of all the facts, what those things were. The theories of a Herbert Spencer could afford little practical aid, and neither could the theories of a Henry George; for the laissez-faire doctrine of gov

ernment is as foreign to the true genius of social and political life in the Western States as is the ultra-Socialistic doctrine.--Contemporary Review.

ONE stormy season about the beginning of the present century a great tree came down among certain moss-covered ridges of old masonry which break the surface of the Rosenmold heath, exposing, together with its roots, the remains of two persons. Whether the bodies (male and female, said German bonescience) had been purposely buried there was questionable. They seemed rather to have been hidden away by the accident, whatever it was, which had caused death-crushed, perhaps, under what had been the low wall of a gardenbeing much distorted, and lying, though neatly enough discovered by the upheaval of the soil, in great confusion. People's attention was the more attracted to the incident because popular fancy had long run upon a tradition of buried treasure, golden treasures, in or about the antiquated ruin which the garden boundary inclosed the roofless shell of a small but solidly-built stone house, burnt or overthrown perhaps in the time of the wars at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Many persons went to visit the remains, lying out on the dark wild plateau, which stretches away above the tallest roofs of the old grand-ducal town, very distinctly outlined, on that day, in deep fluid gray against a sky still heavy with coming rain. No treasure, indeed, was forthcoming among the masses of fallen stone. But the tradition was so far verified, that the bones had rich golden ornaments about them; and for the minds of some long-remembering people their discovery set at rest an old doubt. It had never been precisely known what was become of the young Duke Carl, who disappeared from the world just a century before, about the time when a great army passed over these parts, at a politiIcal crisis, one issue of which was the

final absorption of his small territory in a neighboring dominion. Restless, romantic, eccentric, had he passed on with the victorious host, and taken the chances of an obscure soldier's life? Certain old letters hinted at a different ending-love-letters which provided for a secret meeting, preliminary, perhaps, to the final departure of the young duke (who by the usage of his realm. could only with extreme difficulty go whither, or marry whom, he pleased) to whatever worlds he had chosen, not of his own people. The minds of those still interested in the matter were now at last made up. The disposition of the remains suggesting to them the lively picture of a sullen night, the unexpected passing of the great army, and the two lovers rushing forth wildly, at the sudden tumult outside their cheerful shelter, caught in the dark and trampled out so, surprised and unseen among the horses and heavy guns.

Time, at the court of the grand-duke of Rosenmold, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, might seem to have been standing still almost since the Middle Age-since the days of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, at which period, by the marriage of the hereditary grandduke with a princess of the imperial house, a sudden tide of wealth flowing through the grand-ducal exchequer had left a kind of golden architectural splendor on the place, always too ample for its population. The sloping Gothic roofs for carrying off the heavy snows still indented the sky-a world of tiles, with space uncurtailed for the awkward gambols of that very German goblin Hans Klapper on the long, slumberous, northern nights. Whole quarryfuls of wrought stone had been piled along the streets and around the squares, and were now grown, in truth, like Nature's self again

in their rough time-worn massiveness, with weeds and wild flowers where their decay accumulated, blossoming, always the same beyond people's memories, every summer as the storks came back to their platforms on the remote chimney-tops. Without, all was as it had been on the eve of the Thirty Years' War: the venerable dark green mouldiness, priceless pearl of architectural effect, was unbroken by a single new gable. And within, human life-its thoughts, its habits, above all, its etiquette-had been put out by no matter of excitement, political or intellectual, ever at all, one might say, at any time. The rambling grand-ducal palace was full to overflowing with furniture, which, useful or useless, was all ornamental and none of it new. Suppose the various objects, especially the contents of the haunted old lumber-rooms, duly arranged and ticketed; and their Highnesses would have had a historic museum, after which those famed Green Vaults at Dresden would hardly have counted as one of the glories of Augustus the Strong. An immense heraldry, that truly German vanity, had grown, expatiating, florid, eloquent, over everything without and within: windows, housefronts, church-walls, and church-floors. And one half of the male inhabitants were big or little State functionaries, mostly of a quasi-decorative order-the treble-singer to the town-council, the court-organist, the court-poet, and the like each with his deputies and assistants maintaining all unbroken a sleepy ceremonial, to make the hours just noticeable as they slipped away. At court, with a continuous round of ceremonies which, though early in the day, must always take place under a jealous exclusion of the sun, one seemed to live in perpetual candle-light.

