Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864

Among the plants which exhibit curious phases of hygrometric action might be cited some of the Fig Marigolds (Mesembryanthemum); also the Scaly Club Moss (Lycopodium). The latter, after being thoroughly withered, will, if laid in water, gradually expand, turn green, and assume the appearance of a thriving plant. When again dried, it becomes a brown, shrunken mass, capable, however, of being revived ad libitum.

Some species of Fungi also exhibit a similar property—and all have observed with what promptitude the various pine and larch cones cover their seed in a storm, or even when it 'looks like rain.' I remember being once not a little puzzled in trying to open a drawer that some weeks before had been filled with damp pine cones. Upon becoming dry, each individual had attempted a humble imitation of the genii in the 'Arabian Nights,' expanding to its fullest extent, only to be subjugated by being cast again into the water.

Some of the Algæ exhibit properties similar to that of the Club Moss; and a marine plant known as the Californian Rock-rose is still more curious. Clinging closely to the rocks, and feeding upon some invisible debris, or, like certain orchids, drawing its sustenance from the air (for the rocks upon which it grows, sometimes are lifted far above the water), it attains an enormous size, being in some instances as large as a bushel basket. It is not without a certain jagged beauty of contour, resembling, more than anything else, clusters of Arbor Vitæ branches cut out of wet leather, and meeting in the centre. Once torn from its stony bed, the Rock-rose curls up into an apparently tangled mass of network, having the general outline of a rose, but it will at any time, upon being immersed in water, assume its original appearance. I have seen a fine specimen of this plant open and close, for the hundredth time, years after it had been taken from the rock.

The Hygrometric Ground Star (Geastrum hygrometricum), found in many portions of Europe, is well known; nearer home, we have a variety (Geastrum Saratogensis) differing in some respects from its transatlantic relative, which is of a warm brown color, and flourishes in gravelly soil.

The American variety grows abundantly in the drifting sands of Saratoga County, N. Y. It has no stem or root, excepting here and there a fine capillary fibre by which it clings to the ground. When dry, it contracts to a perfect sphere, is rolled by the wind across the sand, and (according to the account given by Dr. Asa Fitch, who has had a specimen in his possession for twenty years) shakes a few seeds from the orifice at its summit at each revolution. This seed ball also possesses the power of opening when moistened, changing its spherical form to that of an open flower about two inches in diameter. When opened, it displays eight elliptical divisions, resembling petals. These are white as snow on the inside, and traversed by a network of small irregular cracks, while their outer surface resembles kid leather, both in color and texture.

The Ground Star differs in habit from the 'Resurrection Flower,' which never yields its seed unless expanded by moisture (if Dr. Deck's theory be correct), and is not nearly as intricate or beautiful in construction as the oriental relic. Indeed, to this day, the 'Resurrection Flower,' as one must call it for want of a better name, remains without a known rival in the botanical world. From time to time, brief notices concerning it have been published; and where writers, sometimes without having seen the original, have claimed the knowledge or possession of similar specimens, they have become convinced of their mistake on personal inspection. Even the plants alluded to in a short account, given eight years ago, in a leading New York periodical, as being the same as the 'Resurrection Flower,' proved, on comparison by Dr. Eames, to be entirely different.

Although it is by no means certain that the plant in Baron Humboldt's collection, and that owned by Dr Eames, are the only individuals of their kind in existence, the fact of their great rarity is well established. As far as I have been able to ascertain, there is but one 'Resurrection Flower' in America.

That new plants might be obtained from this lonely representative of its race few can doubt; but to this day the germs exposed so temptingly at each awakening, have never been removed. Old as it is, it has never done its work, the only seeds it has sown being those of inquiry and adoration in the minds of all who have witnessed its marvellous powers.

Whether the pretty oriental tale of its origin be true or not—and it requires an oriental faith to believe it in the face of contradictory evidence—none can gaze upon that little emblem of 'Life in Death'—so homely and frail, and yet so beautiful and so eternal—without peculiar emotion.

What drooping, weary soul, parched with the dust of earth, but sometimes longs to be forever steeped in that great Love in which it may expand and bloom—casting its treasures upon Heavenly soil,—and glowing evermore with the radiance of the Awakening.

RECOGNITION

Now in the chambers of my heart is day,
And form and order. A most sacred guest
Is come therein, and at his high behest
Beauty and Light, who his calm glance obey,
Flew to prepare them for his regal sway.
Now solitude I seek, which once, possessed,
I fled; now, solitude to me is blessed,
Wherein I hearken Love's mysterious lay,
And hold with thee communion in my heart.
That thou art beautiful, thou who art mine—
That with thy beauty, Beauty's soul divine
Has filled my soul, I muse upon apart.
In the blue dome of Heaven's eternity,
Rising I seem upborne by thoughts of thee.

