Leerssen Rhine

The symbolical and political investment of the Rhine A Dutch perspective

Joep Leerssen

The Rhine disappears in Holland. Immediately after crossing the Dutch border, near Nijmegen, it begins to branch out into what is known as the Dutch Delta. Its main branch changes its name to Waal ,while a side branch flowing past Arnhem is called the Nederrijn or “Lower Rhine”. The Waal mingles its waters with those of the Maas or Meuse and, after changings its name to Merwede between Dordrecht and Rotterdam flows into the sea through many mouths and under various names. The Nederrijn for its part changes its name to Lek near Utrecht and reaches the Rotterdam harbour by a different bed. Along the way, various small side rivers are fed from this delta, such as the Vecht flowing from Utrecht to Amsterdam, and no less than two rivers called the IJssel (one in the east, the other in the west of the country). And a number of old, minor branches keep the name of Rhine, such as the Kromme Rijn the Vaartse Rijn , the Leidse Rijn and the Oude Rijn . The Rhine dissolves in the Netherlands, it is everywhere and nowhere. For that reason, perhaps, the Rhine never became an identity focus for Holland as it did for Germany. 1 To be sure, the nation’s greatest poet, Joost van den Vondel, wrote a baroque-metaphysical ode to the Rhine (1620), apostrophizing it in terms like these:

You tireless millwheel-driver City-builder, ship-carrier Realm’s frontier and guardian in peril, Wine-spender, ferryman, bank-gnawer Paper-miller, give me paper For me to write your glories onto: Your waters spark my fire. 2

1 merely mention in passing the long meditative poem “Aan den Rhijn in de lente van het jaar 1820” by Elias Borger, which had some popularity in the nineteenth century as a recitation piece but only uses the riverbank setting for what is in fact an elegy on the death of his wife and child. 2 O onvermoeide molenaer, / O stedebouwer, schepedraeger, / O rijxgrens, schermheer in

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Vondel then celebrates the river, which he surveys from Basel (where Erasmus lies buried) by way of Cologne (where he himself was born) to Holland, praising it as the fount of Holland’s historical glories and present-day affluence, and praying for an end to the violence of the Thirty Years’ War.

But ah! I cry my eyes out and shall myself turn into a stream because of this Hydra that proliferates from religious strife and dynastic hatred a hellish Hydra full of venom poisoning the Rhine’s sweet and wholesome banks and tearing all of the German Empire and thriving in unpardoned murders. May a long-awaited Deliverer sweep the Empire clean of the Empire’s damned plague.

Even in 1620, Vondel is thematizing the river as something that both unites and divides, a line of communication and a battle frontier; following the enumeration of side rivers contributing to the Rhine’s mighty sweep, from Main and Moselle to Lippe and Ruhr, the ramifying “Hydra” image evokes the river’s branchings and divisions before it reaches the sea. 3 When Vondel wrote this poem, Holland was a contested borderland on the outer edge of Germany: Charles V had begun to loosen the ties between the “Burgundian Circle” and the Holy Roman Empire by stressing its status as a Habsburg dynastic lordship, and, on his abdication, by entrusting its suzerainty to Philip II, King of Spain. In the Treaty of Westphalia (1648, 28 years after Vondel’s poem), the northern half was

gevaer, / Wijnschencker, veerman, oeverknaeger, / Papieremaecker, schaf papier, / Daer ick uw glori op magh schryven, / Vw water dat ontvonckt mijn vier. (Vondel: “Aen den Rynstroom”, 1620; full text online at the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren , www.dbnl.org). 3 Maer, och! ick schrey mijn oogen uit, / En sal noch in een' vliet verkeeren, / Om datter sulck een Hydra spruit / Wt kerckgeschil en haet van Heeren; / Een helsche Hydra vol vergift, / Die 's Rijns gesonde en soete boorden / Vergiftight, en gants Duitschland schift, / En groeit in onversoenbre moorden. / Een lang gewenst Verlosser vaegh / Het Rijck van 's Rijcks vervloeckte plaegh.

