MISS EDEN'S JOURNEY IN AUSTRIA.*
THIS is a pleasant and truthful little book, somewhat slight and sketchy, but entirely without pretension and affectation. We doubt if Miss Eden does full justice to some of the scenes through which she passed, but at least she indulges in no false enthusiasms, and tells us simply and with vivacity the impressions left upon her mind by a visit to one of the most beautiful regions of Europe,— Salzburg, the Salzkammergut, and the little enclave (or almost- enclave) of Bavaria, in which Berchtesgaden and the Konigsee is situated. The fault of Miss Eden's book is that she took such a rapid glance at the beautiful places of which she writes, that instead of overcolouring, as travellers are apt to do, she often gives a far less attractive picture of the places described than she would have done had she studied them longer and been at all specially open,—which we take it she is not,—to the influences of natural scenery. This partial want of interest in striking natural effects shows itself not only in her pictures of what is beautiful or grand, but even of what is odd, eerie, and Dantesque, like her sketch of the visit to the salt-mine at Berchtesgaden, which had interest enough for us, we admit, to induce us to follow in Miss Eden's footsteps, but her account of which, when read after the visit, does not seem to us to paint anything like adequately the character of the place. Miss Eden first describes the costume in which the visitors are compelled to clothe themselves Then proceeding to the robing-room, we take off our usual dress, and reappear in Bloomer costume—long white trousers, dark tunics, leather belts and aprons, and rather elaborately ornamented caps. There were six of us, all feeling horribly shy and awkward, and staring and giggling at each other. None of us had courage sufficient to be the first to descend the stairs and join the ten gentlemen below, who, their dress also having undergone a metamorphosis, had been changed—at least in appearance—into working miners. At last I suggested to some of the ladies who had husbands below that probably they would be tired of waiting, and so prevailed on them to be the first to descend. I could not help feeling surprised to see how the dowdy, common-place-looking women, in their smart holiday finery, came out quite pretty and grace- ful in their Bloomer costume. We need not have felt so shy about our descent, for the gentlemen below evidently felt just as awkward and as foolish in their miners' dress as we did in our unusual attire."
The present writer had not the pleasure of observing the effect of the Bloomer costume on any "dowdy, common-place-looking women," as none such visited the mine with him. But certainly the transformation effected on one slight, diminutive lady was very curious. It turned her at once into one of the conventional "pages" of the romance-writers, so that when she approached her husband with a candle in her hand and some saucy remark on her tongue after her transformation, he involuntarily replied at once in G.-P.-R.-Jamesese, "Ha, minion,—would'at scoff at me? Peace and look well to thyself ; see thou followest aright the steps of thy trusty guide, or it may be worse for thee yet, froward boy I" The fault of the authorities is that they have not costumes suffi- ciently adapted to all statures and figures. A lady of larger build, who might easily have been transformed into a handsome, fair-haired, Westphalian student, was travestied by her scanty costume into a stout school-boy with a two-iuch tail-coat ; and a little boy of five years old, who was evidently of opinion that his father was about to conduct him into the grave, and who cried bitterly to be let off, was engulfed in a small miner's dress which made his pleading, apprehensive, blue eyes twinkle from out a dismal little cavern of dark fustian. This is Miss Eden's descrip- tion of the mine itself :— " We followed the guides a considerable distance through a long under- ground passage, through doorways, and up and down numerous side galleries, till we came to a very black, dreary-looking subterranean lake, which filled a large cavern. It was lighted all round the edge with hundreds of candles, which showed its dimensions, and made it look more gloomy and depressing. We entered a flat-bottomed boat, and were rowed first to a small fountain, the dripping of whose waters was the only sound to be heard in this awful place. We were then rowed to the opposite side, where we were landed. A more dreary boating excur- sion I never male—not even when, tide necessitating, I have had to go off in a small boat and heavy sea to the Ostend steamer, I should have • ify Holiday in Austria. By Lizzie Selina Eden. London: Hurst and $16.6kOti. 1869. felt still more uncomfortable in my mind had I known at the moment that this lake, which I only looked on as a saucer of ink, was in reality a fearfully deep pit of brine, filled by fresh-water springs from the mountains, and afterwards thoroughly impregnated with the salt from the aides and bottom. After some weeks tho water is drawn off, and conveyed to the salt-works by means of miles of wooden pipes. From this lake we proceeded down more galleries, and through more down- ward sloping passages, until we came to a large empty pit, which we were told was exactly under that filled with water, while yet lower was a third. There are, indeed, many ranges of these pits in the mine, some full of brine or just emptied, and others where they are working, which are not shown. We had to descend in a queer fashion, which convinced us of the utility of our Bloomer costume, of which I had hitherto been rather sceptical. We had to seat ourselves on a steep inclined plane, about fifty feet long. Five or six of us were packed together, with the guide in front, and we glided down with ease and velocity, arriving almost without a jerk on terra firma."
