our highest spiritual being. It is a very small picture, painted in tempera, and looks like a pale and faded watercolour drawing. The colours are tender rose, tender blue, and grey, with golden tints for the hair, and gold for stars, and delicate tracery upon the draperies. The feeling produced upon my mind by this exquisite creation is as of an ecstatic vision seen by saint or martyr.

The figures are of course arranged with perfect symmetry. The lifeless form of Christ, supported behind by Joseph of Arimathea, rises in the centre, pale and stark; the wondrously noble head bowed on the breast, the eyelids with the shadow of death upon them,-the whole tender, mournful, beyond the power of words to express. The rich golden hair falls in gentle waves from the pallid brow around the visionary countenance. The lower portion of the figure is draped in very soft, semi-transparent, white drapery, which hangs in perfectly symmetrical folds; the arms are stretched forth, as if upon the cross, but the hands drooping. The right hand is kissed by the Virgin Mary, the left by St. John. They both approach the figure of our Lord timidly, lovingly, half kneeling; their figures and heads are seen in profile; the attitudes are almost similar, and each is garmented in pale rose-coloured and pale blue drapery. And how adoring, how tenderly, purely beautiful, are their countenances, filled with an unearthly grace-such grace as alone is seen in Raphael's early pictures, and in Angelico's. A golden star gleams upon the shoulder of the Virgin. Behind the figures rises the grey, formal sepulchre cut in the rock, above which are seen the tops of dark cypresses; dark grass, filled with tufts of formal grey and pale blue flowers, covers the ground; all is unreal, mysterious, symbolic, as if traced by the hand of a seraph rather than by the hand of man!

CHAPTER XI.

SLEDGING.

November 22d.-The great feature of this week has been sledging. Last Sunday was the first day that sledges made their appearance. For several days the snow had kept falling and falling, and the sky had continued of a sullen white with unfallen snow.

We felt certain that sledges must soon make their appearance, and talked about the poetry and romance of sledging. We recalled the sledgings in Miss Bremer's novels, and Frithiof, and old King Ring, and Hamilton and Hildegard's sledging adventure in that clever book the "Initials," and determined that when we had our drive in a sledge it also should be towards Nymphenburg, in memory of Hildegard and Hamilton's misfortunes.

And on Sunday afternoon we heard from the street a merry sound of bells-" A sledge, Isabel! a sledge!" cried Anna. In a moment Isabel had rushed to the window, exclaiming in an excited voice, as she looked out, "Oh, how pretty! how pretty! Come, Anna! do look at its scarlet trappings, at its fur-lining, at the funny people wrapped up in it !" And Isabel was ready to clap her hands like a delighted child.

On Monday morning, as I entered the English Garden, and was admiring the heavy masses of snow which hung in fantastic forms upon the dark branches of a group

of fir-trees, and was enjoying the purity, and silence, and beauty of the whole scene, a sharp, clear sound of bells rang through the frosty air; and skimming along the white smooth road which wound among the trees, came on a bright green and golden sledge, drawn by a brisk black horse, brilliant with scarlet trappings and musical with little bells. It was a peasant's sledge; and wrapt up in his cloak, and with a fur-cap drawn down over his brows, and with fur gloves upon his hands, within it sat a burly peasant. So pretty was the whole thing, so gay and fantastic, that a little thrill ran through my nerves, and I was as perfect a child in my joy over the pea-green sledge as Isabel had been the day before.

In the course of Monday, sledges were to be seen everywhere. Sledges were seen standing before doors, without horses, as though people were bringing them forth from their summer retreats and were inspecting their state and condition, whilst others were being pulled along to blacksmiths and coach-builders to be repaired.

Gentlemen's carriages have begun to travel upon sledges instead of upon wheels-ditto droschkies, ditto fiacresditto peasants' carts-ditto laundresses' carts-ditto brewers' carts. Little lads, of course, go to school and return upon sledges instead of upon their own legs. Water-tubs and buckets, and milk-jars, or rather the wooden pails, hooped with brass, in which people here carry their milk about— all travel on sledges. Things and vehicles moving upon wheels or legs, one begins to consider very much out of fashion! Together with the droschkies and fiacres now put upon sledges, you see upon the stands sledges-proper -two- and one-horse sledges-green, blue, and yellow, grand, elegant, and shabby; and these sledges you see driving about in all directions, with their heavily cloaked and be-furred drivers generally standing up behind, à-la

Hansom-cab, and cracking their long lashed whips till the streets resound again. You see a couple of students in one sledge ;--a whole family, father, mother, and a crowd of children, in a family sledge—you see a lady and gentleman alone-you see, perhaps, as I did last night, two fat citizenesses, one driving, with a couple of round-faced rosy children peeping out from under the apron of the sledge, and seemingly quite close under the horse's heels. You see a couple of Munich "gents,”—for there are such animals here with big-buttoned coats, jaunty hats, and cigars in their mouths, driving a lean shambling horse at a furious rate, whilst they themselves seem ready to be spilt from their slight sledge any moment; and you see numbers of well-to-do big-boned peasants, rapidly skimming along in their sledges, which all bear a striking resemblance to each other, being green, often of painted wicker-work, and quaintly adorned with gilt tracery-work, which looks as though it were of iron gilt.

In order to see as much winter life as possible, I have varied my walk to the studio these last several mornings, by going down through the Hof-Garten, where, by the by, three days running, at the same hour and upon the same spot, I have encountered, buttoned up to the chin in his warm furred coat, his Majesty King Max, taking his morning walk, and then I have wended my way down an old street which leads to the St. Anna Vorstadt. And upon these walks I have not only seen all these varieties of the genus sledge, but also soldiers emptying out of long heavy carts loads of snow into the branches of the Isar, which flow through the town, and met processions of laundresses which have vastly amused me. In the early morning they were entering the city with clothes-baskets and bundles, piled up ever so high upon wooden sledges, which they both drew along and pushed. The sledges were not few in

number, and the procession was rendered yet more fantastic from gay-coloured dresses and white petticoats, borne aloft like pennons upon long poles! All bright and fresh in the clear winter's morning, their comely faces glowing with exercise and the sharp air, their gowns and gay handkerchiefs as clean and bright as their faces, these laundressmaids and matrons looked wondrously attractive. Just picture to yourself this train winding along through the old street, white and crisp with its snow, and tell me whether, together with a pea-green sledge rushing along here and there, and every now and then a group of peasants, men and women, cutting up wood before the houses, the scene was not quaint and pleasantly foreign? These groups of cutters of wood are very amusing. The man-for the group usually consists of one man and two women—the man in a chocolate or pale pink cotton jacket, black velvet breeches, and black top-boots, chopping away upon a heavy block which he has placed upon the causeway; the women in pink or blue cotton boddices, with large wadded gigot sleeves, and scarlet or green, or scarlet and green mixed, woollen petticoats, and with black or white kerchiefs tied over their heads, one sawing pieces of wood in a skeleton-like sawing machine, the other carrying away, in a wooden basket on her back, the cut and sawn pieces of wood through the heavy arched door or rather gateway of the house.

But to return to sledging and to our sledging. On Tuesday afternoon the sun shone out gloriously, and casting long gleams on the studio floor through the high windows, my eyes glanced up and encountered, smiling through leafless branches flecked with snow, such a lapislazuli heaven that I forthwith put away my drawing, and some twenty minutes later stood in our little sitting-room, startling Isabel with my exclamation of "On with your