At a short distance from Bussang, a little town in the Department des Vosges in France, is the source of the Moselle; trickling through the moss and stones that, [2]together with fallen leaves, strew the ground, come the first few drops of this beautiful river.
A few yards lower down the hill-side, these drops are received into a little pool of fairy dimensions; this tiny pool of fresh sweet water is surrounded by mossy stones, wild garlic, ferns, little creepers of many forms, and stems of trees.
The trees, principally pine, grow thickly over the whole ballon (as the hills are here called); many are of great size; they shut out the heat of the sun, and clothe the earth with tremulous shadows—tremulous, because the broad but feathery ferns receive bright rays, and waving to and fro in the gentle breeze give the shadows an appearance of constant movement.
Here, then, O reader, let us pause and contemplate the birth-place of our stream; leaving the world of stern reality, let us plunge together into the grateful spring of sweet romance; and while the only sounds of life that reach our ears are the rustling of the leaves, the buzz of the great flies, the murmur of the Moselle, and the distant ringing of the woodman’s axe, let us return with Memory into the past, and leaving even her behind, go back to those legendary days when spirits purer than ourselves lived and gloried in that beautifully created world which we are daily rendering all unfit for even the ideal habitation of such spirits.
And reverie is not idleness; in hours like these we seem to see before us, cleared from the mists of daily cares, the better path through life—the broad straight path, not thorny and difficult, as men are too prone to [3]paint it, but strewed with those flowers and shaded with those trees given by a beneficent Creator to be enjoyed rightly by us earthly pilgrims.
Life is a pilgrimage indeed, but not a joyless one. While the whole earth and sky teem with glory and beauty, are we to believe that these things may not be enjoyed? Our conscience answers, No; rightly to enjoy, and rightly to perform our duties, with thankfulness, and praise, and love within our hearts, such is our part to perform, and such the lesson we are taught by the fairy of the sweet Moselle.
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BIRTH OF THE MOSELLE.
The fair Colline slept in sunshine, when from the far horizon a rain-cloud saw her beauty, and with impetuous ardour rushing through the sky he sought the gentle Colline, wooed her with soft showers, and decked her with jewelled drops and bright fresh flowers.
She soon learnt to love the rugged cloud, and from their union sprang a bright streamlet which, cradled in its mother’s lap, reflected her sweet image. Then, as the time passed on, the little one increased in strength, and leapt and danced about its mother’s knee. Larger and stronger grew the streamlet until its tripping step became more firm, and then it passed into the valley, catching reflections from the things around. And onward went this fairy stream, her source watched over by a mother’s love; and her cloud-father fed her as she passed between her grassy banks. [4]
Then girlhood came, and sister streams flowed in, and, whispering to her, told their little tales of life: so now, her mind enlarged, she onward flows, sometimes reflecting on the things of earth, but oftener expanding her pure bosom to catch the impress of the holy sky; and all the tenants of the sky loved to impart their infinite beauties and their glory to the pure stream.
The age of girlhood passes now away, and she becomes a fair maiden, to gaze on whose beauties towers and cities, castles, spires, and hills, come crowding, and line her path, each giving her the gift of its own being.
Now come the mountains, too, with their crowns of forest waving on their heads, and do homage to her beauty: [5]she gives a sweet smile to all, lingering at every turn to look back upon her friends; but yet she tarries not, her duty leads her on,—nor worldly pomp, or pride, or power, can keep her from her appointed path; she leaves them all behind, and swelling onwards through the level plain, receives the approving glance of heaven, and meets her noble husband Rhine, who, long expecting, folds her in his arms. And thus her pilgrimage complete, her duty ended, she calmly sleeps that happy sleep which wakes only in eternity.
Such is the history of the birth and life of the Moselle. We have now to wander from her birthplace here, in the Vosges mountains, to where she joins her glorious husband Rhine beneath the walls of Ehrenbreitstein. From time to time we shall linger by the roadside, to pluck a flower from legendary lore; from time to time we shall stop to secure a chip from the great rock of history: storing thus our herbal and our sack as well as our portfolio, we shall follow the many bendings of our graceful river, which, womanlike, moves gently and caressingly along, soothing and gladdening all things.
The fairy and the river are as one, life within life; ever flowing on, yet always present; ever young, and yet how old; ever springing freshly mid the hills and woods, yet ever ending the appointed course.
One life is material, earthly, but still sweet and beautiful; the other life is born of the first, but far exceeds [6]it,—it is the life poetic, whose other parent is the human mind: this life, which leaves the parent life behind, floats upwards on its glorious wings and reaches the highest realms of heaven, carrying with it the souls of those who read this life aright——
Lying here beneath the pines, we recall those old days of the past when, on the borders of our river, only forests waved, amid whose depths tribes of wild warriors dwelt apart,—their only amusement hunting, their only business war, they scorned to cultivate the soil save for their actual necessities.
In this neighbourhood lived the Leuci, whose capital was Toul; lower down, the Mediomatrices had their chief city, Metz; and beyond these again came the Treviri, occupying the country about Trèves.
All these were members of that great German family which gave sea-kings to Norway, conquerors to imperial Rome, and at a later day that champion (Charles Martel) who stayed the tide of Moslem conquest near Poitiers; thus Christianising half Europe, and probably saving all earth from Mahomet’s false creed.
Rugged and strong were these old Germans—the huge pines well represent them; glorious in strength, stern in duty, upright, sombre, and picturesquely magnificent: they are recorded as having been of great size, with blue eyes and light hair, inured to every hardship, and never laving aside their arms. [7]
Owning no superior, yet when once they had elected a chief, and raised him aloft upon their shields, they obeyed him implicitly; if unsuccessful in battle they would kill themselves rather than survive, believing that those who died on the battle-field were received by the Walkyren, or heavenly maidens, who hovered over the fight and chose lovers from the dying warriors.
