Europe -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
Wurtemberg is addicted to the cultivation of crops which minister to
man’s luxuries rather than to his necessities. The proportion of land
under fruit, poppies, tobacco, and hops, to that under corn, was very
striking. There was a splendid hemp crop here also. They were gathering
the poppy-heads, as we passed, into sacks. The women and girls both here
and in Bavaria seem to do three-fourths of the agricultural work; the
harder, such as reaping and mowing, as well as the lighter. The beds of
peat are magnificent, and very neatly managed. At first I thought we
had entered enormous black brick-fields, for the peat is cut into small
brick-shaped pieces, and stacked in rows, just as one sees in the best
managed of our brick-fields. As one nears Stuttgart the village churches
begin to show signs of the difference in longitude. Gothic spires and
arches give place to Eastern clock-towers, with tops like the cupolas of
mosques, tinned over, and glittering in the hot sun. I hear that it
was a fancy of the late Emperor Joseph to copy the old enemies of his
country in architecture; but that would not account for the prevalence
of the habit in his neighbour’s territory. I fancy one begins to feel
the old neighbourhood of the Turks in these parts. The houses are all
roomy, and there is no sign of poverty amongst the people. They have a
fancy for wearing no shoes and scant petticoats in many districts; but
it is evidently a matter of choice. Altogether, the whole fine, open,
well-wooded country, from Bruchsal to Munich, gives one the feeling that
an easy-going, well-to-do people inhabit and enjoy it.
As for Munich itself, it is a city which surprised me more pleasantly
than almost any one I ever remember to have entered. One had a sort of
vague notion that the late king had a taste for the fine arts, and spent
a good deal of his own and his subjects’ money in indulging the taste
aforesaid in his capital. But one also knew that he had been tyrannised
over by Lola Montes, and had made a countess of her--and had not
succeeded in weathering 1848; so that, on the whole, one had no great
belief in any good work from such a ruler.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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