XVIII A Sea Change and Spain 1857 (LETTERS 974 TO 1006) LEAVING NEw YoRK in the spring of 1857 Bryant was redeeming a promise made to his wife toward the end of his journey to the East in 1853: "I do not blame you for saying that you will never consent to my going to Europe again without you. I shall never for my part wish to do so." On each long excursion since he and Frances had taken their young daughters abroad in 1834 he had seen places they had hoped to visit together but had failed to do so because of his sudden recall to his newspaper. Now they would fill those gaps in shared experience. After revisiting Paris and Heidelberg, which by now Julia had nearly forgot­ ten, and exploring the Low Countries, familiar only to him, he would guide his family and his niece Estelle Ives across Switzerland and France to the Pyre­ nees and into Spain. Although their four-week sea voyage was occasionally rough, Bryant es­ caped seasickness for the first time, and they all enjoyed shipboard diversions­ shuffleboard and whist, guidebooks and novels, conundrums, and desultory conversations. Their fellow-passengers were congenial; Bryant particularly en­ joyed long conversations in French with a Catholic priest, Father Cenas, who had seen much of South America and was especially enthusiastic in his appraisal of Chileans, red and white. Reaching Le Havre at the end of May, the Bryants followed this itinerary: June I: Rouen; 2-19: Paris (excursion to Versailles); 20-22: Brussels; 23- 25: en route Amsterdam via Antwerp, Rotterdam, The Hague; 26-28: Amster­ dam (excursion to Zaandam); June 29-July 10: en route Heidelberg via Zwolle, Steenwijk, Leeuwarden, Groningen, Leer, Hamm, Deutz, Cologne, Bonn, Konigs­ winter, Koblenz, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt. July 11-19: Heidelberg; 20-21: en route Zurich via Freiburg, Basel, Walds­ hut, Schaffhausen; 22-26: Zurich (excursion to Schmerikon, Weesen, Bad Ragaz, Bad Pfiifers, Wallenstadt); July 27-August 5: en route Geneva via Horgen, Zug, Immensee, Kulm, Weggis, Lucerne, Aarburg, Olten, Bern, Thun, Lauter­ brunnen, Grindelwald, Interlaken, Boltigen, Zweisimmen, Saanen, Bulle, Vevey. August 6-16: Geneva (excursion to Chamonix); 17-22: en route Bagneres­ de-Luchon via Lyons, Nimes, Narbonne, Toulouse; August 23-September 8: Bagneres-de-Luchon. September 9-16: Bagneres-de-Bigorre (excursion to Luz, Lourdes); 17-24: Pau; 25-26: Bayonne; September 27-0ctober 4: San Sebastian. October 5-9: en route Burgos via Vergara, Vitoria, Briviesca; 10-13: Bur­ gos; 14-16: en route Madrid via Aranda, Cabanillas; October 17-November 17: Madrid. A Sea Change and Spain 407 November 18-30: en route Malaga via Albacete, Villena, Alicante, Murcia, Cartagena, Almeria. December 1-14: Malaga (excursion to Granada): 15-23: en route Marseilles via Oran, Algiers; 24-31: Marseilles. Bryant found great changes in Paris, beautified by new boulevards and public buildings being developed by Baron Haussmann under Napoleon III, whose plans for the sumptuous city made life there much dearer, and threatened to leave the poor man "hardly where to lay his head." While the ladies shopped, and their former Heidelberg friend Eva (Hepp) Mercier instructed the girls in French, Bryant saw pictures at the Louvre and at exhibitions, and talked with Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, seeking recovery from bodily injuries suffered the previous year in Congress, and with American Minister John Young Mason, who mistook him for an obscure Virginia versifier and consequently was unaware of his visitor's identity as the caustic critic of his diplomatic quali­ fications four years earlier. Sumner praised the spas he had lately visited in the Pyrenees, increasing Bryant's desire to spend some time there. Leaving Paris, the party made short visits to the chief cities of Belgium and the Netherlands, and after crossing northern Holland by steamer, carriage, and canal boat, entered Germany at Emden and went by rail to Cologne and up the Rhine and the Neckar to Heidelberg. Along the way Bryant dutifully escorted his charges into the principal museums and churches, and passed a day in a pauper colony, but most of their time was spent in outdoor sightseeing. At Brussels they saw the zoo and the botanical garden and listened to a band con­ cert; they drove around the Antwerp docks and the Harmonce Gardens; from the Hague they went to the seashore at Scheveningen, where they caught the queen stepping from a bathing-machine for her morning bath, and dined at the fashionable bathhouse restaurant; in Amsterdam they wandered through the Brook Garden and the most absorbing zoo Bryant had ever seen. Crossing the Ems estuary into Hanover, their little steamer ran on a sandbar, causing them to miss the Cologne train at Emden. From Deutz on the Rhine they joined a religious