It was in a delightful rummaging of one of those lumber-rooms, escaped from that candle-light into the broad day of the uppermost windows, that the young Duke Carl laid his hand on an old volume of the year 1486, printed in heavy type, with frontispiece, perhaps by Albert Dürer-" Ars Versificandi: The Art of Versification," by Conrad Celtes. Crowned poet of the Emperor Frederick the Third, he had the right to speak on that subject; for while he

vindicated as best he might old German literature against the charge of barbarism, he did also a man's part toward reviving in the Fatherland the knowledge of the poetry of Greece and Rome; and for Carl, the pearl, the golden nugget, of the volume was the Sapphic ode with which it closed-" To Apollo praying that he would come to us from Italy, bringing his lyre with him: Ad Apollinem, ut ab Italis cum lyra ad Germanos veniat." The god of light, coming to Germany from some more favored world beyond it, over leagues of rainy hill and mountain, making soft day there,-that had ever been the dream of the ghostridden, yet deep-feeling and certainly meek German soul; of the great Dürer, for instance, who had been the friend of this Conrad Celtes, and himself, all German as he was, like a gleam of real day amid that Hyperborean, German darkness, -a darkness which clave to him too at that dim time when there were violent robbers, nay! real live devils, in every German wood. And it was precisely the aspiration of Carl himself. Those verses, coming to the boy's hand at the right moment, brought a spark of intellectual light to a whole magazine of observation, fancy, desire, stored up from the first impressions of childhood. To bring Apollo with his lyre to Germany !-it was precisely what he, Carl, desired to do; was, as he might flatter himself, actually doing.

The day-light, the Apolline aurora which the young Duke Carl claimed to be bringing to his candle-lit people, came in the somewhat questionable form of the contemporary French ideal in matters of art and literature-French plays, French architecture, French looking-glasses: Apollo in the dandified costume of Lewis the Fourteenth. Only, confronting the essentially aged and decrepit graces of his model with his own essentially youthful temper, he invigorated what he borrowed; and with him an aspiration toward the classical ideal, so often hollow and insincere, lost all its affectation. His doting grandfather, the reigning Grand-Duke, afforded readily enough, from the great store of inherited wealth which would one day be the lad's, the funds necessary for the completion of the vast, unfinished Residence, with "pavilions"

(after the manner of the famous Mansard) uniting its scattered parts; while a wonderful flowerage of architectural fancy, with broken attic roofs, passed over and beyond the earlier fabric: the later and lighter forms being, in part, carved adroitly out of the heavy masses of the old, honest, "stump Gothic" tracery. One fault only Carl found in his French models, and was resolute to correct. He would have, at least within, real marble in place of stucco, and, if he might, perhaps solid gold for gilding. There was something in the sanguine, floridly handsome youth, with his alertness of mind turned wholly, amid the vexing preoccupations of an age of war, upon embellishment and the softer things of life, which soothed the testy humors of the old Duke, like the quiet physical warmth of a fire, or the sun. He was ready to preside with all ceremony at a presentation of Marivaux's "Death of Hannibal," played in the original, with such imperfect mastery of the French accent as the lovers of new light in Rosenmold had at command, in a theatre copied from that at Versailles, lined with pale yellow satin, and with a picture, amid the stucco braveries of the ceiling, of the Septentrional Apollo himself in somewhat watery red and blue. Innumerable waxlights in cut-glass lustres were a thing of course. Duke Carl himself, attired after the newest French fashion, played the part of Hannibal. The old Duke, indeed, at a council-board devoted hitherto to matters of State, would nod very early in certain long discussions on matters of art magnificent schemes from this or that eminent contractor for spending his money tastefully, distinguishings of the rococo and the baroque. On the other hand, having been all his life in close intercourse with select humanity, self-conscious and arrayed for presentation, he was a helpful judge of portraits, and the various degrees of the attainment of truth therein: a phase of fine art which the grandson could not value too much. The sergeant-painter, and the deputy sergeant-painter, were indeed conventional performers enough; as mechanical in their dispensation of wigs, finger-rings, ruffles, simpers, as the figure of the armed knight who struck the bell in the Residence tower.

