Part 12

_September 24._--Having risen before sunrise, the energetic and practical Don Vincenzino gave us coffee by the aid of a spirit lamp, and we passed some hours in drawing the town of Minervino, the sparkling lights and delicate grey tints of whose buildings blended charmingly with the vast pale rosy plains of Apulia in the far distance. At nine we returned to a substantial _déjeûner_, and at half-past ten took leave of our thoroughly hospitable and good-natured host.

CASTEL DEL MONTE

HENRY SWINBURNE

A most disagreeable stony road brought us to Ruvo, through a vine country. The pomegranate hedges in flower, and the holme oak loaded with kermes, enlivened the prospect, which otherwise would have been very dull.... I here quitted the Roman way, and rode fifteen miles westward to Castel del Monte. The country I traversed is open, uneven and dry. The castle is a landmark, and stands on the brow of a very high hill, the extremity of a ridge that branches out from the Apennine. The ascent to it is near half a mile long, and very steep; the view from its terrace most extensive. A vast reach of sea and plain on one side, and mountains on the other; not a city in the province but is distinguishable; yet the barrenness of the foreground takes off a great deal of the beauty of the picture. The building is octangular, in a plain solid style; the walls are raised with reddish and white stones, ten feet six inches thick; the great gate is of marble, cut into very intricate ornaments, after the manner of the Arabians; on the balustrade of the steps lie two enormous lions of marble, their bushy manes nicely, though barbarously, expressed; the court, which is in the centre of the edifice, contains an octangular marble bason of a surprising diameter. To carry it to the summit of such a hill must have cost an infinite deal of labour. Two hundred steps lead up to the top of the castle, which consists of two stories. In each of them are fifteen saloons of great dimensions, cased throughout with various and valuable marbles; the ceilings are supported by triple clustered columns of a single block of white marble, the capitals extremely simple. Various have been the opinions concerning the founder of this castle; but the best grounded ascribe it to Frederick of Swabia. I dined and spent the hot hours with great comfort under the porch, which commands a noble view of the Adriatic.

In the evening I descended the mountain, and rode nine miles to Andria, a large feudal city, east of the Roman road.

THE GENERALIFE

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

The Generalife is situated not far from the Alhambra on a spur of the same mountain. You get to it by a kind of dug out road that traverses the ravine of Los Molinos, which is bordered all the way with fig-trees of enormous glistening leaves, green oaks, pistachio-trees, laurels, and rock roses of a remarkably exuberant vegetation. The ground on which you walk is composed of yellow sand oozing with water, wonderful in its fecundity. Nothing is more delightful than to follow this road, which has the appearance of running through a virgin forest of America, so thickly is it choked with foliage and flowers, and so great is the overwhelming scent of the aromatic plants you inhale there. Vines spring through the cracks of the broken walls, and hang from all their branches fantastic tendrils and leaves resembling the tracery of Arabian ornaments; the aloe opens its fan of bluish blades and the orange trees twist their knotty trunks and cling with fang-like roots to the rents in the steep slopes. Everything flourishes and blooms in a tangled disorder full of the most charming effects of chance. A straying branch of jasmin mingles its white stars with the scarlet flowers of the pomegranate, and a laurel leaps from one side of the road to the other to embrace a cactus, notwithstanding its thorns. Nature, left to herself, seems to take pride in her coquetry, and wishes to show how far she surpasses even the most exquisite and finished art.

After a quarter of an hour’s walk, you come to the Generalife, which is, in some sense, nothing but the _casa de campo_, the country house, of the Alhambra. The exterior, like that of all oriental buildings, is very simple: it consists of large walls without windows and surmounted by a terrace with a gallery divided into arcades, the whole being crowned with a little modern belvedere. Of the Generalife nothing now remains but some arcades and some large panels of arabesques, unfortunately plastered over with layers of whitewash that have been applied again and again with all the obstinacy of a dispiriting cleanliness. Little by little the delicate sculptures and the marvellous guilloches of this fairy-like architecture have been obliterated, filled up, and engulfed. What is at present nothing more than a faintly-vermiculated wall, was formerly open lace-work as fine as those ivory leaves which the patience of the Chinese carves for fans. The brush of the whitewasher has caused more _chefs d’œuvre_ to disappear than the scythe of Time, if I may be allowed to use that superannuated, mythological expression. In a fairly well preserved hall, you notice a series of smoky portraits of the kings of Spain, but these have only a chronological value.

