"Hanc tua Penelope lento tibi mittit Ulysse: Nil mihi rescribas attamen ipse veni;"
his eyes glistening as he recited the lines; he made me feel their beauty without understanding a word of their sense. "Strangest, and happiest of men!" I thought as I looked at him, "that after living seventy years in this world, can still have tears to spare for the sorrows of Penelope!" Well, our next resting place was Cologne.
You pause?--you have nothing to say of Cologne? No English traveller, except your professed tourists and guide-book makers, ever has; of the crowds who pass through the place, on their way up or down the Rhine, how few spend more than a night or a day there! their walk is between the Rheinberg and the cathedral; they look, perhaps, with a sneering curiosity at the shrine of the Three Kings; cut the usual jests on the Leda and the Cupid and Psyche;[4] glance at the St. Peter of Rubens; lounge on the bridge of boats; stock themselves with eau-de-Cologne, and then away! And yet this strange old city, which a bigoted priesthood, a jealous magistracy, and a variety of historical causes, have so long kept isolated in the midst of Europe, with its Roman origin, its classical associations, the wild gothic superstitions of which it has been the theatre; its legion of martyrs, its three kings and eleven thousand virgins, and the peculiar manners and physiognomy of the people, strangely take the fancy. What has become of its three hundred and fifty churches, and its thirty thousand beggars?--Thirty thousand beggars! Was there ever such a splendid establishment of licensed laziness, and consecrated rags and wallets! What a magnificent idea does it give one of the inexhaustible charity, and the incalculable riches of the inhabitants! but the French came with their besom of purification and destruction; and lo! the churches were turned into arsenals, the convents into barracks; and from its old-accustomed haunts, "the genius of beggary was with sighing sent." I really believe, that were I again to visit Cologne, I would not be content with a mere superficial glance, as heretofore.