Florentine Nights Author:Heinrich Heine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE RABBI OF BACHARACH. A FRAGMENT. With kindly greeting, the Legend of the Rabbi of Bacharac is Dedicated In his friend Henry Laube by the Author. ... more »CHAPTER I, On the Lower Ehine, where its banks begin to lose their smiling aspect, where hills and cliffs with romantic ruined castles rise more defiantly, and a wild and sterner dignity prevails, there lies, like a strange and fearful tale of the olden time, the gloomy and ancient town of Bacharach. But these walls, with their toothless battlements and turrets, in whose nooks and niches the winds blew and the sparrows rest, were not always so decayed and fallen, and in these poverty-stricken, repulsive muddy lanes which one sees through the ruined tower, there did not always reign that dreary silence which is only now and then broken by crying children, scolding women, and lowing cows. These walls were once proud and strong,and these lanes were alive with a fresh, free life, power and pride, joy and sorrow, much love and much hate. For Bacharach of old belonged to those municipalities which were founded by the Romans during their rule on the Ehine;1 and its inhabitants, though the times which came after were sadly stormy, and though they had to submit first to the Hohenstaufen, ami then to the Wittelsbach authority, managed, after the example of the other cities oft ' the Ehine, to maintain a tolerably free commonwealth. This consisted of an alliance of different social elements, in which the patrician elder citizens and those of the guilds which were subdivided according to their different trades, mutually strove for power, Bo that while they were bound in union to keep ward and guard against the robber-nobles, they nevertheless were obstinate in domestic dissensions waged for warring interests, the results of which w...« less