And, meantime, those dreams of distant and probably adventurous travel lent the youth, still so healthy of body, a wing for more distant expeditions than he had ever yet inclined to, among his own wholesome German woodlands. In long rambles, afoot or on horseback, by day and night, he flung himself, for the resettling of his sanity, on the cheerful influences of their simple imagery-the hawks, as if asleep on the air below him the bleached crags, evoked by late sunset among the dark oaks: the waterwheels, with their pleasant murmur in the foldings of the hill-side. : Clouds came across his heaven little sudden clouds, like those which in this northern latitude, where summer is at best but a flighty guest, chill out the heart, though but for a few minutes at a time, of the warmest afternoon. He had fits of the gloom of other people: their dull passage through, and exit from, the world: the threadbare incidents of their lives their dismal funerals which, unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled into a gloom more properly his own. Yet, at such times, outward things also would seem to concur unkindly in deepening the mental shadow about him, almost as if there were indeed animation in the natural world: elfin spirits, in those inaccessible hill-sides and dark ruins, as old German poetry pretended, assistant cheerfully sometimes, but for the most part troublesome to their human kindred. Of late these fits had come somewhat more frequently, and had continued. Often, it was a weary, deflowered face that his favorite mirrors reflected. Yes! people were prosaic, and their lives threadbare-all but himself, and organist Max perhaps, and Fritz the treble-singer. In return, the people in actual contact with him thought him a little mad, though still ready to flatter his madness, as he could detect. Alone with the doting old grandfather, in their stiff, distant, alien world of etiquette, he felt surrounded by flatteries, and would fain have tested the sincerity even of Max and Fritz, who said, echoing the words of the other, "Yourself, Sire, are the Apollo of Germany!" It was the desire to test the sincerity of the people about him and unveil flatterers, which, in the first instance, sug gested a trick he played upon the court, upon all Europe. In that complex, but wholly Teutonic genealogy lately under research, lay a much-prized thread of descent from the fifth Emperor Charles ; and Carl, under direction, read, with much readiness to be impressed, all that was attainable concerning the great ancestor, finding there, in truth, little enough to reward his pains. One hint he took, however. He determined to assist at his own obsequies. That he might in this way facilitate that much-desired journey occurred to him almost at once as an accessory motive; and in a little while definite motives were engrossed in the dramatic interest, the pleasing gloom, the curiosity of the thing itself. Certainly, amid the living world here in Germany, especially in old, sleepy Rosenmold, death made great parade of itself. Youth even, in its sentimental mood, was ready to indulge in the luxury of decay, and amuse itself with fancies of the tomb; as, in periods of decadence or suspended progress, when the world seems to nap for a time, artifices for the arrest or disguise of old age are adopted as a fashion, and become the fopperies of the young. The whole body of Carl's relations, saving the drowsy old grandfather, already lay buried beneath their expansive heraldries. At times the whole world almost seemed buried thus-made and remade of the dead-its entire fabric of politics, of art, of custom, being essentially heraldic "achievements," dead men's mementoes, such as those. You see, he was a sceptical young man; and his kinsinen, dead and gone, had passed, certainly in his imaginations of them, into no other world, save perhaps into some stiffer, slower, sleepier, and more pompous phase of ceremony--the last degree of court etiquette; as they lay there, in the great, low-pitched, grandducal vault, in their coffins, dusted once a year for All Souls' Day when the court officials descended thither, and Mass for the Dead was sung amid an array of dropping crape and cobwebs. The lad, with his full red lips and open blue eyes, coming as with a great cup in his hands to life's feast, revolted from the like of that, as from suffocation. And still, the suggestion of it was everywhere. In the garish afternoon, up to the whole some heights of the Heiligenberg, suddenly from one of the villages of the plain came the grinding death-knell. It seemed to come out of the ugly grave itself, and enjoyment was dead. On his way homeward sadly an hour later he enters by chance the open door of a village church, half-buried in the tangle of its churchyard. The rude coffin is lying there of a laborer who had but a hovel to live in. The enemy dogged one's footsteps! The young Carl seemed to be flying not from death simply, but from assassination. And as these thoughts sent him back, in the rebounding power of youth, with renewed appetite to life and sense; so, grown at last familiar, they gave additional purpose to his fantastic experiment. Had it not been said by a wise man, that, after all, the offence of death was in its trappings? Well! he would, as far as might be, try the thing, while, presumably, a large reversionary interest in life was still his. He would purchase his freedom, at least of those gloomy trappings; and listen while he was spoken of as dead. The mere preparations