of Sweden and Queen Sophie. She talked also of Queen Louisa, her husband’s grandmother, preferring her statue at Potsdam even to that at Charlottenburg, and wished to have sent an aide-de-camp with me to see it. She was so good as to desire that I should return to Potsdam, and when I showed her that I could not, said, ‘Oh, but you will now find your way again to Berlin to see me.’ The scene on the terraces was very pretty, looking upon the bright flowers beneath in the subdued light of a fine evening in this transparent atmosphere, the whole air scented with lime-flowers.

“Then came the long weary journey across West Holstein—peat flats varied by marshy swamps—and a night at Schleswig, a white, colourless old town moored as if upon a raft in the marshes, where the Princess of Wales’ grandmother and other royal potentates lie in exposed coffins upon the floor of the ugly rugged old cathedral, which has a belfry like a dovecot. Everywhere roses grew in the streets on the house-walls. The children were hurrying along, carrying the shoes they were to wear in school.

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THE ROSENBORG PALACE, COPENHAGEN.
THE ROSENBORG PALACE, COPENHAGEN. [288]

“Peat and marsh again for many hours, the interminable straight lines of landscape only broken by the mounds, probably sepulchral, which are so common here. A straight line with humps at intervals would do for a view almost anywhere in Jutland, Fuhnen, or Seeland. After hours upon hours of this engaging scenery, we crossed the Middelfardt at Fredericia into Fuhnen, which we traversed by rail, and embarked again on the Great Belt at Nyborg. Then came four hours’ more rail in Seeland, and, at 10.30 P.M., long lines of light glistening on streets of water showed that we had reached Copenhagen. Here I met the two daughters of Sir Henry Holland (Caroline and Gertrude), with whom I had arranged to go on to Norway, and their niece, Miss Chenda Buxton. As they had already been waiting for me several days, I felt obliged to give up a visit to Baron Troll (the stepson of Madame de Bülow) and the château of Gaüno, but I had three full days for Copenhagen, and greatly enjoyed them, the air being that of the high mountains in Switzerland with a mixture of sea—the most bracing place I ever was in. There is a ‘Dragon Tower,’ which is quite ideally Danish; and the old palace of the Danish kings, Rosenborg, surrounded by a moat, is fairy-like in the beauty of its old age, in the midst of a stately and brilliant old garden, and filled with historical memorials, which carry you back into marvellous depths of Danish history, in which the Christians and Friedrichs, always alternating with each other, are most bewildering. The museums also are full of interest, especially the Thorwaldsen collection, with casts of all the works of the great sculptor, and many most grand originals, especially interesting to me, as being described in Madame de Bunsen’s letters from Rome in their first conception and progress.

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ROESKILDE.
ROESKILDE.

“One day we went out to Roeskilde, to the great church near a fiord where the kings are buried. Some of the older sovereigns have grand tombs, but those of later date than the grandfather of our Charles I. lie in their black and silver coffins unburied upon the floor of the church, with very odd effect.”

“Stockholm, Grand Hotel Rydberg, July 13.—On the evening of the 5th we crossed to Helsingfors in Sweden by a very rough passage of ten minutes, and had a wild evening walk in the storm, looking upon the opposite Danish coast, and Helsingborg with the great traditional castle of Hamlet, whose father was really a pirate-chief in Jutland.

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CASTLE OF ELSINORE.
CASTLE OF ELSINORE.

“A journey of twenty-four hours brought us to Stockholm. We only lingered on the way to see the very fine Cathedral of Lund, the Oxford of Sweden. The scenery is not beautiful, but pretty—an exaggerated Surrey, low hills and endless fir-woods, with tiny glistening lakes.

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THE JUNCTION OF LAKE MALAR AND THE BALTIC, STOCKHOLM.
THE JUNCTION OF LAKE MALAR AND THE BALTIC, STOCKHOLM.

“Stockholm has deeply interested us, and there is an odd feeling in being at a place and knowing that it is for once and once only in a lifetime. It is a modern city of ugly streets, but in a situation quite exquisite, on a number of little rocky islets between Lake Malar and the Baltic, surrounding, on the central islet, the huge palace, which is very stately and imposing from its size, and the old church of Riddarholmen, where Gustavus Adolphus and many other kings and queens are buried under the banner-hung arches. Next to the palace, the stateliest building is certainly this hotel, where our windows overlook all that is most characteristic in the place, the bridge which crosses the junction of the Baltic and Lake Malar, the mighty palace dominating the central island, the great white seagulls poised upon the blue waters, and the steam-gondolas, filled with people, darting to and from one island to another. These are the chief means of communication, and we make great use of them, the passages costing twelve öere, or one penny.

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RIDDARHOLMEN.
RIDDARHOLMEN.

“We shall not go to see the midnight sun at Hammerfest; it would be very fatiguing, and indeed there can be little to see which we have not here; for we have only about two hours’ night in Stockholm, and by 2 A.M. it is light enough to read the smallest print. This has a very odd effect at first, but one soon gets used to it.

