THE IXKLEI PASS.

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and tabemacles, without the usual chancel to give tliem anecclesiastical air, suggest curious reminiscences of the stagedressed for one of Herr Döbler's Performances. Then thechurch is festooned all round with garlands of oak-leaves, andthe heavy wooden posts that prop the gallery above entwinedwith them as well; while at one side of the little edifice thereis a niche in the wall, which is bordered with a thick roll ofmoss, and within this Stands a gaudy life-sized statue of thepatron samt, St. Goar—the so-called hermit, though he ishere in green and golden robes—wbo, we are told, first preachedthe Christian creed to the Lurlei fishermen, and who, to provebis divinity to the people, hung bis cloak upon a sunbeam!(A.D., says the tradition, 575.)*

It is a curious sight to see this little place filled on a Sunday

* This Saint, who is said to have been born, of noble blood, in Aquitaine,and to have refused the bishopric of Treves, is renowned for having saved many aboatman who prayed to him from the perils of the neighbouring whirlpool of theGewirr. But from the identity of the two names (for the German people pro-nounce the name of the Saint as if it were written Goivar), there can be littledoubt that the traditionary Christian hermit, living in bis rocky grotto, andhanging his garments on the sunbeam, was none other than the Pagan Deity ofthe whirlpool—the great Gewirr Idol—the Water-God, who was supposed todwell among the rocks under the river—-whose mantle was the mist which wasborne upon the rays of the sun — and to appease whose wrath the superstitiousboatmen offered up their prayers, so that he might not draw them and their craftto the bottom of the stream. As Christiamty, howcver, diffused itself alongthe banks of the Rhine, the early fathers, fmding the people of these partswedded to the worship of a Deity that seemed to them to have the greatest powerover their destinies, naturally sought to give a Christian rendering to the ancientPagan myth, and therefore elevated the Water-God into a Catholic Saint—canon-ized the Idol—framed stories to the boatmen as to how the Blessed Gewirr hadleft his rocky cell, in Order to preach the new creed to the Heathens, and trans-lated that which was originally a poetic type of the misty mantle, supposed toCover the River Sprite, into an idle and unmeaning miracle. And thus it is thatthe simple ferrymen, and nshermen, and raftsmen, pray in these parts to thisday to the Spirit of their great Gewirr, or Gowar, while passing over the famouswhirlpool, offering up their praises to his image when they have traversed thespot in security, the same as they did centuries ago, before the legion of CatholicSaints had been invented.