gave pleasant proof of the devotion to him of a certain number, who entered without question into his plans. It is not difficult to mislead the world concerning what happens to those who live at the artificial distance from it of a court, with its high wall of etiquette. However the matter was managed, no one doubted when with a blazon of ceremonious words the courtnews went forth that, after a brief illness, according to the way of his race, the hereditary Grand-Duke was deceased. In momentary regret, bethinking them of the lad's taste for splendor, those to whom the arrangement of such matters belonged (the grandfather now sinking deeper into bare quiescence) backed by the popular wish, determined to give him a funeral with even more than grand-ducal measure of lugubrious magnificence. The place of his repose was marked out for him, as officiously as if it had been the delimitation of a kingdom, in the ducal burial-vault, through the cobwebbed windows of which, from the garden where he played as a child, the young duke had often peered at the faded glories of the immense coroneted coffins; the oldest shedding their velvet tatters around them. Surrounded by the whole official world of Rosenmold, arrayed for the occasion in almost forgotten dresses of ceremony as if for a masquerade, the new coffin glided from the fragrant chapel, where the requiem was sung, down the broad staircase lined with peach-color and yellow marble, into the shadows below. Carl himself, disguised as a strolling musician, had followed it across the square through a drenching rain, on which circumstance he overheard the old people congratulate the blessed dead within: had listened to a dirge of his own composing brought out on the great organ with much bravura by his friend, the new court-organist, who was in the secret; and that night turned the key of the garden entrance to the vault, and peeped in upon the sleepy, painted and bewigged young pages, whose duty it would be for a certain number of days to come to watch beside their late master's couch. And a certain number of weeks afterward it was known that "the mad Duke" had reappeared, to the dismay of courtmarshals. Things might have gone hard with the youth had the strange news, at first as fantastic rumor, then as matter of solemn inquiry, lastly as as'certained fact pleasing or otherwise, been less welcome than it was to the grandfather-too old indeed to sorrow deeply, but grown so decrepit as to propose that ministers should possess themselves of the person of the young Duke, proclaim him of age and regent. From those dim travels, presenting themselves to the old man who had never been fifty miles away from home as almost lunar in their audacity, he would come back -come back "in time"-he murmured faintly, eager to feel that youthful animating life on the stir about him once more. Carl himself, now the thing was over, greatly relishing its satiric elements, must be forgiven the trick of the burial, and his still greater enormity in coming to life again. And then, Duke or no Duke, it was understood that he willed that things should in no case be precisely as they had been. He would never again be quite so near people's lives as in the past-a fitful, intermittent visitor almost as if he had been properly nights he slept, warm and dry, on the hay stored in a deserted cloister; and, attracted into the neighboring minster for a snatch of church-music, narrowly escaped detection. By miraculous chance the grimmest lord of Rosenmold was there within, recognized the youth and his companions-visitors naturally conspicuous amid the crowd of peasants around them-and for some hours was upon their traces. After unclean streets, the country air was a perfume by contrast, or actually scented with pinewoods. One seemed to breathe with it fancies of the woods, the hills, and water dead the empty coffin remaining as a kind of symbolical "coronation-incident," setting forth his future relations to his subjects. Of all those who be lieved him dead one human creature only, save the grandfather, had sincerely sorrowed for him-a woman, in tears as the funeral train passed by, with whom he had sympathetically discussed his own merits. Till then, he had forgot ten the incident which exhibited him to her as the very genius of goodness and strength how one day, driving with her country produce into the market and embarrassed by the crowd, she had broken one of a hundred little police- of a sort of souls in the landscape, but rules, whereupon the officers were about to carry her away to be fined or worse, amid the jeers of the bystanders, always ready to deal harshly with "the gypsy," at which precise moment the tall Duke Carl, like the flash of a trusty sword, had leaped from the palace-stair and caused her to pass on in peace. She had halfdetected him through his disguise in due time news of his reappearance had been ceremoniously carried to her in her little cottage; and the remembrance of her hung about him not ungratefully, as he went with delight upon his way. The first long stage of his journey over in headlong flight night and day, he found himself one summer morning, under the heat of what seemed a southern sun, at last really at large on the Bergstrasse; with the rich plain of the Palatinate on his left hand; and on the right, vineyards, seen now for the first time, sloping up into the crisp beeches of the Odenwald. By Weinheim only an empty tower remained of the castle of Windeck. He lay for the night in the great whitewashed