2 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without taken out of the Empire as an independent Republic, the southern half confirmed as a Habsburg fief - first under the Spanish branch, later under the Austrian branch. Under Napoleon, the Low Countries were caught up in France’s drive for a natural Rhine frontier. A puppet Kingdom of Holland was established in 1806, similar to the Kingdom of Westphalia and similarly governed by a Bonaparte brother, and the entire country was annexed in 1810 as “a sediment of French rivers”. Meanwhile, however, the Prince of Orange-Nassau, heir to the dynasty’s near-hereditary Stadholdership of the Dutch provinces, was already plotting for a return in power following Napoleon’s downfall. Prince Willem had the ear of Castlereagh and was preparing for a restauration of his erstwhile possessions. With the support of his English allies, 4 Willem developed claims on practically the entire Burgundian circle. He envisaged for himself a country (bumped up to the status of Kingdom) bordered in the South by the line Dunkirk-Luxemburg-Trier- Koblenz, and in the East by the Rhine from Koblenz to Kleve and thence north along the 1648 frontier. The Rhine was to become for much of its course a Dutch border river; and all this rationalized partly by geopolitics - to create a strong middle-sized power containing France from the Ardennes to the Channel - but based largely on dynastic delusions of grandeur. In the event, Willem was to get much, though not all, of his Middle Kingdom. He obtained the territory of what is nowadays the Benelux, but had to share military control of the Luxemburg citadel with Prussia. Prussia itself gained the Rhineland Province. Like most compromises, this arrangement provided for an equal distribution of dissatisfaction. Holland now acquired a large southern extension which it wanted to govern but with which it was not prepared to merge, and entered upon an uncomfortable marriage of convenience that failed disastrously in 1830. And its control over the Rhine delta created sore feelings both in France and in Germany. In France, the drive for a natural Rhine frontier was, together with the metric system of weights and measures, one of those things which survived the country’s regime changes intact. The Bourbon minister Polignac was as firm in his ultimate desire for the Rhine frontier, even in the 1820s, as Vauban, Danton and Napoleon had been; and indeed it is to be stressed that the Rhine crisis of 1840 did not appear out of nowhere,

4 For most of what follows, I am indebted to N.C.F. van Sas, Onze natuurlijkste bondgenoot: Nederland, Engeland en Europa, 1813-1831 (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1985).

3 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without but was the manifestation of a long-standing tension. Two episodes in that tension need to be highlighted here, because they involve the Netherlands: the period 1813-1815 and the Belgian Secession of 1830. The former saw the geopolitical tug-of-war around the various frontiers of a Restored Europe, with the Rhine as one of the bones of contention. It was in this context that Ernst Moritz Arndt wrote his fateful Der Rhein, Teutschlands Strom, nicht Teutschlands Gränze . While the main focus of Arndt’s vehement insistence on German claims to the Rhineland concerned the Alsatian situation and Strasbourg, there were already hints that the lower reaches of the Rhine were as important to him as the rover’s upper parts. The Empire’s loss, in 1648, of both the Swiss Cantons and the Dutch Provinces, was equally irksome to him, and he also claimed (like the Prince of Orange) a Luxembourg-Dunkirk borderline, albeit not for a new Netherlands, but for a reconstituted Germany. There are statements by other Romantic Germanists of this generation, men such as Hoffmann von Fallersleben and Jacob Grimm, indicating that he was far from alone in these views. 5 Holland, in this view, was a German border province which owing to regrettable historical accidents had drifted away from the heartland but which the course of history should reconnect to its true appurtenance. The hegemonic attitude from Germany saw this state (astutely enough) as an artificial contrivance doomed to failure. While France coveted the Rhine for its eastern frontier, certain German circles saw the Meuse as the ideal western frontier (a view echoed in the “Von der Maas bis an die Memel”, in Hoffmann von Fallerslebens “Lied der Deutschen”), and Holland was wedged in amidst those overlapping irredentisms. The border between the Netherlands and the Prussian Rhine Province had been designed expressely, in certain places, to keep Prussia away from the Meuse by the length of one cannon shot; and Holland’s control of the Rhine irked Germans no less than the French. For, as a compromise, the river, even if it had not become “Teutschlands Strom” altogether, had been internalionalized by forbidding any tolls along its entire length, thus opening its potential as a pan-German shipping artery. However, the Dutch argued that indeed the Rhine disappears in Holland, and whereas the Rhine toll treaty stipulated toll

5 Ulrike Kloos, Niederlandbild und deutsche Germanistik, 1800-1933. Ein Beitrag zur komparatistischen Imagologie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995); my own De bronnen van het vaderland: Taal, literatuur en de afbakening van Nederland, 1806-1890 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2006).

