and English ballad. The old town has, however, many beauties, tho its
military character looks out through most of them, and reminds us that
the Mosel city (for it originally stood only on that river, and then
crept up to the Rhine), tho a point of union in Nature, has been for
ages, so far as mankind was concerned, a point of defense and watching.
The great fortress, a German Gibraltar, hangs over the river and sets
its teeth in the face of the opposite shore; all the foreign element in
the town is due to the deposits made there by troubles in other
countries, revolution and war sending their exiles, émigrés and
prisoners. The history of the town is only a long military record, from
the days of the archbishops of Trèves, to whom it was subject....

There is the old "German house" by the bank of the Mosel, a building
little altered outwardly since the fourteenth century, now used as a
food-magazine for the troops. The church of St. Castor commemorates a
holy hermit who lived and preached to the heathen in the eighth century,
and also covers the grave and monument of the founder of the "Mouse" at
Wellmich, the warlike Kuno of Falkenstein, Archbishop of Trèves. The
Exchange, once a court of justice, has changed less startlingly, and its
proportions are much the same as of old; and besides these there are
other buildings worth noticing, tho not so old, and rather distinguished
by the men who lived and died there, or were born there, such as
Metternich, than by architectural beauties. Such houses there are in
every old city. They do not invite you to go in and admire them; every
tourist you meet does not ask you how you liked them or whether you saw
them. They are homes, and sealed to you as such, but they are the shell
of the real life of the country; and they have somehow a charm and a
fascination that no public building or show-place can have. Goethe, who
turned his life-experiences into poetry, has told us something of one
such house not far from Coblenz, in the village of Ehrenbreitstein,