guest-chamber of the Capuchin convent. The national rivers, like the national woods, have a family likeness-the Main, the Lahn, the Moselle, the Neckar, the Rhine. By help of such accommodation as chance afforded, partly on the stream itself, partly along the banks, he pursued the leisurely winding course of one of the prettiest of these tarrying for a while in the towns, gray, white, or red, which came in his way tasting their delightful native "little" wines, peeping into their old overloaded churches, inspecting the church-furniture, or trying the organs. For three cheerful and genial now-happy souls. A distant group of pines on the verge of a great upland awoke a violent desire to be there; seemed to challenge one to proceed thither. Was there infinite view thence? It was like an outpost of some far-off fancy land, a pledge of the reality of such. Above Cassel the airy hills curved in one black outline against a glowing sky; pregnant, one could fancy, with weird forms, which might be at their old diableries again among the ruins in those remote places ere night was quite come there. At last, in the streets, the hundred churches of Cologne, he feels something of a Gothic enthusiasın, and all a German's enthusiasm for the Rhine. Through the length and breadth of the Rhine country the vintage was begun. The red ruins on the heights, the whitewalled villages, white Saint Nepomuc upon the bridges, were but isolated higher notes of contrast in a landscape sleepy and indistinct under the flood of sunshine, with a headiness in it like that of must, of the new wine. The noise of the vineyards came through the lovely haze; still, at times, with the sharp sound of a bell-death-bell perhaps, or only a crazy summons to the vintagers. And amid those broad willowy reaches of the Rhine, at last, from Bingen to Mannheim, where the brown hills wander into airy blue distance, like a little picture of Paradise, he felt that France was at hand. Before him lay the road thither, easy and straight-that well of light so close! But, unexpectedly, the capricious incidence of his own humor and the opportunity did not suggest, as he would have wagered it must, 66 Go, drink at once!" Was it that France had come to be of no account at all, in comparison of Italy, of Greece? or that, as he passed over the German land, the conviction had come, "For you, Italy, France, Hellas itself, is here!"-that the thought of the untried spiritual possibilities of meek Germany had for Carl transferred the ideal land out of space, beyond the Alps or the Rhine, into future time, whither he must be the leader? A little chilly of humor, in spite of his manly strength, he was journeying partly in search of physical heat. To-day, certainly, in this great vineyard physical heat was about him in measure sufficient, at least for a German constitution. Might it be not otherwise with the imaginative, the intellectual heat and light? the real need being that of an interpreter-Apollo, illuminant, rather as the revealer, than as the bringer, of light. With large belief that the Eclaircissement, the Aufklärung (he had already found the name for the thing), would indeed come, he had been in much bewilderment whence and how. Here, he began to see that it could be in no other way than by action of informing thought upon the vast accumulated material of which Germany was in possession: art, poetry, fiction, an entire imaginative world, following reasonably upon a deeper understanding of the past, of Nature, of one's self an understanding of all beside through the knowledge of one's self. To understand, would be the indispensable first step toward the enlargement of the great past, of one's little present, by criticism, by imagination. Then the imprisoned souls of Nature would speak, as of old. The Middle Age, in Germany, where the past has had such generous reprisals, never far from us, would reassert its mystic spell for the better understanding of our Raffaelle. The spirits of distant Hellas would reawake in the men and women of little German towns. Distant times, the most alien thoughts, would come near together, as elements in a great historic symphony. A kind of ardent new patriotism awoke in him; sensitive, for the first time, at the words national poesy, national art and literature, German philosophy. To the resources of the past, of himself, of what was possible for German mind, more and more his mind opens as he goes on his way. A free open space had been determined, which something, now to be created by him, must occupy. "Only," he thought, "if I had coadjutors !-if these thoughts would awake in but one other mind !”’ At Strasburg, with its mountainous, goblin houses, nine stories high, grouped snugly, in the midst of that inclement plain, like a great stork's nest around the romantic red steeple of its cathedral, Duke Carl became fairly captive to the Middle Age. Tarrying there week after week he worked hard, but (without a ray of light from others) in one long mistake, at the chronology and history of the colored windows. Antiquity's very self seemed expressed there, on the visionary image of king or patriarch, in the deeply incised marks of character, the hoary hair, the massive proportions, telling of a length of years beyond what is lived now. Surely! past ages, could one get at the historic soul of them, were not dead but living: rich in company for the entertainment, the expansion of the present; and Duke Carl was still without suspicion of the cynic afterthought that such historic soul