Everybody who knows and loves the Swabian poet Mörike, the music for whose songs, composed by Hugo Wolff, have become the property of the international brotherhood of music-lovers, will think of his “Old Church-Tower Cock,” strangely similar in feeling to Tennyson’s poem of “The Cock” and his brothers of the weather. We are not surprised to find that the poets of the land of Wanderlust give special attention to taverns and signs. Besides Mörike, and Uhland, whose “Inn” we quoted above, Johann Peter Hebel, a son of the Black Forest, has always shown a special predilection for the sign and its wonders. In an untranslatable poem, “On the death of a tippler,” he celebrates his man as a diligent astronomer who never tires looking for shining “Stars,” a brave knight always ready to hunt up “Bears” and “Lions,” a pious Christian willing to do penitence at the “Cross,” a man who frequented the best society, including “The Three Kings,” his most intimate friends. Germany may boast, too, of a classical literary tavern, the “Bratwurstglöckle” in Nuremberg, built directly against the walls of a church, the Gothic Moritz-Kapelle. Among its famous guests were the Mastersinger, Hans Sachs, and Dürer, Germany’s greatest artist. Like a house out of a fairy tale it stands before us; we are only surprised that no fence of sausages surrounds it and that its door and window shutters are ordinary wood and not gingerbread! CHAPTER IX POLITICAL SIGNS [Illustration: The King of Württemberg Stuttgart] CHAPTER IX POLITICAL SIGNS “Au-dessus de ma tête, Charles Quint, Joseph II ou Napoléon pendus à une vieillie potence en fer et faisant enseigne, grands empereurs qui ne sont plus bons qu’à achalander une auberge.” VICTOR HUGO, _Le Rhin_. At the first glance our peaceful sign seems to have nothing to do with politics whatsoever, except perhaps in so far as under its symbol the Philistines assemble, not only to drink and be merry, but, as a side-issue, to solve the world’s problems. The contrast of human strife and battle outside, somewhere in distant lands, with the undisturbed comfort of the tap-room has been for ages one of the chief fascinations of the tavern, and none has described this selfish attitude of the Philistine more graphically than Goethe in the conversation of the two citizens in his “Faust”:-- “On Sundays, holidays, there’s naught I take delight in, Like gossiping of war, and war’s array. When down in Turkey, far away, The foreign people are a-fighting. One at the window sits, with glass and friends, And sees all sorts of ships go down the river gliding: And blesses then, as home he wends At night, our times of peace abiding.” This opinion the other citizen, who reminds us curiously of certain modern neutrals, approves with the following words:--