4 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without freedom jusqu’à la mer - which for Germans meant: up to and including the maritime port of Rotterdam - the Dutch claimed Rotterdam toll rights because the Rhine was no longer the Rhine there, and jusqu’à la mer should not be read as jusque dans la mer ... This attitude caused massive irritation in Germany; the phrase jusqu’à la mer became a bitter catchphrase in German politics (we see it used even in the Frankfurt parliament of 1848), and Holland was seen in some circles as a dour, stolid stopper blocking Germany’s access to the high sea, rather than as a buffer against France. 6 Matters came to a head in 1830, when anti-Dutch liberal riots in Brussels escalated into a full-blown secession movement. The Belgian Revolt came hot on the heels of increasing French gestures towards a Rhineward expansionism: the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, so it was argued in late-1820s France, would create an Eastern power vacuum which, in a domino effect, would allow all European powers to find a new equilibrium by expanding at their eastern frontier, ending with France gaining its Rhine objective. 7 Accordingly, the Belgian secession from the Netherlands was universally seen as part of this French expansionism. The new government in Brussels was pro-French, the new Liberal government in Paris was pro-Belgian, and the Franco-Belgian axis meant that the French sphere of influence now extended almost to Trier, Aachen and Mönchengladbach (for the Province of Limburg from Maastricht to Venlo had gone along with the Belgian secession; it was transferred back to Holland in 1839 partly as a move to keep Belgium away from the Lower Rhine). Arndt reacted immediately with two pamphlets restating, in even more forceful tones, his arguments of 1813: Die Frage über die Niederlande und die Rheinlande (1831) and Belgien und was daran hängt (1834). For observers like Grimm, the Dutch-Belgian split signalled a future redivision where France would extend its sphere of influence northward to Brussels, and Germany its sphere of influence westward to Gent. Accordingly, we see an intense preoccupation among nationalistically-minded Vormärz

6 For German attitudes to Holland against this backdrop, see N.C.F. van Sas, "«Jusqu'à la mer». Vrijheid en onvrijheid aan de Rijn", in Leven met Duitsland. Opstellen over geschiedenis en politiek aangeboden aan Maarten Brands , ed. H. Beliën et al. (Amsterdam: Van Oorschot, 1998): 272-93. More generally, the “classic” which stands as an inspiration behind the work both of Vas Sas and of myself: J.C. Boogman, Nederland en de Duitse Bond, 1815-1851 (2 vols; Groningen: Wolters, 1955). 7 Thus the Oriental Crisis triggering the Rhine Crisis in 1840 was already pre-rehearsed in 1826-1829. Van Sas, Onze natuurlijkste bondgenoot , 286-290, and sources cited there, should be used as the backdrop for reading French and German reactions to the Belgian secession of 1830, cf. Leerssen, Bronnen ,

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Romantics to cultivate friendly ties with Flanders, which from that moment onwards came to be considered an exposed western bulwark against French culture. Gustav Höfken, who, with Arndt, was a delegate at the Frankfurt Parliament, was operative in seeing Flanders as the outermost extension of the German Rhine delta and in fraternally lending Germanic support to Flanders in its struggle against French domination. 8 One particularly strong tie was that of choral socities: German male choirs from the Rhineland were welcome guests at Flemish festivals, e.g. in Gent, while Flemish choirs were present at the Cologne choral festival of 1846. Höfken described that Flemish Wacht am Rhein as follows:

[While, during the opening of the French-Belgian railway in Lille, all thoughts turned on a French-Belgian union], singers from the Rhine, from the Odenwald, from all of Germany as far north as Schleswig-Holstein, accompanied their Belgian brethren to the house of old Ernst Moritz Arndt, to the Drachenfels, to the Victory Monument of the Rhine Crossing of 1814, and in united voices sang before the world [the closing lines of Arndts Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland ]: “That is what is should be, that is what is must be, Germany entire it should be!” While the official speeches of Lille and Brussels preened themselves, two thousand forthright men sang a reply: “Germany entire it should be!” The spirit will unite, and although a song will no more conquer countries than that iron railways will fetter them, and although a song will win no battles, yet it may render them superfluous, which is perhaps an even greater thing; in any case, we have felt the power of German song.9