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THE CHURCH OF OLD UPSALA.
THE CHURCH OF OLD UPSALA.

“Alas! we have been here a week, and, except one day, it has rained almost incessantly. One pities the poor Swedes in losing their short summer, for there are only about three months without snow, and every day is precious. The streets are sopping, but we have managed several excursions in the covered gondolas to quiet damp old palaces on the banks of lonely fiords. On our one fine day we went to Upsala by rail, and saw the cathedral where Gustavus Wasa lies aloft on a great tomb between his two pretty little wives, and we drove on to Old Upsala, where Odin, Thor, and Freya reigned as human beings and were buried as gods. In the tomb of Thor—a grassy mound—the Government still gives the mead of ancient times to foreign visitors. It is a very delightful place, like a dip in the Sussex downs, the quaint church, of immemorial antiquity, probably once a pagan temple, nestling behind the mounds of the heroes.

“The Hollands are delightful companions, full of interest in everything, glad to draw, reading up all the history, learning Swedish, holding historical and retrospective examinations once a week. We do a great deal of ‘lessons’ together. Certainly that one’s travels should ‘leave a good taste’ behind entirely depends upon one’s companions. And we are never even reduced to the state which I find alluded to in a French guide-book—‘Dans une voiture découverte, quand il y a une personne de mauvaise humeur, les autres admirent le paysage.’ Mr. and Mrs. Eric Magnusson are in this hotel, and we see a good deal of them. He is an Icelander, but now a Professor at Cambridge, and sent here by the University to investigate and inspect the Runic inscriptions.”

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GRIPSHOLM.
GRIPSHOLM.

“July 15.—Yesterday we steamed down Lake Malar to Gripsholm, a very quaint castle with domed red towers, full of ancient pictures, and with the wonderful old room and bed where Queen Catherine Jagellonica (delightful name!), whose tomb we saw at Upsala, gave birth to her son Sigismund, afterwards King of Poland.”

“Throndtjem, July 28.—Surely this old cradle of Northern Christianity is one of the most beautiful places in the world. No one had ever told us about it, and we came here only because it was the Throndtjem of sagas and ballads, and expecting a wonderful and beautiful cathedral; but it is really a dream of loveliness, so exquisite in the soft silvery morning lights on the fiords and purple mountain ranges, and the nearer hills covered with bilberries and breaking into steep cliffs, that one remains in a state of transport, which is at a climax when all is engraven upon an opal sunset sky, and when ships and buildings meet their double in the still transparent water. Each old wide street of curious wooden houses displays a new vista of sea, of rocky promontories, of woods dipping into the water, and at the end of the chief street is the grey massive cathedral of St. Olaf, where Northern art and poetry have exhausted their loveliest and most poetic fancies around the grave of the national hero. Here alone in Scandinavia I have gone back perpetually to the old days of my life, and felt how happy the mother would have been here, so much—almost everything—being within her own walk; and I seem to see our trio spending a quiet month at this homelike hotel (where the landlord and landlady—highly educated people of good family—receive their guests like friends in a country-house), and sallying forth to draw in all the sheltered coves and wooded rocks by the side of fiord or river. The air too is most bracing, an arctic feeling combined with the brightest sunshine.

“But I must go back to Kristiania, which was steaming in intensity of heat when we reached it, the wet of Stockholm having cleared in Norway into cloudless sunshine which had hatched all the mosquitoes. There is no beauty in the mean little town, which was built by Christian IV. (brother of our Anne of Denmark), and has a good central church of his time. We went by rail to Kongsberg, a primitive place with a nice little hotel kept by a Dane, where, however (and at many other places), we were annoyed by the ludicrously consequential advent of General Grant and Co. Here we hired a carriage and carriole for a five days’ excursion in Tellemarken. What a drive!—by silent lakes or through deep, beautiful, ever-varying woods of noble pine-trees, rising from thickets of juniper, bilberries, and cranberries. The loveliest mountain flowers grow in these woods—huge larkspurs of rank luxuriant foliage and flowers of faint dead blue, pinks, stagmoss—wreathing around the grey rocks, and delicate lovely soldanellas drooping in the still recesses. But what a road, or rather what a want of one!—hills of glassy rock, up which our horses scrambled like cats, abysses where they gathered up their legs and flung themselves down headlong with the carriages on the top of them, till at the bottom we were all buried in dust, and picked ourselves up, gasping and gulping, and wondering we were alive, to begin the same pantomime over again.

“We arrived at the little châlet of Tinoset on the wrong day for the steamer down its lake, and had to engage a private boat. The little lake was lashed by the wind into furious purple billows, and the voyage was most wretched. A horrid male creature from Middlesborough, whom we surnamed the ‘Bumble Bee,’ accompanied us. I was brutal enough to make him over to Miss Holland, by saying, ‘This lady will be deeply interested to hear all you have to say,’ and to her he buzzed on perpetually. He told us that the people of Middlesborough were astonished—and no wonder—at his building in the midst of that hideous red manufacturing place a black and white timber house in imitation of one at Coventry, and designing to be carved on its barge-board the charming inscription—