The impression produced upon us by the black subterranean lake, with its border of closely-set lights, each of them of course doubled by the clear reflection in the dark water, was not that of mere gloom at all. It gave a most Dantesque effect, as of some circle in the Inferno provided for metaphysicians who had cared so much for the clear definition of their ideas that they left the ideas themselves, except at the edges where they needed discrimination from related ideas, to the obscurity of practical neglect, and who had been condemned in consequence to live for ever in regions mapped out by doubly illumined boundaries, each light of science doubled by the bounty of nature, and yet regions of all but Cimmerian darkness none the less, —by way of teaching them how very little a scientific definition, how- ever clear, adds to the richness of natural gifts. The impres- sion that you were undergoing some lesson in the difference between phantasms of the imagination and realities (such as that of the celebrated myth in Plato's Republic, where the slaves chained for ever in a dark cavern mistake the shadows flitting to and fro on a screen before them for realities), was heightened when you looked down from a considerable height above the newest salt excavations on the miners and their lanthorns crawling about like gigantic glow-worms, their heavy forms just dimly shadowed out in the darkness, while a low confused hum of voices floated up from beneath. And this dreaminess of effect reached its height in the picturesque flights down inclined planes, between the different levels of the mine, made by the various parties of visitors. The sliding caravans of dimly-lit figures, each with one hand on the shoulder of the person before him, and with his candle in the other giving just light enough to show vaguely the outline of the person, while the face, overshadowed by the cap, was only just seen as a pallid gleam of something human, reminded one strongly of Mr. Carlyle's phrase, "here and there a flight of perturbed ghosts." Certainly Miss Eden's picture would by no means prepare any one who followed her practical example for the dreamy and picturesque effects of the Berchtesgaden salt- mine.
Nor does her book do justice either to the Konigsee or to the Danube. It is evident that she made no stay at the Konigsee, and did not even trouble herself to ascend a single alp in the neighbourhood, or get one view which the lake itself and the shore in the neighbourhood of the little inn did not afford. She makes no mention, again, of the picturesque costume of the boat- women on the lake who, with their stockingless but not shoeless feet, white leggings, white sleeves, black dress, and gay-coloured handkerchiefs folded over it, and arms which, even in the case of women of seventy years of age, pulled so stoutly at the heavy, spade-like oars, gave a very striking variety of effect to the pleasure parties which skimmed over the lake in boats of all sizes, from the omnibus-boat, carrying thirty passengers, to the little skiff adapted only for one. Nowhere in Switzerland or the Tyrol is there a lake more manifestly devoted to show purposes than the Konigsee, and yet nowhere do the people seem so unique, simple, and unspoiled. Miss Eden has certainly exaggerated the dangerousness of the boats, and still more their "jerky motion ;" nor do we think she has done full justice to the wonderful beauty of the scenery. But then she only saw it from beneath, and we doubt if any scenery gains its full charm for the eye till you have varied as often as possible the aspects in which it can be seen. She should hardly have been contented without climbing to the Gotzen-alp or some other alp of equal height, whence she could have seen the lake lying thousands of feet beneath her, and looked at the barren "stony sea" (Steinernes Meer) of mountains which border its southern end with crest on crest of what look exactly like petrified waves; the "little" Watzmanu, which is so mighty anti massive, that the 'great" Watzmann rises sensibly in your respect ; the vast circular basin of glittering glacier which has received the name of the " overflowed alp ;" the summit of the Hohe Gull, on the north-