8 Generally, H.W. von der Dunk, Der deutsche Vormärz und Belgien, 1830-1848 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1966). 9 Gustav Höfken, Vlämisch-Belgien (2 vols; Bremen: Schlodtmann, 1847), 2: 297. In the original: [...] es war ein eigenes Zusammentreffen, daß das Fest zur Eröffnung der französischen Nordeisenbahn an denselben Tagen mit dem vlämisch-deutschen Gesangfeste in Köln stattfand. In Lille und Brüssel hielt der Börsenkönig Rothschild, der Erbauer der Eisenbahn, glänzenden Hof; in Köln herrschten schlichter Gesang und Volkslust. Dort drehten sich alle Reden um den einen Gedanken: Union zwischen Frankreich und Belgien; hier brachten die Sänger vom Rhein, vom Odenwalde, aus ganz Deutschland bis nach Schleswig- Holstein hinauf, die belgischen Brüder vor das Haus des greisen Moritz Arndt, führten sie nach dem Drachenfels, nach dem Siegesdenkmal des Übergangs über den Rhein (1814), und sangen vereint in die Welt hinaus: «Das soll es sein, das muß es sein, das ganze Deutschland soll es sein!» Auf die Redensarten in Lille und Brüssel, die, so schön sie konnten, auf Stelzen gingen, sangen zur Antwort am Rhein zweitausend schlichte Männer: «Das ganze Deutschland soll es sein!» Der Geist vereint, und wenn man mit einem Lied keine Länder erobert – so wenig als man sie mit eisernen Schienen fesselt – und keine

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A pivotal figure in this Flemish-Rhinelandic connection was the poet Prudens Van Duyse, whose cantata closing one of these festivals ended as follows:

Come on, Belgian and German, stand together For freedom, language and Fatherland! Let the banner of the Flemish and the German Choral Union Be proudly displayed on Gent’s field of gold! We want to be free like the eagle Who proudly soars on his own wings And who will admit only one caress: that of the sun. Our sun is the fatherland And where is the fatherland of the German nation? Wherever the language of the Germanic tribes Is raised, flourishes and delights the people There lies our fatherland 10

The echoes of Arndt’s “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland”, already thematized so heavily in Höfkens prose, are obvious to anyone who can manage to read through to the closing lines. All in all, the link between Flemish national romanticism and Rhenian geopolitics is obvious, a final example being this poem from the Flemish poet Victor dela Montagne which is a remarkable example of late-nineteenth-century Rhine kitsch in Flemish form.

A true old German tavern, singing “Burschen” on the linden tree bench A blonde maid on the doorstep, and vines trailing around the wooden wall

Smoke-stained beams in the interior, a firm brown-tinted twilight And a stray sunbeam playing over mug and pint

Schlachten gewinnt, so kann es sie doch vielleicht überflüssig machen, und das ist noch mehr. Wir nur fühlen des deutschen Liedes Kraft.” 10 Welaan, Germaan en Belg te zaam ten strijd / Voor vrijheid, taal en Vaderland! / De vaan van ’t Duitsche en Vlaamsche Zangverbond / Praal’ op ’t Gentse eregoud! / Wij willen vrij zijn als de adelaar / Die stout op eigen wieken drijft / Voor wien er slechts één’ koestring is: de zon. / Onz’ zon is ’t Vaderland. / En waer is ’t Vaderland des Duitschen stams? / Alom waar der Germanen tael / Zich heft en bloeit en ’t volk verrukt / Daar is ons Vaderland. Quoted

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Blue tobacco clouds, and a cat purring by the fireplace And from the walls three faces gravely look down upon the silent host:

Field Marshall Blücher, Kaiser Wilhelm and Old Fritz Men of steel and iron, a green-laureled hero-triad.

We sit near the open windows, and in our tall slender glasses The blonde, sacred wine shimmers in pearls, rays and sparks.

