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But we carried on until we came to a large open space fronting a beautiful piece of water, which I was told was the Alster. As I walked through the narrow streets, I was struck with the peculiarity of the gables of the tall houses being all turned towards the thoroughfare, and with the stupendous size of the churches.
The bleak, icy winter of North Germany is past. We have trodden its accumulated snows as they lay in crisp heaps in the streets of Hamburg; and have watched the muffled crowd upon the frozen Alster, darting and reeling, skating, sliding, and sleighing upon its opaque and motionless surface.
So one fine morning in May I shouldered my knapsack, and bade a temporary adieu to my friends in Frankfort. By night I was in Hamburg. The next day was agreeably spent in rambling about the gardens across the Alster Basin, and at 5 P.M. I left Altona for Kiel, a journey of three hours by rail across a flat and not very interesting tract of country within the limits of Schleswig-Holstein.
The noise subsided suddenly, as when a damper is laid over a resounding instrument; the steamer had passed the bridge, and floated out on to the broad waters of the Aussen Alster, which widened apparently into a great bay, the mist having wiped out the boundary lines between its oily surface and the flat shores which barely rose above it.
The undertakers of Hamburg vie with each other in the dressing of their men, and indeed, one indispensable part of their “stock-in-trade” are some half-dozen dress-suits of black, it matters not of what age or country, the stranger the better, so that the “effect” be good. We will take a stroll about the beautiful Alster this Sunday afternoon.
The sky was thickly overcast, the air unusually mild, on account of the prevailing west wind, and the pavement of the Jungfernstieg damp and muddy. A thin veil of yellow fog lay over the Binnen Alster, giving the objects far and near the indefinite, wavering appearance of a mirage.
Hamburg being a Free Port, travellers leaving for any other part of Germany had to undergo a regular Customs examination at the railway station, as though it were a frontier post. Hamburg impressed me as a vastly prosperous, handsome, well-kept town. The attractive feature of the place is the "Alster Bassin," the clear, fresh-water lake running into the very heart of the town.
It would be difficult to conceive of a more attractive sight than that afforded by the broad sheet of water in the centre of the town known as the Alster Basin, a mile in circumference, bounded on three sides by streets ornamented liberally with trees, while its surface is dotted with little omnibus steamers and pleasure boats darting hither and thither like swallows on the wing.
Sometimes, we workmen spent a pleasant hour or two in the concert-rooms, of which there were several admirably conducted; or pored hours long over the papers, chiefly literary, in the Alster Halle; sipping our coffee, and listening in the pauses of our reading to the band of choice musicians, who played occasionally through the evening.
The description of one amounted to an assertion that in Hamburg people only talked of two things, money and women; that of another commenced: "Of all the places I have ever seen in my life, Hamburg is the most hideous." The situation of the town could not be compared with that of Copenhagen, but the Alster quarter was attractive, the architecture and the street life not uninteresting.
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