sensitive and imaginative temperament, particularly the traveller exiled irrevocably from his home and longing passionately to see it.  Horatius, about to plunge into the Tiber, addressed it as his father and god, charging it to care well for his life and fortunes—­fortunes in which those of all Rome were involved for the time being.  Ecce Tiber! was the glad cry of the Romans on beholding the Tay—­a cry which shows once again with what ardent devotion they thought of the river which passed by their native city; while Naaman the Syrian, told that his sickness would be cured would he but lave his leprous limbs in the Jordan, exclaimed aghast against a prescription which appeared to him nothing short of sacrilegious and insulting, and declared that there were better and nobler streams in his own land.  Even the deadly complaint with which he was smitten could not shake his fidelity to these, could not alter his conviction that they were superior to alien streams; and the truth is that nearly every great river—­perhaps because its perpetual motion makes it seem verily a living thing—­has a way of establishing itself in the hearts of those who dwell by its banks.

The Rhine is no exception to this rule; on the contrary, it is a notable illustration thereof.  From time immemorial the name of the mighty stream has been sacred to the Germans, while gradually a halo of romantic glamour has wound itself about the river, a halo which appeals potently even to many who have never seen the Vaterland.  Am Rhein!—­is there not magic in the words?  And how they call up dreams of robber barons, each with his strange castle built on the edge of a precipice overlooking the rushing stream; fiends of glade and dell, sprites of the river and whirlpool, weird huntsmen, and all the dramatis personae of legend and tradition.

The Rhine has ever held a wide fame in the domain of literature.  For there is scarcely a place on the river’s banks but has its legend which has been enshrined in song, and some of these songs are so old that the names of their makers have long since been forgotten.  Yes, we have to go very far back indeed would we study the poetry of the Rhine adequately; we have to penetrate deeply into the Middle Ages, dim and mysterious.  And looking back thus, and pondering on these legendary and anonymous writings, a poem which soon drifts into recollection is one whose scene is laid near the little town of Lorch, or Lordch.  Hard by this town is a mountain, known to geographers as Kedrich, but hailed popularly as ’the Devil’s Ladder.’  Nor is the name altogether misplaced or undeserved, the mountain being exceeding precipitous, and its beetling, rocky sides seeming well-nigh inaccessible.  This steepness, however, did not daunt the hero of the poem in question, a certain Sir Hilchen von Lorch.  A saddle, said to have belonged to him, is still preserved in the town; but on what manner of steed he was wont to ride is not told explicitly, and truly it must have been a veritable Bucephalus.  For the nameless poet relates that Sir Hilchen, being enamoured of a lady whom angry gnomes had carried to the top of Kedrich and imprisoned there, rode at full gallop right up the side of the mountain, and rescued the fair one!