membrances on worthy men. Johannes had visited India in the train of a well-known scholar; she thought she could give him the energy he lacked, him to rise from obscurity to

and hoped to help name and fame.

Her

Her court numbered other

brilliant names; well-wishing was all she bestowed on him.

The lady was full of illusions, and her life was played out like a well-arranged piece of music. The palace in Genoa, with its splendid colonnade and proud gallery, had been ceded by the widow, as she had no son, to the brothers of her deceased husband; but she was rich enough to live brilliantly in her wise and temperate manner. The palazzo on the mountain, where her father had lived, was her residence during the fine season of the year; she spent the winter in Paris; and she invited Johannes, if his way should lead him in that direction, to visit her. At the end of the letter there was a postscript, in which the lady commissioned him, just as if she had seen him yesterday, to procure her the sketches of furniture of the Renaissance period which were in Lord Arthur's castle, or to inform her of an artist in London who would execute them for her at a moderate price. The letter concluded by saying, that a man's character may be seen in the arrange

ment of his room, and in the taste with which he combines the beautiful with the useful.

The sight of her hand-writing had touched him; her tone of superiority, and the commission at the end of her letter, made him smile. He was in a state of mind in which we almost languish for truthfulness of feeling!

He laid the book aside, and wandered through the gloomy avenues of the park, where the nightingales were singing.

He answered her letter with a few words of thanks, and at the same time bid her farewell.

BOOK THE NINTH.

CHAPTER I.

FRANZISKA'S HOME.

Schleswig-Holstein, stammverwandt,
Wanke nicht, mein Vaterland.

ON a hot day, early in July, the musician Klaren was sitting supporting his somewhat too long chin on the polished head of his walking-stick, and looking before him with his grey, deep-set, and sparkling eyes. He was sitting, with a fine coverlet thrown over his knees, on an easy-chair, under a group of lime-trees in the centre of a large court-yard, apparently enjoying the summer heat of noonday, when everything in the country has, as it were, gone to sleep, and it is dinner-time within doors. The artist had come on a visit from Hamburg to Schleswig-Holstein at an unfavourable time, for there was unrest and excite

ment throughout the land in the year 1850; he

1

had everywhere encountered troops and soldiers. The Duchies would not submit to be merged in Denmark; they wished to remain German, and it was now allowed them to defend themselves, and to make the attempt to fight their way with their young army and their old rights. The Governments of Germany washed their hands in innocency, and played the part of impartial spectators in the impending contest.

Klaren had not thought that the decision would have been arrived at so soon, otherwise he would have preferred remaining in Hamburg. It was fortunate that in the neighbourhood, at any rate on this day, there was some repose. The day before the village was full of soldiers, quartered in the different houses; to-day the troops had advanced further, and all was quiet. The artist had a finely-strung soul, susceptible to every discord; his nerves had grown still more excitable during the eight years that had elapsed since we last saw him; and his deformed figure seemed to have sunk still more, so that his arms and slender hands seemed longer than ever. But his mind was active and lively, and his heart had never changed.

There was something strangely agreeable in the stillness of this noontide hour. Beasts and birds and other habitants of earth and air seemed to

have withdrawn for rest and sleep; the bees alone were humming in the lime-blossoms, and now and then a breeze stirred and passed softly through the splendid roof above him, wafting down to him the delicious fragrance of the blossoms.

Klaren had looked around him with a cheerful smile. Suddenly, however, the expression of a sad resignation stamped itself on his fine face: far from the stable, behind the court-yard, he caught the sound of the Schleswig-Holstein song. Two powerful young voices, natural enough without any touch of art-knowledge, were giving free vent to their enthusiasm and joyousness in the ringing song; and Klaren could indulge in reflections upon rudeness in matters of art, to which mankind still stuck fast in our cultivated century. Even he who wears a good coat, sits decently at table, is schooled in matters of life and intercourse, or has even finished a learned course of study, has little taste for art; so that good people and bad musicians strut about in a thousand forms, and condemn the soul and feeling of some of their fellow men to eternal martyrdom, unless they are healthy as the young, and have nerves like the ropes on which the church bells are moved.

The face with the said expression passed, how