The waves of the old Rhine flow like melting silver The mountain-tops glow in the purle-red sunset

In the valley way down below, a lad sings full of yearning And deep, stately peace eddies silently over the blue expanse. 11

And in Holland? Here, too, the Rhine stood for Romanticism. The Romantic movement has long been unnoticed in Dutch literary history, to the point even that Dutch literary historians long maintained that Romanticism failed to take hold in Dutch literature, or that, as the saying goes, it flapped its wings, but never took flight. That judgement reflected a lack of vision among literary historians rather than a lack of Romanticism in Dutch literature, and in recent decades much has been done to set the record straight. One of the Romantic manifestos in Dutch has been highlighted in particular. It dates from 1831, was written by the critic Jacob Geel, has the form of a philosophical dialogue and is set... on the Drachenfels. 12

Leerssen, De bronnen . 11 “Een echte oudduitse taveerne, / zingende ‘Burschen’ ter lindebank, / op de drempel een blonde deerne, / om ’t houten geveltje wingerdrank; // van binnen gerookte balken, / een krachtig bruine schemertint, / en een zonnestraal, de schalke, / die dartelt over kroes en pint. / / De tabakswolken blauwen. / Poes spint er bij de koele haard; / en van de wanden schouwen / diep ernstig op de zwijgende waard, / / Feldmarschall’ Blücher en keizer / Wilhelm en der alte Fritz, / mannen van staal en ijzer, / een groenomlauwerde heldentrits. // Wij zitten bij de open vensters, en in de romers slank en rank / strooit parels, stralen en gensters / de blonde wijn, de heilige drank. // Als smeltend zilver vloeien / de golven van de oude Rijn, / der bergen toppen gloeien / in purperrode avondschijn; // in ’t dal wel verre beneden, / klinkt stil weemoedig het knapenlied, / en diepe, statige vrede / wiegt zwijgend over het blauw verschiet...” Quoted Leerssen, De Bronnen . 12 The Dutch comparatist and literary historian Willem van den Berg has done much to

Geel’s Conversation on the Drachenfels (“Gesprek op den Drachenfels”) 13 tries to distinguish what Thomas De Quincey would call “the literature of knowledge and the literature of power”, and thus forms part of the Romantic debate about the power of language to represent and the power of the poet to imagine. The respective poetical positions - the dictates of veracity vs. the power of imagination - are represented by “Diocles” and “Charinus”, both professors at Bonn university (in real life: Geel’s acquaintances Karl Friedrich Heinrich and August Ferdinand Naeke). The positions taken in this debate need not concern us in detail; more intriguing in the present context is the fact that “romantic” is linked specifically to congenially sublime landscapes described, invoked or imagined by the poet. Textual references are specifically to Schiller, and his Swiss landscape description in Wilhelm Tell , Byrons Mazeppa and of course his Childe Harold which explicitly evokes “the castled crag of Drachenfels”. The Drachenfels is itself, of course, deployed as an example of the power of description to evoke a landscape - an elegant mise en abyme where Geel’s discourse itself exemplifies what it thematizes. The ascent of the Drachenfels follows the route of the Eselweg , by then already fixed in the tourist trade, and the first thing the company meet is an English tourist seated on an ass, very much as in Bulwer-Lytton’s description of The Pilgrims of the Rhine (1834). Indeed, boat trips upstream to the Siebengebirge were to become a popular Dutch tourist enterprise. The penchant for German Rhine romanticism in Holland seems to follow the curve of English interest as traced in Günther Blaichers Das Deutschlandbild in der englischen Literatur of 1992. An example of its persistence as gesunkenes Kulturgut is furnished by the music-hall song Een reisje langs den Rijn (Louis Davids, 1906), which has remained popular throughout the twentieth century despite two world wars. 14

retrieve the idea that there was, in fact, a Dutch participation in European Romanticism, and has drawn attention to Geel’s “Gesprek op den Drachenfels”. Cf. his De ontwikkeling van de term ‘romantisch’ en zijn varianten in Nederland tot 1840 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1973); "«Onze poëzie is 'reëel' en 'praktisch'». Het denken over de identiteit van de Nederlandse letterkunde in de eerste helft van de negentiende eeuw", in «Typisch Nederlands»: De Nederlandse identiteit in de letterkunde , ed. K. Enenkel et al. (Voorthuizen: Florivallis, 1999): 149-62; Een bedachtzame beeldenstorm , ed. Klaus Beekman et al. (Amsterdam University Press, 1999). 13 Full text available online on the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (www.dbnl.org), following the 1968 edition of J.C. Brandt Cortius; I have made grateful use of Brandt Corstius’ editorial annotations and clarifications. 14 “We won from the lottery a nice little tip, I said to my friends, join me for a pleasant trip; they suggested Brussels, or Paris or London, but I said: “Come on! We’ll be fine with a trip along the Rhine!” And before you knew it we were all aboard... [Chorus, on the melody of Berliner

