thus engaged, he
thought of the vow he had made while a captive--the vow he had not kept.
Here, possibly--here in this shadow darkening the joy of his bridal--was
a message from on high! So straightway he built his chapel, choosing as
situation therefor a spot hard by the windswept hermitage, and in this
shrine to St. Peter dwelt Bertha's sister to the end of her days. Was
it, mayhap, jealousy and a dart from Cupid's bow which kept her there;
and was she, too, enamoured of Sir Dietrich? Well, the poet who tells
the story certainly thought so!

Drinking Songs of the Rhine

It were a lengthy matter to recount the many other poems of Rhineland
akin to those mustered above, and enough has been said to indicate
their general characteristics; while an ancient Rhine classic of yet a
different kind, The Mouse Tower, given elsewhere, is so familiar owing
to Southey's English version that it were superfluous to offer any
synopsis or criticism of it here. Then a class of poems of which the
great river's early literature is naturally replete are those concerned
with the growing of the vine and the making of Rhenish, prominent among
these being one consecrated to Bacharach, a town which was a famous
centre of the wine industry in the Middle Ages. Near Bacharach there
is a huge stone in the Rhine which, known as 'the Altar of Bacchus,'
is visible only on rare occasions, when the river chances to be
particularly low; and in olden times, whenever this stone was seen,
the event was hailed by the townsfolk as an omen that their next grape
harvest would be an exceptionally successful one. It is with this 'Altar
of Bacchus' that the poem in question deals. But coming to modern times,
many of the Rhine drinking songs are also concerned to some extent with
patriotism--an element which seems to go hand in hand with the
bacchanal the world over!--and a typical item in this category is
the Rheinweinlied of Georg Hervegh, a poet of the first half of the
nineteenth century. A better patriotic song of Rhine-land, however,
is one by a slightly earlier poet, Wolfgang Mueller, a native of
Koenigswinter, near Bonn, who sings with passionate devotion of the great
river, dwelling lovingly on its natural beauties, and exalting it above
all other streams. His song appears to have been composed when the
writer was undergoing a temporary period of exile from the Vaterland,
for a somewhat pathetic and plaintive air pervades each verse, and the
poet refers