eastern aide which, seen in sunlight, resembles the gritty and. dazzling surface of the full moon as it appears through a telescope of moderate power ; and in the distance, the enormous masses of the Untersberg and the Hobe Stanfen, in order to appreciate to the full the grandeur of the mountains which peep over at you from. behind the precipitous walls of the green Kiinigsee. We shall not easily forget the view, which came suddenly in sight as we stepped on to the level surface of the Gotzen-alp after a fatiguing afternoon climb, the eveniug sky still crimson, the crescent moon. lighting up the brilliant snows of the Ubergossene Alm, the panorama of mountain summits bathed in the deepest violet, while a merry party of Alpine herdsmen and herclswomen, gathered round a bonfire on the edge of the alp, were trying their nerve by seesawing in turns on a gigantic plank precariously balanced close to the rim of the mountain, and which carried the ascending figure full thirty feet above the ground, and apparently high over the dizzy depths beneath. You don't realize the grandeur of such a lake as the Konigsee from beneath, till you have gained a little nearer acquaintance—(we will not say familiarity, for only the guides and chamois huntsmen can pretend to that)—with the forest of summits which look down upon it from above.
Miss Eden seems to have made acquaintance with the Danube only between Linz and Vienna, and there to have been disappointed with it. She says, "The whirlpools I was prepared to find much more awful than they really are, but the scenery about them is really beautiful ; and in the evening, under the effect of light and. shade produced by the setting sun, it must for many miles be very striking. Under a hot August sun at mid-day it certainly loses much of its beauty, and I must confess to having felt disappointed. The Rhine causes the same feeling of disappointment, even in the most beautiful parts, when seen by a noonday sun." We do not know the Danube between Linz and Vienna, but between Passau and Linz, and even in many parts above Ratisbon, nothing can be grander of its kind. It seems to us infinitely superior to the Rhine where the terraced vineyards give at once an air of tameness and civilization to the effect, while the rather lumpy shapes of the hills have little in them of variety or sublimity. The- Rhine mountains, excepting always the exquisite Seven Hills of which the Dracheufels is one, have, we think, been a good deal overpraised. But the stately cones of wild pine forest which border the Danube, the violent swirling of the mighty yellow river where, from half a mile to a mile wide, it bends with a rapidity which taxes the steering power of the long narrow steamers to turn, the great stacks of bark at the few stations where the steamer stops, suggesting dense miles of forest not visible from the river, are- not to be easily forgotten, and, as Miss Eden hints, they are not remembered less vividly if you happen to choose a gloomy and stormy day for the descent. We remember hearing a stately English matron, shocked with the rain and the desolation, groan out to the family for whose sake, no doubt, she had tempted these wildernesses, " Oh, these terrible pleasures !" evidently in the sense in which Sir Cornewall Lewis used to say that "the world would be very tolerable but for its enjoyments."' But, in fact, she used a very happy word to express the enjoyment proper to the scenery of the Danube. If Miss Eden had seen the Danube in this mood, she would have found more pleasure in. it, though to her, perhaps,—for though she is not an adventurous or an energetic, she is by no means a complaining or a cowardly traveller,—there might not have been much terror in it. On the whole, her book is a very pleasant, but a rather indolent one. Whereverwe have followed in her footsteps, we have found much that she has not noted, and felt convinced that she might have noted much more than she did. Her notices of wild flowers, how- ever, are always careful and interesting. She loves the flowers much more than she loves the mountains.
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