[Illustration: THE GENERALIFE, SPAIN.]

The real charm of the Generalife consists in its gardens and waters. A canal paved with marble runs through the whole length of the enclosure, and rolls its abundant and rapid waves under a series of leafy arches, formed by yews curiously bent and clipped. Orange-trees and cypresses are planted on each border; it was at the foot of one of these cypresses, of a prodigious size, and which dates from the time of the Moors, that the favourite of Boabdil, if we may believe the legend, often proved that bolts and grilles are but slight protectors of the virtue of sultanas. One thing, at least, is certain,--that the yew is very large and very old.

The perspective is terminated by a porticoed gallery, ornamented with fountains and marble columns, like the Patio of Myrtles in the Alhambra. The canal turns sharply and you then enter other enclosures ornamented with water-works and whose walls still retain traces of the frescoes of the Sixteenth Century representing rustic architecture and distant views. In the centre of one of these basins of water, a gigantic oleander of a singular brilliancy and incomparable beauty rises like an immense basket of flowers. At the time that I saw it, it seemed like an explosion of blossoms, or a bouquet of vegetable fireworks; its ruddy hue was so splendid and vigorous,--indeed almost clamorous, if one may apply that word to colours,--as to dim the hue of the most vermilion rose. Its lovely flowers leaped with all the ardour of desire towards the pure light of the sky; and its noble leaves, shaped expressly by nature for a crown of glory and sprinkled by the spray of the fountain, sparkled in the sunshine like emeralds. Never did anything inspire me with a higher sentiment of the beautiful than this rose-bay of the Generalife.

The water is brought to the gardens down a very steep inclined plane, bordered by little walls, forming on each side a kind of parapet, supporting canals hollowed out and lined with large tiles through which the water runs beneath the open sky with the gayest and liveliest chatter in the world. At yard intervals, well-supplied water-jets burst forth from the centre of little basins and shoot their crystal aigrettes into the thick foliage of the groves of laurels whose branches interlace above them. The mountain gushes with water on every side; at each step a spring starts out, and you continually hear at your side the murmuring of some rivulet turned from its course, and going to supply a fountain, or to carry refreshment to the foot of some tree. The Arabs have carried the art of irrigation to the highest degree; their hydraulic-works attest the most advanced state of civilization; these works still exist to-day, and it is to them that Grenada owes the reputation it has of being the Paradise of Spain, and of enjoying eternal spring in an African climate. An arm of the Darro has been turned out of its course by the Arabs and carried for more than two leagues along the hill of the Alhambra.

From the Belvedere of the Generalife you can clearly see the outline of the Alhambra with its enclosure of reddish, half-ruined towers, and its pieces of wall which rise and fall with the undulations of the mountain. The Palace of Charles V., which is not visible from the side of the city, stands out with its square and heavy mass, gilded with a pale reflection of sunlight, upon the damask-like slopes of the Sierra Nevada, whose white ridges are strongly notched against the sky. The bell-tower of Saint-Marie lifts its Christian silhouette above the Moorish battlements. A few cypresses thrust their sorrowful leaves through the crevices in the walls, in the midst of all this light and azure sky, like a melancholy thought at a joyous festival. The slopes of the hill running down towards the Darro and the ravine of Los Molinos disappear beneath an ocean of verdure. It is one of the most beautiful views that can be imagined.

