Leith on the morning of the second of this month, with no wind at all. We drifted on, I know not how, and toward evening were within gunshot of Inchkeith; on the following morning we were in sight of the Bass, and in sight of the same we continued during the whole day. For the next two or three days we went beating up against a head-wind, which forced us to tack so much that whenever we made one mile we travelled ten, a pleasant mode of progressing, is it not? However, I had the whole ship to myself, and plenty of female society in the person of the captain's lady, who, being fond of pleasure, had chosen to diversify her monotonous existence at Leith by taking a delightful summer trip to Rotterdam, which confined her to her crib during almost the whole of our passage under the pressure of racking headaches and roaring sickness. She had a weary time of it, poor woman, and nothing could do her any good—neither spelding, cheese, nor finnan haddies, nor bacon, nor broth, nor salt beef, nor ale, nor gin, nor brandy and water, nor Epsom salts, though of one or other of these she was aye takin' a wee bit, or a little drop. We were nearly a week in clearing our own Firth, and did no good till we got as far as Scarborough. At this place I had serious intentions of getting ashore if possible, and making out the rest of my journey by means that were more to be depended on. Just in the nick of time, however, a fair wind sprang up, and from Scarborough we had a capital run, with little or no interruption, to the end of our voyage.' An account of a ten days' voyage which makes us thankful to be in great measure independent of the winds at sea! Holland, our traveller thinks an intolerable country to live in, and the first impressions of the Rhine are distinctly unfavourable. 'The river himself is a fine fellow, certainly, but the country through which he flows is stale, flat, though I believe, not unprofitable. The banks on either side are covered either with reeds or with a matting of rank shrubbery formed apparently out of dirty green worsted, and the continuance of it so palls upon the senses that the mind at last becomes unconscious of everything except the constant flap-flapping of the weary paddles as they go beating on, awakening the dull echoes of the sedgy shores. The eye is occasionally relieved by patches of naked sand, and now and then a stone about the size of your fist, diversifies the monotony of the scene. Occasionally, in the distance, are to be seen funny, forlorn-looking objects, trying evidently to look like trees, but whether they would really turn out to be trees on a nearer inspection is what I very much doubt.' At Cologne he had an amusing meeting with an Englishman, 'whom I at once twigged to be an Oxford man, and more, even, an Oxford tutor. There is a stiff twitch in the right shoulder of the tribe, answering to a similar one in the hip-bone on the same side, which there is no mistaking.' The tutor appears to have done valiant service in making known the traveller's wants in French to waiters, etc., though 'he spent rather too much of his time in scheming how to abridge the sixpence which, "time out of mind," has been the perquisite of Boots, doorkeepers, etc.' 'But,' he adds in excuse, 'his name was Bull, and therefore, as the authentic epitome of his countrymen, he would not fail to possess this along with the other peculiarities of Englishmen.' From Cologne, Ferrier went to Bonn, where he had an introduction to Dr. Welsh, and then proceeded up the Rhine to Mayence. He does not form a very high estimate of the beauty of the scenery. He feels 'a want of something; in fact, to my mind, there is a want of everything which makes earth, wood, and water something more than mere water, wood, and earth. We have here a constant and endless variety of imposing objects (imposing is just the word for them), but there is no variety in them, nothing but one round-backed hill after another, generally carrying their woods, when they have any, very stiffly, and when they have none presenting to the eye a surface of tawdry and squalid patchwork,' thus suggesting, in his view, a series of children's gardens—an impression often left on travellers when visiting this same country. His next letters find him settled in the University town of Heidelberg.

  CHAPTER II

WANDERJAHRE—SOCIAL LIFE IN SCOTLAND—BEGINNING OF HIS LITERARY LIFE

In the present century in Germany we have seen a period of almost unparalleled literary glory succeeded by a time of great commercial prosperity and national enthusiasm. But when Ferrier visited that country in 1834 the era of its intellectual greatness had hardly passed away; some, at least, of its stars remained, and others had very recently ceased to be. Goethe had died just two years before, but Heine lived till many years afterwards; amongst the philosophers, though Kant and Fichte, of course, were long since gone, Schelling was still at work at Munich, and Hegel lived at Berlin till November of 1831, when he was cut off during an epidemic of cholera. Most of the great men had disappeared, and yet the memory of their achievements still survived, and the impetus they gave to thought could not have been lost. The traditional lines of speculation consistently carried out since Reformation days had survived war and national calamity, and it remained to be seen whether the greater tests of prosperity and success would be as triumphantly undergone.

We can imagine Ferrier's feelings when this new world opened up before him, a Scottish youth, to whom it was a new, untrodden country. It may be true that it was his literary rather than his speculative affinities that first attracted him to Germany. To form in literature he always attached the greatest value, and to the end his interest in letters was only second to his attachment to philosophy. German poetry was to him what it was to so many of the youth of the country from which it came—the expression of their deepest, and likewise of their freshest aspiration. The poetry of other countries and other tongues—English and Latin, for example—meant much to him, but that of Germany was nearest to his heart. French learning did not attract him; neither its literature nor its metaphysics and psychological method appealed to his thoughtful, analytic mind; but in Germany he found a nation which had not as yet resigned its interest in things of transcendental import in favour of what pertained to mere material welfare.

Such was the Germany into which Ferrier came in 1834. He did not, so far as we can hear, enter deeply into its social life; he visited it as a traveller, rather than as a student, and his stay in it was brief. Considering the shortness of his time there, and the circumstances of his visit, the impression that it made upon him is all the more remarkable, for it was an impression that lasted and was evident throughout all his after life. Since his day, indeed, it would be difficult to say how many young Scotsmen have been impressed in a similar way by a few months' residence at a University town in Germany. For partly owing to Ferrier's own efforts, and perhaps even more owing to the 'boom'—to use a vulgarism—brought about by Carlyle's writings, and by his first making known the marvels of German literature to the ordinary English-speaking public, who had never learned the language or tried to understand its recent history, the old traditional literary alliance between Scotland and France appeared for the time being to have broken down in favour of a similar association with its rival country, Germany. The work of Goethe was at last appreciated, nothing was now too favourable to say about its merits; philosophy was suddenly discovered to have its home in Germany, and there alone; our insularity in keeping to our antiquated methods—dryasdust, we were told, as the old ones of the schools, and perhaps as edifying—was vigorously denounced. Theology, which had hitherto found complete support from the philosophic system which