Page:Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 - Volume 1.djvu/68

44 miserable death of Toussaint l’Ouverture; second, the execution of Hoffer. The sun set cheerfully on a pleasant landscape; we returned to our dreary inn;—it was the first bad accommodation we had encountered on our way.

along the same style of country, we arrived in the middle of the day at Freyberg, where we dined. This was not one of the regular, formal, white-looking, modern German towns; it was antique, irregular, picturesque. We visited its Cathedral; it is celebrated for its great beauty: it is Gothic, and the tower, and spire that surmounts it, are of the most exquisite tracery and finish. We were accompanied by a valet de place who had lived in a nobleman’s family in England, and spoke English tolerably. His claims were high to the knowledge of our language; he had not only written an English description of the Cathedral of Freyberg in prose, but an English poem descriptive of the route we were about to pursue through the Höllenthal and Swartzwald, anglicè Valley of Hell, and Black Forest. The poem is in heroic measure, rhymed, meant to be in the style of Pope’s didactic poems. It is a curious specimen of the sort of mistakes a foreigner may make in a language which