On the other side, as if to form a contrast with so much verdure, there rises an uncultivated, scorched, tawny mountain with patches of ocre and burnt Sienna which is called La Silla del Moro, on account of some ruins of buildings upon its summit. It was from here that King Boabdil used to view the Arabian horsemen jousting in the Vega with Christian knights. The memory of the Moors is still vivid in Grenada. You would think that they left the city only yesterday, and, if we should judge of them by their traces, it is a pity that they ever left it at all. What southern Spain requires is African civilization and not the civilization of Europe, which is not in sympathy with the heat of the climate, or the passions it inspires.

CHÂTEAU DE CHENONCEAUX

JULES LOISELEUR

Unlike so many other _châteaux_ of Blaissons and Touraine, Chenonceaux awakens only gay and happy thoughts. Chambord possesses the calm gravity of a monastery; Ambroise is a prison; Blois bears upon its face its blot of blood. All the other retreats of the royal Valois and all the _châteaux_ of their courtiers, grouped in such number upon the banks of the Cher, the Vienne, and the Loire--Loches, Chinon, Plessis-lez-Tours, Luynes, Saumur, Brissac,--speak of treachery, perfidy, revenge, conspiracy and all the wicked tendencies of human nature. Chenonceaux alone recalls only memories of youth, elegance, poetry, and love. There is no blood upon its stones. The gentlest and the most charming figures of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, Diane de Poitiers, Mary Stuart, Gabrielle and Françoise de’Mercœur come in succession to animate that smiling nature and to reflect their fair faces in its clear waters. Catherine de Medicis, in passing through this beautiful place, here dropped a little of her cold and imperious gravity: she has left only the memory of that orgy-like and splendid banquet that cost more than a million of our money, and where Madame de Sauve, half naked, was the stewardess.

[Illustration: CHÂTEAU DE CHENONCEAUX, FRANCE.]

The widow of Henri III., promenading in her long robes of mourning, lent it another charm,--that of melancholy; and when Rousseau, at last raised that voice there which could gather together tempests, it was not philosophy, nor social conditions, nor the rights of man of which he spoke: it was still love and poetry.

Chenonceaux, by means of its position, its architecture, and its history, is so near the other _châteaux_ on the banks of the Loire, neighbouring and contemporary pearls, that it is impossible to detach it from that jewel-case. However, it is not on the Loire, the river of severe horizons and majestic wearisomeness; it is on a less proud and more smiling little river, the Cher, three leagues from Amboise, that this palace of Armida was built. It rears itself upon the bosom of this charming stream which stops here in a lazy curve as if to linger and bathe its walls, delighting in reflecting those graceful towers and enchanted gardens in its liquid depths. No other palace that I know rises thus, like Venus from the breast of the waves, without any link to the earth save a single bridge at one of its extremities. It was a woman who had this charming idea that gives to the _château_ a somewhat fairy-like and supernatural effect: for Chenonceaux is not, as is too often believed, the work of Thomas Bohier, but of his wife, who consecrated to this work, conceived in love, the treasures that her husband sent her from Italy. There are two other women, Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de’Medici who completed while enlarging the thought of Catherine Briçonnet. It seems that women only could possess a sufficiently light hand to touch such a delicate work and to design the plan.

It was at the north-east corner of the court of honour, between the stream and the gardener’s house, that MM. Sechan and Déplechein placed themselves to paint the picture used for the scenery in the second act of _Les Huguenots_. This choice proved a familiar general view. No other spot shows Chenonceaux in a more complete and picturesque aspect. Seen from this point, the _château_ presents itself obliquely, which enables the eye to embrace at the same time the principal façade and the entire construction of the western side, from the apsis of the chapel to the end of the gallery that crosses the Cher.

The foreground of the picture is charming.

At the right and in the corner, the court of honour precedes its royal avenue of plantains and ends with its stone balustrades. Behind this balustrade, stands the beautiful tower with a roof like a pepper box, which is used as the porter’s lodge, and which, built upon the firm ground, seems like a timid sister watching her big sisters bathing their feet in the river without daring to follow them.

