" Hence they drove to Gotha, and lodged in Napoleon's room
after Leipzig. Then by Erfurt, with more Luther memories, they took rail
to Weimar, explored the houses of Goethe and of Schiller, and dined by
invitation with the Augustenburgs; the Grand Duchess, with sons and
daughters, conversing in a Babylonish dialect, a melange of French,
English, and German. The next stage seems to have been Leipzig, then in
a bustle with the Fair. "However," says Carlyle, "we got a book or two,
drank a glass of wine in Auerbach's keller, and at last got off safe to
the comparative quiet of Dresden." He ignores the picture galleries; and
makes a bare reference to the palaces from which they steamed up the Elbe
to the heart of Saxon Switzerland. There he surveyed Lobositz, first
battle-field of the Seven Years' War, and rested at the romantic mountain
watering-place of Toeplitz. "He seems," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, "to be getting
very successfully through his travels, thanks to the patience and
helpfulness of Neuberg. He makes in every letter frightful _misereres_
over his sleeping accommodations; but he cannot conceal that he is really
pretty well." The writer's own _misereres_ are as doleful and nearly
as frequent; but she was really in much worse health. From Toeplitz the
companions proceeded in weary stellwagens to Zittau in Lusatia, and so on
to
Herrnhut, the primitive city of the Moravian brethren: a
place not bigger than Annan, but beautiful, pure, and quiet
beyond any town on the earth, I daresay; and, indeed, more
like a saintly dream of ideal Calvinism made real than a town
of stone and lime.
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