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, beneath the fortress, and which in familiar Coblenz parlance goes by the name of “The Valley”—­the house of Sophie de Laroche.  The village is also Clement Brentano’s birthplace.

The oldest of German cities, Treves (or in German Trier), is not too far to visit on our way up the Mosel Valley, whose Celtic inhabitants of old gave the Roman legions so much trouble.  But Rome ended by conquering, by means of her civilization as well as by her arms, and Augusta Trevirorum, tho claiming a far higher antiquity than Rome herself, and still bearing an inscription to that effect on the old council-house—­now called the Red House and used as a hotel—­became, as Ausonius condescendingly remarked, a second Rome, adorned with baths, gardens, temples, theaters and all that went to make up an imperial capital.  As in Venice everything precious seems to have come from Constantinople, so in Trier most things worthy of note date from the days of the Romans; tho, to tell the truth, few of the actual buildings do, no matter how classic is their look.  The style of the Empire outlived its sway, and doubtless symbolized to the inhabitants their traditions of a higher standard of civilization.

The Porta Nigra, for instance—­called Simeon’s Gate at present—­dates really from the days of the first Merovingian kings, but it looks like a piece of the Colosseum, with its rows of arches in massive red sandstone, the stones held together by iron clamps, and its low, immensely strong double gateway, reminding one of the triumphal arches in the Forum at Rome.  The history of the transformation of this gateway is curious.  First a fortified city gate, standing in a correspondingly fortified wall, it became a dilapidated granary and storehouse in the Middle Ages, when one of the archbishops gave leave to Simeon, a wandering hermit from Syracuse in Sicily, to take up his abode there; and another turned it into a church dedicated to this saint, tho of this change few traces remain.  Finally, it has become a national museum of antiquities.  The amphitheater is a genuine Roman work, wonderfully well preserved; and genuine enough were the Roman games it has witnessed, for, if we are to believe tradition, a thousand Frankish prisoners of war were here given in one day to the wild beasts by the Emperor Constantine.  Christian emperors beautified the basilica that stood where the cathedral now is, and the latter itself has some basilica-like points about it, tho, being the work of fifteen centuries, it bears the stamp of successive styles upon its face....