In the middle distance, is the bridge with its three unequal arches and its heavy buttresses alongside of their half moons in brackets. Beyond the bridge, is the principal façade, flanked with two corbelled towers presenting under a flying buttress its large caryatides, its two balconies in hemicycle, and three charming dormer windows that crown it. Farther along in the centre of the picture, is the apsis of the chapel with its long lancets flaming in the sun, supported, like the principal front, by those heavy courses of stone in which are the kitchen offices of the castle; then comes the beautiful eastern front that surmounts the great arch and occupies the centre of the stream which, as well as the whole corresponding western front, must certainly be attributed to Diane de Poitiers, for its windows, its architrave and all the details of its entablature bear the mark of the reign of Henri II.

Finally, to the left of the picture, are the five arches of the bridge built for Diane to connect the left bank of the Cher with the great pavilion and, above this bridge, the two stages of galleries constructed by Androuet du Cerceau for Catherine de’Medici, with their little turrets with arched windows corresponding to the peers, and forming so many terraces for the second gallery.

All this, with the river for the foreground and with the large trees on both banks for a frame, and the trees of the gardens for perspective, and the tops, formerly gilded, of the gallery and the large pavilion, the ornamented chimneys, the peaked roofs and the vanes of the turrets, peaks, dormer windows, chimneys and weather-vanes, vaporously melting into the beautiful sky of Touraine; all this, I say, forms a complete whole that would ravish any painter and one that in truth is worthy of the honour paid to it by M. Scribe at the Opéra. No false tone and no ungraceful nor violent line disturbs the harmony of this beautiful picture. Minds that love parallelism and symmetry may regret undoubtedly that the enthusiasm of political life did not permit Catherine de’Medici to complete that beautiful conception and build upon the left bank of the Cher a large pavilion similar to that on the right bank: the gallery, which does not come to-day any further than the steep bank of the river, would then have occupied the centre of the building. But, perhaps, there is in this incompleteness of Chenonceaux, which permits everybody to finish it in dreams according to his pleasure, something that saves it from banality; perhaps it gains, instead of losing, by exciting that admiration mingled with regrets and also with criticism which the greater number of men, by an inherent weakness of nature, prefer to the enthusiasm without reservation that is the right of a perfect work.

DUBLIN CASTLE

LADY WILDE

Few amongst us who tread the Dublin of the present in all its beauty, think of the Dublin of the past in all its contrasted insignificance. True, the eternal features are the same; the landscape setting of the city is coeval with creation. Tyrian, Dane, and Norman have looked as we look, and with hearts as responsive to Nature’s loveliness, upon the emerald plains, the winding rivers, the hills draperied in violet and gold, the mountain gorges, thunder-riven, half veiled by the foam of the waterfall, and the eternal ocean encircling all; scenes where God said a city should arise, and the mountain and the ocean are still, as of old, the magnificent heritage of beauty conferred on our metropolis.

But the early races, whether from the southern sea or northern plain, did little to aid the beauty of nature with the products of human intellect. Dublin, under the Danish rule, consisted only of a fortress, a church, and one rude street. Under the rule of the Normans, those great civilizers of the western world, those grand energetic organizers, temple and tower builders, it rose gradually into a beautiful capital, the chief city of Ireland, the second city of the empire. At first the rudimental metropolis gathered round the castle, as nebulæ round a central sun, and from this point it radiated westward and southward; the O’Briens on the south, the O’Connors on the west, the O’Neils on the north, perpetually hovering on the borders, but never able to regain the city, never able to dislodge the brave Norman garrison who had planted their banners on the castle walls. In that castle, during the seven hundred years of its existence, no Irishman of the old race has ever held rule for a single hour.