The last word should be given to Jacob Geel. His romantic Gradus ad Parnassum continues up the slopes of the Drachenfels amidst ever more romantic views over the valley and the surrounding mountains, the medieval ruin, and the legends of Rolandseck and of the dragon which was ousted by a maiden’s steadfast Christian belief. However, the Drachenfels is also the sentinel mid-way point between the delights of the Romantic imagination and the dull flat plains of Dutch realism: it is here, that Father Rhine emerges from the land of Loreleys and medieval ruins to commence his bored, sullen meanderings through flat fields. That at least was the point that had been made by Ludolf Wienbarg in his Holland in den Jahren 1831 und 1832 , which had appeared in 1833, and which provided an important repoussoir for Geel’s treatise. For the time was after all, that of the years dominated by the Belgian secession and German digruntlement over the Rotterdam tolls at the mouths of the Rhine jusqu’à la mer. Fittingly and subtly, therefore, the peak of this German-romantic mountain is reached with reference to the influence of France. Symbolically, even the battle of literary fashions becomes a German-French confrontation fought on the Rhine. Diocles bitterly denounces a modern tendency to describe reality only in its gruesomeness, to describe the eating of bread as a disgusting list of details concerning chewing, swallowing, spittle, dirty teeth and bad breath. The Dutch tourist exclaims

“In heaven’s name, Diocles, stop! [...] my stomach is turning” “I cannot help it,” he replied: this is the French romantic school . Do not gag: your country is beginning to celebrate it.” “ Oh no!,” I exclaimed, “maybe an isolated fool...” But Diocles had begun the descent, with Charinus following him. The sun had set, and the Rhine-mists rose higher. The entire landscape vista became

Luft: ] Yes, a trip along the Rhine, Rhine Rhine, evenings in the moonshine, shine, shine; with a tasty mug of beer, beer, beer we can steer steer steer on the river, -ver, -ver. On one of those newfangled boats, boats, boats, in the cabin below deck, deck, deck; o how fashionable and fine fine fine, such a trip along the Rhine!” In the original: “Laatst trokken we uit de loterij / Een aardig prijsje, / 'k Zei tot mijn vrienden: 'Maak met mij / Een aardig reisje.' / Die wou naar Brussel of Parijs, / Die weer naar Londen, / 'Vooruit!' riep ik, 'wij maken fijn / Een reisje langs den Rijn!' / In een wip, sakkerloot, / Zat het clubje op de boot! [Refrein:] Ja, zoo'n reisje langs den Rijn, Rijn, Rijn, / 's Avonds in den maneschijn, schijn, schijn, / Met een lekker potje bier, bier, bier, / Aan den zwier, zwier, zwier, / Op d'rivier, vier, vier! / Zoo'n reisje met een nieuwerwetsche schuit, schuit, schuit, / Allemaal in de kajuit, juit, juit, / 't Is zoo deftig, 't is zoo fijn, fijn, fijn, / Zoo een reisje langs den Rijn.”

sombre and awe-inspiring. As we hastened down, nothing more was said; for descending from such heights is a speedy business. As we were ferried across the Rhine, the conversation was hampered by the chill on the water, which made each of us cower into his cloak; but I looked back, between the two, at what I could still discern of the top of the Drachenfels; for there I had seen much, and heard much which I have often recalled since. 15

15 In the original: “In 's hemels naam, Diocles, houd op! riep ik: mijn hart draait om! - Ik kan het niet helpen, antwoordde hij: het is de Fransche romantische school. Gij moogt niet walgen: uw vaderland begint ze te huldigen. - Och neen! riep ik, een enkele verdwaalde... - Maar Diocles was reeds aan het afdalen van den berg, en Charinus volgde hem. De zon was ondergegaan, en de Rijn-nevels rezen hooger. Het geheele natuurtooneel werd somber en ontzagwekkend. Wij haasteden ons naar beneden, en er werd niets meer gesproken: want het afstijgen van zulke hoogten gaat snel. Terwijl wij den Rijn overvoeren, was het gesprek gestremd door de koude op het water, die ieder van ons in zijn mantel deed duiken; maar ik keek nog tusschen beide op naar de spits van den Drachenfels, zoo veel ik ze onderscheiden kon: want ik had er veel gezien, en veel gehoord, waaraan ik dikwijls herdacht heb.”