vow he had made while a captive—­the vow he had not kept.  Here, possibly—­here in this shadow darkening the joy of his bridal—­was a message from on high!  So straightway he built his chapel, choosing as situation therefor a spot hard by the windswept hermitage, and in this shrine to St. Peter dwelt Bertha’s sister to the end of her days.  Was it, mayhap, jealousy and a dart from Cupid’s bow which kept her there; and was she, too, enamoured of Sir Dietrich?  Well, the poet who tells the story certainly thought so!

Drinking Songs of the Rhine

It were a lengthy matter to recount the many other poems of Rhineland akin to those mustered above, and enough has been said to indicate their general characteristics; while an ancient Rhine classic of yet a different kind, The Mouse Tower, given elsewhere, is so familiar owing to Southey’s English version that it were superfluous to offer any synopsis or criticism of it here.  Then a class of poems of which the great river’s early literature is naturally replete are those concerned with the growing of the vine and the making of Rhenish, prominent among these being one consecrated to Bacharach, a town which was a famous centre of the wine industry in the Middle Ages.  Near Bacharach there is a huge stone in the Rhine which, known as ‘the Altar of Bacchus,’ is visible only on rare occasions, when the river chances to be particularly low; and in olden times, whenever this stone was seen, the event was hailed by the townsfolk as an omen that their next grape harvest would be an exceptionally successful one.  It is with this ’Altar of Bacchus’ that the poem in question deals.  But coming to modern times, many of the Rhine drinking songs are also concerned to some extent with patriotism—­an element which seems to go hand in hand with the bacchanal the world over!—­and a typical item in this category is the Rheinweinlied of Georg Hervegh, a poet of the first half of the nineteenth century.  A better patriotic song of Rhine-land, however, is one by a slightly earlier poet, Wolfgang Mueller, a native of Koenigswinter, near Bonn, who sings with passionate devotion of the great river, dwelling lovingly on its natural beauties, and exalting it above all other streams.  His song appears to have been composed when the writer was undergoing a temporary period of exile from the Vaterland, for a somewhat pathetic and plaintive air pervades each verse, and the poet refers to the Rhine as a memory rather than as something actually before his eyes.  But very different is another fine patriotic song of which it behoves to speak, the work of August Kopisch, a contemporary of Mueller.  This latter song treats of an incident in the Napoleonic wars, and Bluecher and his forces are represented as encamped on the Rhine and as debating whether to march forward against their French foes.  Nor is it necessary to add, perhaps, that they decide to do so, for otherwise no German singer would have handled the theme!