the liturgy. A supreme moment of vindication came for Queen Caroline. She arrived at Canterbury, and her journey to London was a triumphal one. The populace rallied in her support, mobs threatened, flags were hoisted, and seditious placards posted. She appeared undaunted before the House of Lords during the preparation of the bill of separation. The coronation took place in July, 1821. The queen appeared at the entrance of Westminster Abbey, and was refused admittance. The repulse hastened her end. She died in August, and her remains were taken to Brunswick at her own request.

The audience, posterity, contemplates these problems of history. If the nose of Cleopatra had been less symmetrical the face of the earth would have been materially modified. If an inflammatory fever had not seized Mirabeau, a tile had fallen on Robespierre, or a bullet struck Bonaparte, events would have had different results. If Louisa of Mecklenburg had married George IV. how would the German Empire have

been shaped by Bismarck for that fine old gentleman Kaiser Wilhelm to rule over? If Queen Caroline had been more tractable, as wife and mother, the fairies would have watched in vain. around the cradle in 1819, of Victoria Alexandrina, daughter of the Duke of Kent, for the Victorian era.

The curtain falls at Villa d'Este, the lights burn dim, and the play, called Life, is over for Caroline of Brunswick to all eternity.

XVII

A MUSICAL MEMORY

HE tall and slender form of a priest,

T

in a black robe, paced the path bordered by orange and citron trees.

The seminarist had come from Rome,

and his sphere of cloistered studies, at the invitation of the proprietor long absent in foreign lands. Something notable would be expected of him in his day, perhaps. His soul of the musician was full of half-awakened harmonies. His education had taken him back to the date when music lay yet in the cradle, awaiting the touch of Italy upon her strings, the touch of Germany upon her keys. The Gregorian Chaunts, the themes of Pergolesi, and even the graceful imagination of Metastasio had long absorbed

him.

With Schleiermacher he believed that religion is a music, pervading all our sentiments, thoughts, and acts.

Hedges of bay and ilex framed a belvedere, and a tiny amphitheatre of lawn, with an obelisk rising in the centre. On all sides of the boundary the property was embowered in laurel. The visitor might find here a sunny garden, a cool banquet-hall, and watch the play of the central fountain, with antique bronze reliefs, where the spray blown by zephyrs rose in a silvery veil, aspired to the heights, swayed, and lapsed back earthward to repose once more. How many have enjoyed this courteous hospitality of generations of patrician owners.

To the seminarist the place was peopled with ghosts; a shadowy company of sweetest suggestiveness to his own meditations and aspirations. All were friendly, and all smiled on him. The brotherhood had attained immortality, crossed the boundary chasm between life and death, climbed to new realms of harmony. Did not Beethoven, colossal and profound in thought, 177

12

Mozart, melancholy yet majestic, and Mendelssohn, full of power and technical skill, or Wagner, among the clouds of the great ideal, beckon to him to struggle forward in a daring boldness of conception of the fugue movement, or, at least, to attain sincerity and truthfulness in his work? Alas! would he ever presume to write a symphony after Beethoven's Ninth, which Wagner designated as the last possible emanation of music as a separate art? Could he hope to follow Mozart's Jupiter symphony, or charm the ear of his generation by even an echo of Mendelssohn's elves and fairies? Still nearer to him the composers of the sonata, the fantasia, the song, linking together words and melody, of his own day, brushed him by an impalpable presence, wafted to him, in the fountain's spray, as he passed in his walk, in all the manifold phases of a subtle language speaking to the human heart; Schubert's rich lyrics, Schumann, first of subjective romanticists, and Brahms, with his store of chamber music. The seminarist folded his arms across his breast, and watched the upward puls