A Residence in France: With an Excursion Up the Rhine, and a Second Visit to SwitzerlandCooper, James Fenimore
History
A Residence in France: With an Excursion Up the Rhine, and a Second Visit to Switzerland
Cooper, James Fenimore
France -- Description and travel; Germany -- Description and travel; Switzerland -- Description and travel
We met the Neckar again, after crossing a range of wooded mountain, and
at Tubingen we once more found a city, a university, the remains of
feodality, redoutes, pipes, and other German appliances. Here we
breakfasted, and received a visit from a young countryman, whose
parents, Germans, I believe, had sent him hither to be educated. He
will, probably return with a good knowledge of Greek, perfect master of
metaphysics and the pipe, extravagant in his political opinions, a
sceptic in religion, and with some such ideas of the poetry of thought,
as a New England dancing-master has of the poetry of motion, or a
teacher of psalmody, of the art of music. After all, this is better than
sending a boy to England, whence he would come back with the notions of
Sir William Blackstone to help to overturn or pervert his own
institutions, and his memory crammed with second-hand anecdotes of lords
and ladies. We labour under great embarrassments on this point of
education, for it is not easy to obtain it, suited equally to the right,
and to our own peculiar circumstances, either at home or abroad. At home
we want science, research, labour, tone, manners, and time; abroad we
get the accumulated prejudices that have arisen from a factitious state
of things; or, what is perhaps worse, their reaction, the servility of
castes, or the truculence of revolution.
About a post beyond Tubingen, a noble ruin of a castle of the middle
ages appeared in the distance, crowning the summit of a high conical
eminence. These were the finest remains we had seen in a long time, and
viewed from the road, they were a beautiful object, for half an hour.
This was the castle of Hohenzollern, erected about the year 980, and the
cradle of the House of Brandenburg. This family, some pretend, was
derived from the ancient Dukes of Alsace, which, if true would give it
the same origin as those of Austria and Baden; but it is usual, and
probably much safer, to say that the Counts of Hohenzollern were its
founders. We must all stop somewhere short of Adam.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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