procession crossing the boat bridge to Cologne, visiting the unfin­ ished cathedral and the ancient church of Saint Ursula, where Bryant was impressed by its display of the skulls of eleven thousand virgins behind glass, in a room whose walls consisted of their marrow bones! At Konigswinter they climbed the thousand-foot Drachenfels, Bryant afoot and the ladies on donkeys, for a sweeping view of the river, then took a steamer to Koblenz and went on to Wiesbaden. Here, served by "half a dozen German Naiads, two or three ... pretty," they drank hot mineral water tasting "a little like chicken broth." They sampled the waters as well at Langenschwalbach and Schlangenbad, and watched gamblers at their hotel, before visiting Frankfurt to see Goethe's birthplace and Danneker's statue of Ariadne on a Panther, then continued by rail to Heidelberg. It was hot, so they settled in the Prinz Karl Hotel for a quiet week, searching out such former friends as they could find. Unexpectedly, at their hotel they met Rev. Robert Waterston and his wife, the former Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy, of Boston, with their daughter Helen. This chance encounter marked the start of an intimacy with the Unitarian minis­ ter which would continue until the end of Bryant's life. As they followed the Neckar, or climbed the hills around Heidelberg, Bryant impressed his compan- 408 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT ion as possessing a "robust nobleness, with quiet repose," seeming a close and exact observer of nature, in the presence of which "a sense of beauty and har­ mony ... quivered through his whole being." Much as he admired Bryant's writings, Waterston thought the man "far more than the best that had proceeded from his pen." The Bryants and the Waterstons would meet again nine months later at Naples, under less happy circumstances. The Bryants had acquired a Dutch guide, John Bolender, fluent in English and somewhat addicted to drink, who would accompany them as far as Madrid. Passing through the Black Forest to Freiburg, where Bryant admired the cathedral spire and Holbein's Adoration in the choir, they spent a night at the old Hotel of the Three Kings overlooking the Rhine in Basel. They followed the river to the great falls at Schaffhausen, then went on to Zurich and sailed up its lake to enter the Alps at Bad Ragaz, where Bryant walked and the ladies rode a wagon to Pfafers high above. Crossing from Zurich to Lake Zug, they climbed Mount Rigi, Frances in a sedan chair and the rest on horseback­ though Bryant noted in his diary, "I walked the greater part of the way leaving the horse to my courier." After a night on the summit at Kulm, they awoke to trumpets calling them to enjoy a "clear, glorious view" of the snow-topped Alps at sunrise. Frances wilted in the heat while walking down toward Weggis on Lake Lucerne, but Cullen found her another chair, and they took a steamer to the city. On the mountain they had met Bryant's Sketch Club friend Beckwith, with whom they now walked the old wooden bridges of Lucerne, with their long-ranging frescoed gables, over the rushing waters of the Reuss, and paid their respects at Thorvaldsen's pathetic memorial to the Swiss Guards of 1792. At Bern they found Professor Hagen, self-exiled from Baden, who walked with them under the cool arcades and across the Aar to the comical bear pits, and took them through the new parliament buildings and an exhibition of indus­ trial arts which reinforced Bryant's respect for Swiss ingenuity and dexterity. On their way through the Bernese Oberland to Vevey the travelers spent two nights at Grindelwald, and here, below the towering white peak of the Jungfrau, Bryant walked on the glaciers and entered their grottoes of clear blue ice. Then, after a "sultry" night in the valley at Interlaken, where he was im­ patient with crowds of idle tourists-"we had not crossed the sea to see fine people," he wrote Christiana Gibson; "there are too many of them in New York"-he found a carriage for the trip over the Simmental to Saanen, and down to Vevey for the crossing by steamer to Geneva. Bryant found that city much changed, physically and politically, since his visit in 1849. The old walls had given way to gardens and boulevards and a handsome lakefront, and the city's patrician rulers were yielding control to a popular party; "The emancipated Catholics," Bryant observed, "are building themselves a magnificent church on the west side of the Rhone, and priests, in cocked hats and long black skirts, go hobbling about in the city of Calvin." He found acquaintances in Geneva, and conversed with an English botanist and his wife who collected and pressed rare plants, but he most enjoyed an excursion to Chamonix on the shoulder of Mount Blanc, where he climbed and wandered across the Mere de Glace.