and to me full of suggestions and emotions.  Ah, if there be, as the apostle vividly suggests, houses not made with hands, strange splendors, of which these are but shadows, that vast religious spirit may have been finding scope for itself where all the forces of nature shall have been made tributary to the great conceptions of the soul.  Save this cathedral, Strassburg has nothing except peaked-roofed houses, dotted with six or seven rows of gable windows.

[Footnote A:  From “Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands.”  Mrs. Stowe published this work in 1854, after returning from the tour she made soon after achieving great fame with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  During this visit she was received everywhere with distinction—­and especially in England.]

FREIBURG AND THE BLACK FOREST[A]

BY BAYARD TAYLOR

The airy basket-work tower of the Freiburg minster rises before me over the black roofs of the houses, and behind stand the gloomy pine-covered mountains of the Black Forest.  Of our walk to Heidelberg over the oft-trodden Bergstrasse, I shall say nothing, nor how we climbed the Kaiserstuhl again, and danced around on the top of the tower for one hour amid cloud and mist, while there was sunshine below in the valley of the Neckar.  I left Heidelberg yesterday morning in the “stehwagen” for Carlsruhe.  The engine whistled, the train started, and, altho I kept my eyes steadily fixt on the spire of the Hauptkirche, three minutes hid it and all the rest of the city from sight.  Carlsruhe, the capital of Baden—­which we reached in an hour and a half—­is unanimously pronounced by travelers to be a most dull and tiresome city.  From a glance I had through one of the gates, I should think its reputation was not undeserved.  Even its name in German signifies a place of repose.

I stopt at Kork, on the branch-road leading to Strassburg, to meet a German-American about to return to my home in Pennsylvania, where he had lived for some time.  I inquired according to the direction he had sent me to Frankfort, but he was not there; however, an old man, finding who I was, said Herr Otto had directed him to go with me to Hesselhurst, a village four or five miles off, where he would meet me.  So we set off immediately over the plain, and reached the village at dusk....

My friend arrived at three o’clock the next morning, and, after two or three hours’ talk about home and the friends whom he expected to see so much sooner than I, a young farmer drove me in his wagon to Offenburg, a small city at the foot of the Black Forest, where I took the cars for Freiburg.  The scenery between the two places is grand.  The broad mountains of the Black Forest rear their fronts on the east, and the blue lines of the French Vosges meet the clouds on the west.  The night before, in walking over the plain, I saw distinctly the whole of the Strassburg minster, whose spire is the highest in Europe, being four hundred and ninety feet, or but twenty-five feet lower than the Pyramid of Cheops.