But

scattered through its half - deserted rooms, state bed-chambers and the like, hung the works of more genuine masters, still as unadulterate as the hock, known to be two generations old, in the grand-ducal cellar. The youth had even his scheme of inviting the illustrious Antony Coppel to the court, to live there, if he would, with the honors and emoluments of a prince of the blood. The illustrious Mansard had actually promised to come, had not his sudden death taken him away from earthly glory.

And at least, if one must forego the masters, master-pieces might be had for their price. For ten thousand marksday ever-to-be-remembered !—a genuine work of "The Urbinate,' from the cabinet of a certain commercially-minded Italian grand-duke, was on its way to Rosenmold; anxiously awaited, as it came over rainy mountain-passes and along the rough German roads through doubtful weather. The tribune, the throne itself, were made ready in the presence-chamber, with hangings in the grand-ducal colors laced with gold, together with a speech and an ode. Late at night, at last, the wagon was heard rumbling into the courtyard; with the guest, arrived in safety, but, if one must confess one's self, perhaps forbidding at first sight. From a comfortless portico with all the grotesqueness of the Middle Age, supported by brown, aged bishops, whose meditations no incident could distract, Our Lady looked out no better than an unpretending nun, with nothing to say the like of which one was used to hear. Certainly one was not stimulated by, enwrapped, absorbed in the great master's doings: only, with much private disappointment, put on one's mettle to defend him against critics notoriously wanting in sensibility, and against one's self. In truth, the painter whom Carl most unaffectedly enjoyed, the real vigor of his youthful and somewhat animal taste finding here its proper sustenance, was Rubens-Rubens reached, as he is reached at his best, in well-preserved family portraits, fresh, gay, ingenuous, as of privileged young people who could never grow old. Had not he too brought something of the splendor of a better land into those northern regions: if not the glowing gold of Titian's Italian sun, yet the carnation

and yellow of roses or tulips, such as might really grow there with cultivation even under rainy skies? And then, about this time something was heard at the grand-ducal court of certain mysterious experiments in the making of porcelain, veritable alchemy for the turning of clay into gold. The reign of Dresden china was at hand, with one's own world of little men, and women more delightfully diminutive still, amid imitations of artificial flowers. The young duke braced himself for a plot to steal the gifted Herr Böttcher from his enforced residence, as if in prison, at the fortress of Meissen. Why not bring pots and wheels to Rosenmold, and prosecute his discoveries there? The Grand-Duke, indeed, preferred his old service of gold plate, and would have had the lad a virtuoso in nothing less costly than gold-gold snuff boxes!

For in truth, regarding what belongs to art or culture, as elsewhere, we may have a large appetite and little to feed on. Only, in the things of the mind the appetite itself counts for so much at least in hopeful unobstructed youth with the world before it. "You are the Apollo you tell us of, the northern Apollo," people were beginning to say to him, surprised from time to time by a mental purpose beyond their guesses -expressions, liftings, softly gleaming or vehement lights, in the handsome countenance of the youth, and his effec tive speech, as he roamed, inviting all about him to share the honey, from music to painting, from painting to the drama, all alike florid in style. Yes! and perhaps third-rate. And so far, consistently throughout, he had held that the centre of one's intellectual system must be understood to be in France. He had thoughts of proceeding to that country secretly, in person there to attain the very impress of its genius.

Meantime its more portable flowers came to order in abundance. That the roses, so to put it, were but excellent artificial flowers, redolent only of musk, neither disproved for Carl the validity of his ideal, nor to our minds the vocation of Carl himself in these matters. In art, as in all other things of the mind again, much depends on the receiver; and the higher informing capacity, if it exist within, will mould an unpromising

matter to itself-will realize itself by selection, and the preference of the better in what is bad or indifferent, asserting its prerogative under the most unlikely conditions. People had in Carl, could they have understood it, the spectacle, under those superficial braveries, of a really heroic effort of mind at a disadvantage. That rococo, seventeenth-century, French imitation of the true Renaissance called out in Carl a boundless enthusiasm ; as the Italian original had done nearly two centuries before. He put into his reception of the æsthetic achievements of Lewis the Fourteenth what young France had felt when Francis the First brought home the great Da Vinci and his works. It was but himself truly, after all, that he had found, so fresh and real among those artificial

roses.

