Various - Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850

The wind was strong on this lofty height, and the rattling of the shutters in the look-out windows in the tower, and of their fastenings, would have been dismal enough on a stormy night, and gave quite a wildness to it even then. The view over the Odenwald was beautiful. Half covered with wood, as far as you could see, with green, winding straths between them, distant castles, and glimpses of the white walls of low-lying dorfs or villages, it gave you an idea of a region at once solitary and attractive. The whole was filled with the cheerful light of morning, and the wooded hills looked of the most brilliant green. We descended, and pursued our way through the forest glades with that feeling of enjoyment which the entrance into an unknown region, pleasant companionship, and fine weather, inspire. When we issued from the woods which clothe the sides of Melibocus, we sate down on the heathy turf, and gazed with a feeling of ever-youthful delight on the scene around us. Above us, and over its woods, rose the square white tower of Melibocus; below, lay green valleys, from among whose orchards issued the smoke of peaceful cottages; and beyond, rose hills covered with other woods, with shrouded spots, the legends of which had reached us in England, and had excited the wonder of our early days – the castle of the Wild Huntsman – the traditions of the followers of Odin – and the strongholds of many an iron-clad knight, as free to seize the goods of his neighbors as he was strong to take and keep them. Now all was peaceful and Arcadian. We met, as we descended into the valley, young women coming up with their cows, and a shepherd with a mixed flock of sheep and swine. He had a belt around him, to which hung a chain, probably to fasten a cow to, as we afterward saw cows so secured.

We found the cottages, in the depths of the valleys, among their orchards, just those heavy, old-fashioned sort of things that we see in German engravings; buildings of wood-framing, the plaster panels of which were painted in various ways, and the windows of those circular and octagon panes which, from old association, always seem to belong to German cottages, just such as that in which the old witch lived in Grimm’s Kinder und Haus Märchen ; and in the Folk Sagor of Sweden and Norway. There were, too, the large ovens built out of doors and roofed over, such as the old giantess, Käringen som vardt stekt i ugnen , was put into, according to German and Scandinavian legends. The people were of the simplest character and appearance. We seemed at once to have stepped out of modern times into the far-past ages. We saw several children sitting on a bench in the open air, near a school-house, learning their lessons, and writing on their slates; and we wept into the school.

The schoolmaster was a man befitting the place; simple, rustic, and devout. He told us that the boys and girls, of which his school was full, came, some of them, from a considerable distance. They came in at six o’clock in the morning and staid till eight, had an hour’s rest, and then came in till eleven, when they went home, and did not return again till the next morning, being employed the rest of the day in helping their parents; in going into the woods for fuel; into the fields to glean, tend cattle, cut grass, or do what was wanted. All the barefooted children of every village, how ever remote, thus acquire a tolerable education, learning singing as a regular part of it. They have what they call their Sing-Stunde , singing lesson, every day. On a black board the Lied , song, or hymn for the day, was written in German character in chalk; and the master, who was naturally anxious to exhibit the proficiency of his scholars, gave them their singing lesson while we were there. The scene was very interesting in itself; but there was something humiliating to our English minds, to think that in the Odenwald, a portion of the great Hyrcanian forest, a region associating itself with all that is wild and obscure, every child of every hamlet and cottage, however secluded, was provided with that instruction which the villages of England are in a great measure yet destitute of. But here the peasants are not, as with us, totally cut off from property in the soil which they cultivate; totally dependent on the labor afforded by others; on the contrary, they are themselves the possessors. This country is, in fact, in the hands of the people. It is all parceled out among the multitude; and, wherever you go, instead of the great halls, vast parks, and broad lands of the few, you see perpetual evidences of an agrarian system. Except the woods, the whole land is thrown into small allotments, and upon them the people are laboring busily for themselves.

Here, in the Odenwald, the harvest, which in the great Rhine plain was over in July, was now, in great measure, cut. Men, women, and children, were all engaged in cutting it, getting it in, or in tending the cattle. Everywhere stood the simple wagons of the country with their pair of yoked cows. Women were doing all sorts of work; reaping, and mowing, and threshing with the men. They were without shoes and stockings, clad in a simple, dark-blue petticoat; a body of the same, leaving the white chemise sleeves as a pleasing contrast; and their hair, in some instances, turned up under their little black or white caps; in others hanging wild and sunburnt on their shoulders. The women, old and young, work as hard as the men, at all kinds of work, and yet with right good-will, for they work for themselves. They often take their dinners with them to the fields, frequently giving the lesser children a piece of bread each, and locking them up in their cottages till they return. This would be thought a hard life in England; but hard as it is, it is better than the degradation of agricultural laborers, in a dear country like England, with six or eight shillings a week, and no cow, no pig, no fruit for the market, no house, garden, or field of their own; but, on the contrary, constant anxiety, the fear of a master on whom they are constantly dependent, and the desolate prospect of ending their days in a union work-house.

Each German has his house, his orchard, his road-side trees, so laden with fruit, that if he did not carefully prop up, and tie together, and in many places hold the boughs together with wooden clamps, they would be torn asunder by their own weight. He has his corn-plot, his plot for mangel-wurzel or hay, for potatoes, for hemp, etc. He is his own master, and he therefore, and every branch of his family, have the strongest motives for constant exertion. You see the effect of this in his industry and his economy.

In Germany, nothing is lost. The produce of the trees and the cows is carried to market. Much fruit is dried for winter use. You see wooden trays of plums, cherries, and sliced apples, lying in the sun to dry. You see strings of them hanging from their chamber windows in the sun. The cows are kept up for the greater part of the year, and every green thing is collected for them. Every little nook where the grass prows by roadside, and river, and brook, is carefully cut with the sickle, and carried home, on the heads of women and children, in baskets, or tied in large cloths. Nothing of any kind that can possibly be made of any use is lost. Weeds, nettles, nay, the very goose-grass which covers waste places, is cut up and taken for the cows. You see the little children standing in the streets of the villages, in the streams which generally run down them, busy washing these weeds before they are given to the cattle. They carefully collect the leaves of the marsh-grass, carefully cut their potato tops for them, and even, if other things fail, gather green leaves from the woodlands. One can not help thinking continually of the enormous waste of such things in England – of the vast quantities of grass on banks, by roadsides, in the openings of plantations, in lanes, in church-yards, where grass from year to year springs and dies, but which, if carefully cut, would maintain many thousand cows for the poor.