With such discourse the hour of dinner passed; and after dinner Flemming went to the Cathedral.  They were singing vespers.  A beadle, dressed in blue, with a cocked hat, and a crimson sash and collar, was strutting, like a turkey, along the aisles.  This important gentleman conducted Flemming through the church, and showed him the choir, with its heavy-sculptured stalls of oak, and the beautiful figures in brown stone, over the bishops’ tombs.  He then led him, by a side-door, into theold and ruined cloisters of St. Willigis.  Through the low gothic arches the sunshine streamed upon the pavement of tombstones, whose images and inscriptions are mostly effaced by the footsteps of many generations.  There stands the tomb of Frauenlob, the Minnesinger.  His face is sculptured on an entablature in the wall; a fine, strongly-marked, and serious countenance.  Below it is a bas-relief, representing the poet’s funeral.  He is carried to his grave by ladies, whose praise he sang, and thereby won the name of Frauenlob.

“This then,” said Flemming, “is the grave, not of Praise-God Bare-bones, but of Praise-the-Ladies Meissen, who wrote songs `somewhat of lust, and somewhat of love.’  But where sleeps the dust of his rival and foe, sweet Master Bartholomew Rainbow?”

He meant this for an aside; but the turkey-cock picked it up and answered;

“I do not know.  He did not belong to this parish.”

It was already night, when Flemming crossedthe Roman bridge over the Nahe, and entered the town of Bingen.  He stopped at the White Horse; and, before going to bed, looked out into the dim starlight from his window towards the Rhine, and his heart leaped up to behold the bold outline of the neighbouring hills crested with Gothic ruins;—­which in the morning proved to be only a high, slated roof with fantastic chimneys.

The morning was bright and frosty; and the river tinged with gay colors from the rising sun.  A soft, thin vapor floated in the air.  In the sunbeams flashed the hoar-frost, like silver stars; and through a long avenue of trees, whose dripping branches bent and scattered pearls before him, Paul Flemming journeyed on in triumph.

I will not prolong this journey, for I am weary and way-worn, and would fain be at Heidelberg with my readers, and my hero.  It was already night when he reached the Manheim gate, and drove down the long Hauptstrasse so slowly, that it seemed to him endless.  The shops werelighted on each side of the street, and he saw faces at the windows here and there, and figures passing in the lamp-light, visible for a moment and then swallowed up in the darkness.  The thoughts that filled his mind were strange; as are always the thoughts of a traveller, who enters for the first time a strange city.  This little world had been going on for centuries before he came; and would go on for centuries after he was gone.  Of all the thousands who inhabited it he knew nothing; and what knew they, or thought, of the stranger, who, in that close post-chaise, weary with travel, and chilled by the evening wind, was slowly rumbling over the paved street!  Truly, this world can go on without us, if we would but think so.  If it had been a hearse instead of a post-chaise, it would have been all the same to the people of Heidelberg,—­though by no means the same to Paul Flemming.