All these characteristic signs and changes will meet the eye of the tourist if he even go no farther than the confines of the Rhine, and the old city of Cologne. There at once is that depression visible to which allusion has already been made. It is visible in the aspect of the fallen half-ruined shopkeeper, of the disconsolate master of the hotel, and, above all, of the anxious labourer upon the progress of that mighty work, the completion of which evil times seem again to render an impossible task—the Cologne cathedral. Funds for the further progress of the great undertaking already begin to fail; and these are not times to seek them from the munificence either of states or private individuals. The _Baumeister_, who has spent the greater part of a life upon the wonderful task of working out the completion of this miracle of Gothic art,—whose whole soul has been concentrated upon this one object,—the breath of whose very existence seems to depend upon the growth of this foster-child of his fancy, for which alone he has lived,—now shakes his head, like the consumptive man whose presentiments tell him that his last hour is nigh, and who despairs of escaping his doom. The revolutionary wind has blown like the plague-blast over the land: he feels that his hand must soon fall powerless before the neglect, or even ill-will of the newborn age of revolutionary liberty, and that he must disperse abroad that band of artist-workmen whom he has fashioned and educated to the noble work, and whom, in their completeness of artistic intelligence, none perhaps, in future years, may be able again to collect together. The cathedral, however, has proceeded to a certain point, at which the whole interior may be enclosed; and there, in all probability, the progress of the works will be checked for the present. The consecration of the new part of the building, in this state, has already taken place; but, even in these ceremonies, the revolutionary modern spirit of Germany has not forgotten to assert its influence: the deputation sent to them by the Prussian Assembly refused to join to itself a Catholic ecclesiastic; and yet it was seriously proposed at the same time, by the arrangers of the ceremonial _programme_, that the monarchs who were expected to be present upon the occasion should mount upon the roof of the cathedral, and there take an oath to preserve the unity of Germany, which oath was to be blessed and ratified by the Pope, who was to be invited to come over to Cologne for the purpose. The Pope has had other deeds and other revolutionary tendencies to bless or to ban in his own dominions; but this little trait, culled from the first _programme_ of the consecration of the Cologne cathedral, may be taken, at the same time, as a slight specimen of the wild poetico-political freaks of theoretically revolutionising Germany.