I heard similar profanity on my return trip across the Atlantic.  One night when a storm assailed our ship, so that the waves rolled over the deck and the fierce rocking of the vessel threw many almost out of their beds, I heard many of them swear, even during the very time that the thunder rolled with tremendous roarings and crashes across the heavens.  It seems almost impossible that conscious intelligent beings could behave thus, but the fact that they do, helps us to believe other strange truths recorded in history, without which, no correct conception of man’s former depraved condition can be formed at this advanced day.  For example, few seem to appreciate the part played by the Catholic Church with her images, shrines, sacred relics, paid magnificent temples, in taming and civilizing man, because they do not know who and what he was when the light of intelligence first began to direct his footsteps, and he had not yet learned to control his selfish nature which had hitherto been guided by an instinct worth a hundred times more than intelligence without morality or religion.  We make a sad mistake yet in the nineteenth century, in cultivating the intellect and leaving morality so much out of the question.  We see some of the fruits already in the corruption which prevails alike in all circles without regard to party or sect.  I will recur to this again in speaking of the influence of the church, when I come to describe the magnificent churches of Italy.

On the second afternoon that I spent at Cologne there had been a shower, and from sunset till dusk I beheld one of the grandest atmospheric phenomena that I had ever witnessed.  From a window of Mlueler’s Hotel (facing the Dom-Platz) I was looking over the Cathedral at the western sky, as the sun throw its colored light through the small drops of rain still descending, and thus colored both the green foliage of the trees and the grand edifice before me, presenting a scene of such enchanting beauty as would afford almost a sufficient excuse for one to go into raptures, or sink down in a fit of ecstatic delight.

I may add that before leaving Cologne, I saw among the many dog-teams used in distributing produce over the city, a span whose disproportion I shall never forget; there was a dog hitched to one side of the shaft and a woman took hold of the other side and assisted him in pulling the load!

Bonn.

On Friday morning, August 13th, I left Cologne and went by rail to Bonn, 21 miles further up the Rhine.  It is the seat of the Freidrich Wilhelm University, and contains about 26,000 inhabitants.  The Poppelsdorfer Allee, an excellent quadruple avenue of fine horse-chestnuts, three quarters of a mile long, is the principal promenade of the town.  At the end of it stands the Schloss containing the University, with a library (200,000 volumes) and a museum rich in Roman antiquities.  The Muenster (or Cathedral) dates from the 12th and 13th centuries.  In the Muensterplatz stands a fine bronze statue of Beethoven, a celebrated German musician, who was born in the Bonngasse, No. 515.  This statue faces south, (as do most of the statues that I have seen in Europe, except when the surroundings are unfavorable).  One side of the pedestal contains the following inscription: