heir infinite view thence? It was like an
outpost of some far-off fancy land, a pledge of the reality of such.
Above Cassel, the airy hills curved in one black outline against a
glowing sky, pregnant, one could fancy, with weird forms, which might
be at their old diableries again on those remote places ere night was
quite come there. At last in the streets, the hundred churches, of
Cologne, he feels something of a "Gothic" enthusiasm, and all a
German's enthusiasm for the Rhine.

Through the length and breadth of the Rhine country the vintage was
begun. The red ruins on the heights, the white-walled villages, white
Saint Nepomuc upon the bridges, were but isolated high notes of
contrast in a landscape, sleepy and indistinct under the flood of
sunshine, with a headiness in it like that of must, of the new wine.
The noise of the vineyards came through the lovely haze, still, at
times, with the sharp sound of a bell--death-bell, perhaps, or only a
crazy summons to the vintagers. And amid those broad, willowy reaches
of the Rhine at length, from Bingen to Mannheim, where the brown hills
wander into airy, blue distance, like a little picture of paradise, he
felt that France was at hand. Before him lay the road thither, easy and
straight.--That well of light so close! But, unexpectedly, the
capricious incidence of his own humour with the opportunity did not
suggest, as he would have wagered it must, "Go, drink at once!" Was it
that France had come to be of no account at all, in comparison of
Italy, of Greece? or that, as he passed over the German land, the
conviction had come, "For you, France, Italy, Hellas, is here!"--that
some recognition of the untried spiritual possibilities of meek Germany
had for Carl transferred the ideal land out of space beyond the Alps or
the Rhine, into future time, whither he must be the leader? A little
chilly of humour, in spite of his manly strength, he was journeying
partly in search of physical heat. To-day certainly, in this great
vineyard, physical heat was about him in measure sufficient, at least
for a German constitution. Might it be not otherwise with the
imaginative, the intellectual, heat and light; the real need being that
of an interpreter--Apollo, illuminant rather as the revealer than as
the bringer of light? With large belief that the Eclaircissement, the
Aufklaerung (he had already found the name for the thing) would indeed
come, he had been in much bewilderment whence and how.