Page:Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 - Volume 1.djvu/237

 the river, where the sovereigns held réunions, and entertained their poet friends; many a June evening was there spent in refined intercourse. There is also a pavilion in the garden which Göthe inhabited in the summer months.

The park of Weimar was an oasis in the desert. We found for many miles after leaving it, the same dreary landscape; flat and unmarked as the sea; not as barren, for the country is all corn-fields but as no hedge intersects them, nor any bush shows its tufted top, nor any trees appear except the ill-looking poplars mixed with cherry-trees that line the road, nothing can be more unvaried or uninteresting than these vast plains; uninteresting indeed, in outward aspect, yet claiming our attention and exciting our curiosity as the scene of a thousand battles, above all, of that last struggle, when yielding the ground inch by inch, mile by mile, Napoleon was driven from Dresden to the Rhine.

Some slight interruption occurs in the uniform aspect of these bare plains, when they are intersected by the course of the Saale, a common name for a river in Germany, which winds through a pleasing village. On the heights that surround, stand old castles renowned in story. We soon left this pleasant change behind, and came again on the