was but an arbitrary substitution, a generous loan of one's self. The mystic soul of Nature laid hold on him next, saying, on him next, saying, "Come! understand-interpret-me!" He was awak ened one morning by the jingle of sledgebells along the street beneath his windows. Winter had descended betimes from the mountains. The pale Rhine below the bridge of boats on the long way to Kehl was swollen with ice, and for the first time he realized that Switzerland was at hand. On a sudden he was captive to the enthusiasm of the mountains, and hastened along the valley of the Rhine, by Alt Breisach and Basel, upward, unrepelled by a thousand difficulties, to Swiss farm-houses and lonely villages, solemn still and untouched by strangers. At Grindelwald, sleeping at last in the close neighborhood of the greater Alps, he had the sense of an over-brooding presence; of some strange new companions around him. Here one might yield one's self to the unalterable imaginative appeal of the elements in their highest force and simplicity-light, air, water, earth. On very early spring days the mantle was suddenly lifted: the Alps were an apex of natural glory, toward which, in broadening spaces of light, the whole of Europe sloped upward. Through them, on the right hand as he journeyed on, were the doorways to Italy, to Como, or Verona: from yonder peak Italy's self was visible, as, on the left hand, in the South-German towns, in a heightened artistic fineness, in the dainty flowered iron-work for instance, the overflow of Italian genius was traceable. These things presented themselves, at last, only to remind him that, in a new intellectual hope, he was already on his way home. Straight through life, straight through nature and man, with one's own self-knowledge as a light thereon, not by way of the geographical Italy or Greece, lay the road to the new Hellas; to be realized now as the outcome of homeborn German genius. At times, in that early fine weather, looking now not southward but to Germany, he seemed to trace the outspread of a faint, not wholly natural, aurora over the dark northern regions. And it was in an act ual sunrise that the news came which finally put him on the directest road homeward. One hardly dared breathe in the rapid uprise of all-embracing light. which seemed like the intellectual rising of the Fatherland, when up the straggling path to his high beech-grown summit (was one safe nowhere ?), protesting over the roughness of the way, came the too familiar voices (ennui itself made audible) of certain high functionaries of Rosenmold, come to claim their new sovereign, close upon the runaway. With news of the old Duke's decease! A real grief at his heart, he hastened now over the ground which lay between him and the bed of death, still trying, at quieter intervals, to snatch profit by the way-peeping at the most unlikely hours on the objects of his curiosity, waiting for a glimpse of dawn through glowing church-windows, penetrating into old church-treasuries by candlelight, taxing the old courtiers to pant up for the view to this or that conspicuous point in the world of hilly woodland. From one such at last, in spite of everything with pleasure to Carl, old Rosenmold was visible-the attic windows of the Residence, the storks on the chimneys, the green copper roofs baking in the long, dry, German summer-the homeliness of true old Germany! He too felt it, and yearned toward his home. And the "beggar-maid" was there. Thoughts of her had haunted his mind all the journey through, as he was aware, not unpleased, graciously overflowing toward any creature he found dependent upon him. The mere fact that she was awaiting him-at his disposition-meekly, and as though through his long absence she had never quitted the spot on which he had said farewell, touched his fancy, and on a sudden concentrated his wavering preference into a practical decision. "King Cophetua" would be hers. And his good will sunned her wild-grown beauty into majesty, into a kind of queenly richness. There was natural majesty in the heavy waves of golden hair folded closely above the neck, built a little massively; and she looked kind-beseeching also, capable of sorrow. She was like clear sunny weather, with blue-bells and the green leaves, between rainy days, and seemed to embody Die Ruh auf dem Gipfel-all the restful hours he had spent of late in the wood-sides and on the hill-tops. One June day, on which she seemed to have withdrawn into herself all the tokens of summer, brought decision to our lover of artificial roses, who had cared so little hitherto for the like of her. Grand-Duke perforce, he would make her his wife, and had already reassured her with caricature of his horrified ministers. Go straight to life!" said his new poetic code; and here was the opportunity. Here also the real adventure, in comparison of which his previous efforts that way seemed childish theatricalities, fit only to cheat a little the profound ennui of real life. In a hundred stolen interviews she taught the hitherto indifferent youth the art of love. Duke Carl has made arrangements for his marriage, secret but complete, and soon to be made public. Long since he had cast complacent eyes on a strange architectural relic, an old grange or hunting-lodge on the heath, with he could hardly have defined what charm of remoteness and old romance. Popular belief amused itself with reports of the wizard who inhabited or haunted the place, his fantastic treasures, his immense age. His window-lights might |