What a picture of barbaric grandeur and indomitable will is given us in the last act of one of their more northern naval heroes! Being mortally wounded in a fight in which he had conquered his enemies, he caused himself to be placed on board his vessel with the bodies of his slain enemies around him, and all his plunder piled into a throne, on which he sat,—then the sails were set, the pile was lighted, and the blazing vessel putting out to sea, he sought his heaven—Walhalla.
This Walhalla was supposed to contain a great battle-field, on which the warriors fought their foes all day, receiving no hurt; and at evening they returned to carouse and enjoy the caresses of the Walkyren.
Of these immediate tribes, however, C?sar relates, that “they only worshipped the forms of the gods they could see and whose beneficence they felt, such as the sun, moon, and fire; of others they had never heard.” Doubtless, in after days, they adopted many of the Roman divinities, but at the time of which we speak they adored their Creator on the mountain tops; and when Christianity was introduced they built their churches on the tops of hills, and even now the sacred [8]edifices are usually placed on eminences. Some remnant of the old hill-worship still remains, for the Mass is annually read to the Sens shepherds on the Alps; and not long ago the Saint John’s fire was yearly lit upon the hill-tops.
Christmas was their most holy time; for then, they said, the gods walked on earth.
The oak and the alder were objects of especial reverence; for from the former man was made, and woman from the latter.
They considered all trees, and flowers, and plants, and stones, and even animals, to be inhabited by beings of a superior order, who came from an intermediate heaven and hell.
Lakes, rivers, and springs, were held in special veneration; and Petrarch relates, that even in the fourteenth century the women at Cologne bathed in the Rhine to wash away their sins.
Strangely in their natures were intermixed the gentle and the savage, the cruel and the terrible, with the honourable and brave. Side by side we find human sacrifices and a festival in honour of the first violet; men who had been mutilated, and sickly children were sunk in morasses, or otherwise destroyed; and we find them with a pure love for woman, whom they held in the highest reverence. Their women were brought up in the strictest seclusion, scarcely seeing any stranger,—an injury offered to female modesty was punished by death, and fines for injuries done to them were heavier than for those to men. [9]
Maidens were portionless, so only married for their merits or their beauty: they seldom married before their twentieth year, and the husband had generally reached his thirtieth; they had but one husband, and the historian Tacitus observes, speaking of them, “as she can have but one body and one life, so she can have but one husband.”
Prophetesses were frequent, and great confidence placed in their predictions,—they were called Alrun?, and lived apart in the recesses of the forests.
They had many ways of interpreting the will of the gods, but of all interpreters the horse was considered the most sacred; white horses were peculiarly venerated, and maintained at the expense of the community, expressly to interpret the divine will,—even the priests themselves considered that they were but the ministers, while the horses were the confidants of the gods.
The priests, as in all semi-barbarous countries, were the real governors of these uncurbed Germans: no control but theirs was submitted to; even in camp they alone had the right to bind and flog, and in all public assemblies they kept order: these functions they assumed as ministers of the supreme, invisible Being. There was, however, no priestly caste, and each head of a family could perform religious offices for his own household.
Thus we find, at this earliest period of the known history of our river—its banks occupied by a brave, hardy race, given to dissipation and war, and governed by priests whose bloody sacrifices were offered to a [10]supreme Being, worshipped through His great emblems of sun, fire, and water—they enjoyed a life of action, and looked forward to a death of glory.
Under this rugged nature appear the gentler attributes of love and veneration; and a belief in Fairies, Kobolds, Nixies, and all the different classes of superior existences with which they supposed the whole world to teem.
Savage and grand, loving and honourable, we shall, if we examine history, find them first engaging the Romans on equal terms, then for a while giving place to the conquerors of the world, but ever holding themselves superior to them, not adopting their habits but merely borrowing their knowledge to render themselves more fit to encounter them; and finally, we shall find them supplanting these world-conquerors, and seizing for themselves that crown and dominion, the fairest portion of which remains with the German race to this present day. And, moreover, it is this German race that has carried civilisation over the whole earth, and whose descendants, the English people, are rapidly populating the great continents of America and Australia.
Back from the train of old history our thoughts return as the evening closes in by the source of our sweet river, and we bend our steps down through the dim woods. The white butterflies flap past, heavily, as though feeling the last moments of their short lives are fleeting fast; frequently above our heads starts out a projecting mass of rock, from whose summit a great [11]pine towers up, first leaning forward, then shooting upwards, its top seems piercing the blue sky.
Ever and anon open out green dells, filled with bright foxgloves and other beautiful flowers; through these dells trickle tiny rivulets that swell the course of our young stream, which through the woods we hear gurgling and gushing on, falling from stone to stone, and wearing many a little pool in the rough ground.
Occasionally we pass a heap of fresh-cut wood, and across our path lie huge trunks of the fallen forest giants; a resinous odour is strongly mixed with the scent of the wild flowers,—one flower, from which the mountain bees make their delicious honey, is peculiarly fragrant and very frequent; occasionally the rivulet is quite hid by the luxuriant carpets of the false forget-me-not that line its banks.
At length we pass from the forest to the cultivated land: the little valley opens into a wider one, which is surrounded by mountains of diverse forms steeped in sunlight; the sun declines, and wreaths of blue smoke ascend from the chalets on the hill-sides, where the evening meal is being prepared for the active, hard-working peasantry, who, with loads of all sorts on their heads, pass by, saluting politely as they go us and each other.
The young stream dances along by the roadside, and thus we enter Bussang, and close our first chapter of this fairy life.