that he fell backward and
broke his neck, is the solid remembrance of castles built on many of these
Rhine-hills, defences and bulwarks of the archbishops of Cologne against
the emperors of Germany. But Drachenfels keeps another token of its legend
in its dark-red wine, called "dragon's blood." (Could any teetotaller have
invented a more significant name?) One has often heard of the unbelieving
monk who stumbled at the passage in Scripture which declares that a
thousand years are but as one day to the Lord, and the consequent taste of
eternity which he was miraculously allowed to enjoy while he wandered off
for a quarter of an hour, as he thought, but in reality for three hundred
years, following the song of a nightingale. The abbey of Heisterbach
claims this as an event recorded in its books, and its beautiful ruins and
wide naves with old trees for columns are, so says popular rumor, haunted
by another wanderer, an abbot with snow-white beard, who walks the
cloisters at night counting the graves of his brethren, and vainly seeking
his own, which if he once find his penance will be over. This part of the
Rhine was the favorite home of many of the poets who have best sung of the
national river: a cluster of townlets recalls no less than five of them to
our mind--Unkel, where Freiligrath chose his home; Menzerberg, where
Simrock lived; Herresberg, Pfarrins's home; Koenigswinter, Wolfgang
Mueller's birthplace; and Oberkassel, that of Gottfried Kinkel. Rhondorf
shows us a monument of one of the last robber-lords of Drachenfels, and
Honnef a smiling modern settlement, a very Nice of the North, where the
climate draws together people of means and leisure, _litterateurs_,
retired merchants and collectors of art-treasures, as well as
health-seekers. These little colonies, of which most of the large cities
on the Rhine have a copy in miniature, even if it be not a bathing-place,
are the places in which to seek for that domestic taste and refinement
which some hasty and prejudiced critics have thought fit to deny to the
Fatherland.

[Illustration: DRACHENFELS.]

The scenery of the Rhine begins to lose its distinctive features as we
near Bonn: plains replace rocks, and the waters flow more sluggishly. Bonn
is alive enough: its antiquities of Roman date are forgotten in its
essentially modern bustle, for the heart of its prosperity is of very
recent date, the university having been founded only in 1777, and after
the troubles of