THE NEW HYPERION.

From Paris to Marly by way of the Rhine.

IV.—­A day in Strasburg.

[Illustration:  Tearing up the pontoon bridge.]

Behold me, then, with five hours around my neck, like so many millstones, in Strasburg, on the abjured Rhine!  Had I not vowed never to visit that bewitched current again?  Was it not by Rhine-bank that I learned to quote the minnesingers and to unctuate my hair?  From her owl-tower did not old Frau Himmelauen use to observe me, my cane, and my curls, and my gloves?  Did not her gossips compare me to Wilhelm Meister?  And so, when he thought he was ripe, the innocent Paul Flemming must needs proceed to pour his curls, his songs and his love into the lap of Mary Ashburton; and the discreet siren responded, “You had better go back to Heidelberg and grow:  you are not the Magician.”

Yet before that little disaster of my calf period I sighed for the Rhine:  I used its wines more freely than was perhaps good for me, and when the smoke-colored goblet was empty would declare that if I were a German I should be proud of the grape-wreathed river too.  At Bingen I once sat up to behold the bold outline of the banks crested with ruins, which in the morning proved to be a slated roof and chimneys.  And when at Heidelberg I saw the Neckar open upon the broad Rhine plain like the mouth of a trumpet, I felt inspired, and built every evening on my table a perfect cathedral of slim, spire-shaped bottles—­sunny pinnacles of Johannisberger.

And now, decoyed to the Rhine by a puerile conspiracy, how could I best get the small change for my five hours?

[Illustration:  Strasburg cathedral in flames.]

Should I sulk like a bear in the parlor of the Maison Rouge until the departure of the Paris train, or should I explore the city?  Some wave from my fond, foolish past flowed over me and filled me with desire.  I felt that I loved the Rhine and the Rhine cities once more.  And where could I better retie myself to those old pilgrim habits than in this citadel of heroism, a place sanctied by recent woes, a city proved by its endurance through a siege which even that of Paris hardly surpassed?  One draught, then, from the epic Rhine!  To-morrow, at Marly, I could laugh over it all with Hohenfels.

The Muenster was before me—­the highest tower in Europe, if we except the hideous cast-iron abortion at Rouen.  I recollected that in my younger days I had been defrauded of my fair share of tower-climbing.  Hohenfels had a saying that most travelers are a sort of children, who need to touch all they see, and who will climb to every broken tooth of a castle they find on their way, getting a tiresome ascent and hot sunshine for their pains.  “I trust we are wiser,” he would observe, so unanswerably that I passed with him up the Rhine quite, as I may express it, on the ground floor.