After a visit to Berlin, they move on to
Dresden, where she revels in the loveliness of the city, the museums, the works
of art. And then … on to Prague … and more visits to baths. But she tells us
about an earlier experience at Töplitz (or Teplitz), where you go down a few marble steps into a basin
of the same material, filled with water of delightful temperature and pellucid
clearness. I never experienced a more agreeable bath.[1]
Volume II of Rambles continues her account of her stay in Prague, 1842, a volume
she begins with some descriptions of the habits of Germans she has seen as she’s
traveled. They have, she writes, a habit
of staring … their eyes follow you with pertinacity, without any change of
expression.[2]
She complains as well about the quality of German bread, calling it a sour, black, damp, uneatable substance.[3]
Mary, in her youth, was a more amiable,
generous traveler; now, as her ill health gains more and more control, she is more
… grumpy, sounding at times almost like the cliché of the whimpering, spoiled
American tourist.
But soon she is back in Italy—and much
happier. She is wise and light-hearted enough to recognize as a tourist trap
the so-called “tomb of the Capulets” in Verona. But in Venice, she is reminded
of the horrors of her earlier stay in 1818 when she and Bysshe buried their
daughter, Clara Everina Shelley, barely a year old. Death hovered over the scene, she writes. … I saw those before me long departed; and I was agitated again by
emotions—by passions—and those the deepest a woman’s heart can harbour—a dread
to see her child even at that instant expire ….[4] Little
Clara’s gravesite remains unknown.
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