And what a history it has of tragedies and splendours; crowned and discrowned monarchs flit across the scene, and tragic destinies, likewise, may be recorded of many a viceroy! Piers Gaveston, Lord Lieutenant of King Edward, murdered; Roger Mortimer--“The Gentle Mortimer”--hanged at Tyburn; the Lord Deputy of King Richard II. murdered by the O’Briens; whereupon the King came over to avenge his death, just a year before he himself was so ruthlessly murdered at Pomfret Castle. Two viceroys died of the plague; how many more were plagued to death, history leaves unrecorded; one was beheaded at Drogheda; three were beheaded on Tower Hill. Amongst the names of illustrious Dublin rulers may be found those of Prince John, the boy Deputy of thirteen; Prince Lionel, son of Edward III., who claimed Clare in right of his wife, and assumed the title of Clarence from having conquered it from the O’Briens.

[Illustration: DUBLIN CASTLE, IRELAND.]

The great Oliver Cromwell was the Lord-Lieutenant of the Parliament, and he in turn appointed his son Henry to succeed him. Dire are the memories connected with Cromwell’s reign here, both to his own party and to Ireland. Ireton died of the plague after the siege of Limerick; General Jones died of the plague after the surrender of Dungarvon; a thousand of Cromwell’s men died of the plague before Waterford. The climate, in its effect upon English constitutions, seems to be the great Nemesis of Ireland’s wrongs.

Strange scenes, dark, secret, and cruel, have been enacted in that gloomy pile. No one has told the full story yet. It will be a Ratcliffe romance of dungeons and treacheries, of swift death or slow murder. God and St. Mary were invoked in vain for the luckless Irish prince or chieftain that was caught in that Norman stronghold; but that was in the old time--long, long ago. Now the castle courts are crowded only with loyal and courtly crowds, gathered to pay homage to the illustrious successor of a hundred viceroys.

The strangest scene, perhaps, in the annals of viceroyalty, was when Thomas Fitzgerald (Silken Thomas), son of the Earl of Kildare, and Lord-Lieutenant in his father’s absence, took up arms for Irish independence. He rode through the city with seven score horsemen, in shirts of mail and silken fringe on their head-pieces (hence the name Silken Thomas), to St. Mary’s Abbey, and there entering the council chamber, he flung down the sword of state upon the table, and bade defiance to the king and his ministers; then hastening to raise an army, he laid siege to Dublin Castle, but with no success. Silken Thomas and five uncles were sent to London, and there executed; and sixteen Fitzgeralds were hanged and quartered at Dublin. By a singular fatality, no plot laid against Dublin Castle ever succeeded; though to obtain possession of this foreign fortress was the paramount wish of all Irish rebel leaders. This was the object with Lord Maguire and his papists, with Lord Edward Fitzgerald and his republicans, with Emmet and his enthusiasts, with Smith O’Brien and his nationalists--yet they all failed. Once only, during seven centuries, the green flag waved over Dublin Castle, with the motto--“Now or Never! Now and for Ever!” It was when Tyrconnel held it for King James.

In the ancient stormy times of Norman rule, the nobility naturally gathered round the Castle. Skinner’s Row was the “May Fair” of mediæval Dublin, Hoey’s Court, Castle Street, Cook Street, Fishamble Street, Bridge Street, Werburgh Street, High Street, Golden Lane, Back Lane, etc., were the fashionable localities inhabited by lords and bishops, chancellors and judges; and Thomas Street was the grand prado where viceregal pomp and Norman pride were oftenest exhibited.

SANS SOUCI AND OTHER PRUSSIAN PALACES

WILLIAM HOWITT

Berlin has its public gardens, and its popular music and dances, as well as any other German city; but they who do not care to visit these will find pleasure in walking as far as the Kreutzberg, a little eminence, a novelty here, at a little distance from the city, on which is erected a Gothic cross or monument of metal, in memory of those who died in the war; and figures of the chief leaders in it occupy niches, and the names of all the great battles in which the Prussians were engaged, are exhibited on the different sides. Charlottenburg, a few miles from Berlin, is also not only a charming palace in extensive and pleasant gardens, but of great interest from the reposing statue of the amiable Queen Louise, by Rauch, which is in a little temple in the garden.