He was thrown the more upon such outward and sensuous products of mind

architecture, pottery, presently on music-because for him, with so large intellectual capacity, there was, to speak properly; no literature in his mothertongue. Books there were, German books; but of a dulness, a distance from the actual interests of the warm, various colored life around and within him, to us hardly conceivable. There was more entertainment in the natural train of his own solitary thoughts, humored and rightly attuned by pleasant visible objects, than in all the books he had hunted through so carefully for that all-searching intellectual light, of which a passing gleam of interest gave fallacious promise here or there. And still generously he held to the belief urging him to fresh endeavor, that the literature which might set heart and mind free must exist somewhere, though court-librarians could not say where. In search for it he spent many days in those old book-closets where he had lighted on the Latin ode of Conrad Celtes. Was German literature always to remain no more than a kind of penal apparatus for the teasing of the brain? Oh for a literature set free, conterminous with the interests of life itself!

In music, it might be thought, Germany had already vindicated its spiritual liberty. One and another of those North German towns was already aware of the youthful Sebastian Bach. The

first notes had been heard of a music not borrowed from France; but flowing, as naturally as springs from their sources, out of the ever-musical soul of Germany itself. And the Duke Carl was a sincere lover of music, himself playing melodiously on the violin to a delighted court. That new Germany of the spirit would be builded perhaps to the sound of music. In those other artistic enthusiasms, as the prophet of the French drama or of the architectural, taste of Lewis the Fourteenth, he had contributed himself generously helping out with his own good faith the inadequacy of their appeal. Music alone hitherto had really helped him, and taken him out of himself. To music instinctively more and more he devoted himself; and in his desire to refine and organize the court music from which, by leave of absence to official performers enjoying their salaries at a distance, many parts had literally fallen away, like the favorite notes of a worn-out spinet, he was ably seconded by a devoted youth, the deputy-organist of the grand-ducal chapel. A member of the Roman Church amid a people chiefly of the Reformed religion, Duke Carl would creep sometimes into the curtained court-pew of the Lutheran church to which he had presented its massive golden crucifix, to listen to the chorales, the execution of which he had managed to tune to his liking: relishing, he could hardly explain why, those passages of a pleasantly monotonous and unending melody, as it might seem, which certainly never came to what could rightly be called an ending here on earth; and having also a sympathy with the cheerful genius of Dr. Martin Luther, with his good tunes, and that ringing laughter, which sent dull goblins flitting.

At this time, then, his mind ran eagerly for a while on the project of some musical and dramatic development of a fancy suggested by that old Latin poem of Conrad Celtes: the Hyperborean Apollo, sojourning, in the revolutions of time, in the sluggish north for a season, yet Apollo still: prompting art, music, poetry, and the philosophy which interprets man's life: making a sort of intercalary day amid the natural darkness, -not meridian day, of course, but a soft derivative daylight, good enough for us.

It would be necessarily a mystic piece, abounding in fine touches, suggestions, innuendoes. His vague proposal was met half-way by the very practical executant power of his friend, or servant, the deputy-organist, already pondering, with just a satiric flavor (suppressible in actual performance, if the time for that should ever come), a musical work on Duke Carl himself—" Balder, an Interlude." He was contented to recast and enlarge the part of the northern god of light, with a now wholly serious intention. But still, the near, the real and familiar, gave precision to, or actually superseded, the distant and the ideal. The soul of the music was but a transfusion from the fantastic, but so interesting creature close at hand. And Carl was certainly true to his proposed part, in that he gladdened others by an intellectual radiance which had ceased to mean warmth or animation for himself. For him, the light was still to seek, in France, in Italy: above all, in old Greece, amid the precious things which might yet be lurking there unknown, in art, in poetry, perhaps in very life, till Prince Fortunate should come.

Yes! it was thither, to Greece, that his thoughts were turned during those romantic, classical musings while the opera was made ready. That, in due time, was presented with sufficient success. Meantime, his purpose was grown definite to visit that original country of the Muses, from which the pleasant things of Italy had been but derivative : to brave the difficulties in the way of leaving home at all: the difficulties, also, of access to Greece, in the present condition of the country.

At times the fancy came that he must really belong by descent to a southern. race; that a physical cause might lie beneath this strange restlessness, like the imperfect reminiscence of something that had passed in earlier life. The aged ministers of heraldry were set to work (actually prolonging their days by an unexpected revival of interest in their too well-worn function) on the search for some obscure rivulet of Greek descent, later Byzantine Greek perhaps, in the Rosenmold genealogy. No! with a hundred quarterings, they were as indigenous, incorruptible heraldry reasserted, as the old yew-trees a-squat on the heath.