THE SEVEN-HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY OF A GERMAN CAPITAL

Most of our countrymen look upon Germany as all one. The varieties of outlandish customs, costumes, and dialects observed among our emigrant population from that land are little noticed, and never regarded as marking districts of the fatherland from which they severally sprung. One of the most fruitful themes of pleasant humor and biting sarcasm in our periodical literature and in the popular mouth, is the ignorance betrayed by enlightened foreigners, and especially foreign journalists, in regard to the geography of our country; as though America were, par excellence, THE land, and on whatever other subject the world might, without meriting our contempt, fail to inform itself, our country, not only in its glorious history and more glorious destiny, but in the minuter details of the picture, must be understood and acknowledged. This charge of ignorance is not unfounded. Often have I been not a little amused when an intelligent German has inquired of me as a New Yorker, with the sure hope of news from his friend in Panama, or another to learn how he might collect a debt from a merchant at Valparaiso, or a third to be informed why he received no answers to letters addressed to friends in Cuba, and so on. But if the tables were turned upon us, there is no point on which we should be found open to a more fearful retribution than on this. I know an American gentleman of education—and he told me the story himself—who applied at Washington for letters to our diplomatic representatives in Europe, and who had sufficiently informed himself to be on the point of sailing for several years' residence abroad, and still, when letters were handed him for our consul-general at Frankfort and our minister in Prussia, asked, with no little concern, whether a letter to our minister in Germany could not be given him. I knew a correspondent of a New York journal fearfully to scourge a distinguished German for his ignorance of American geography. The same person, after months of residence in Munich, having about exhausted the resources which it offered him for his correspondence, gave a somewhat detailed account of the affairs of Greece, in which he referred to King Otho as brother of King Lewis of Bavaria, although almost any peasant could have told him that the latter was father to the former.

Indeed, there is nothing strange about this, unless it be that any one should deem himself quite above the class of blunders which he satirizes. It is less to be wondered at that one should continue to hurl his satiric javelins at those who commit the same class of errors with himself, since he seldom becomes aware of his own ridiculous mistakes. In regard to Germany, our people know but its grand divisions and its large cities; and of its people among us but their exterior distinctions, and mainly those offered to the eye, arrest attention. We meet them as servants or employés in kitchens, shops, and gardens, and on farms, or as neighbors, competitors, or associates in business. At evening we separate, and they go to their own domestic or social circles, where alone the native character speaks itself freely forth in the native language and dialect. There only the homebred wit and humor freely flow and flash. There the half-forgotten legends and superstitions, the utterance of which to other ears than those of their own people is forbidden—perhaps by a slight sense of shame, perhaps by the utter failure of language,—together with the pastimes and adventures of their native villages or districts, are arrested in their rapid progress to oblivion, as they are occasionally called forth to amuse the dull hours or lighten the heavy ones of a home-sick life in a foreign land. Could we but half enter into the hearts of the peasant Germans who move among us, and are by some regarded as scarcely raised in refinement and sensibility above the rank of the more polished domestic animals of our own great and enlightened land, we should often find them replete with the choicest elements of the truly epic, the comic, and the tragic.

How seldom do the people of different lands and languages learn to understand each other—become so well acquainted as to appreciate each other's most engaging traits? The German emigrant seeks a home among us, and desires to identify himself with us. The costume of his native district is thrown off as soon as he needs a new garment, often much sooner. His language is laid aside except for domestic use and certain social and business purposes, as soon as he has a few words of ours. These words serve the ends of business, and rarely does he ever learn enough for any other purpose. The other parts of the man remain concealed from our view. He is to us a pure utilitarian of the grossest school. His pipe suspended from his mouth, his whole time given to his shop, his farm, or his garden, and to certain amusements unknown to us, he is deemed to vegetate much like the plants he grows, or to live a life on the same level with that of the animal he feeds, incapable of appreciating those higher and more refined pleasures to which we have risen—in other words, the true type of dulness and coarseness. An intelligent Welshman once told me that he could not talk religion in English nor politics in Welsh. So with the Germans among us. Their business and politics learn to put themselves into English, their religious, domestic, and social being remains forever shut up in the enclosure of their mother tongue, and from this we rashly judge that what they express is all there is of them. We have never considered the difficulty of transferring all the utterances of humanity from their first and native mediums to foreign ones. It is easy to learn the daily wants of life or the formal details of business in a new language. Here words have a uniform sense. But the nice shades and turns of thought which appear in the happiest and most delicate jets of wit and humor, and which form the great staples of pleasant social intercourse, depend upon those subtile discriminations in the sense of words which are rarely acquired by foreigners. One may have all the words of a language and not be able to understand them in sallies of wit. How nicely adjusted then must be the scales which weigh out the innumerable and delicate bits of pleasantry which give the charm to social life! The words to relate the legends connected with the knights and castles of chivalry, saints, witches, elves, spooks, and gypsies, the foreigners among us never acquire, or at least never so as to have the ready and delicate use of them in social life, until their foreign character has become quite absorbed in the fully developed American, and the taste, if not the material for picturing the customs and legends of the fatherland are forever gone.

It is mainly North Germany with whose institutions we have become more or less familiar through our newspaper literature, and the numbers of students who have from time to time gone thither for educational purposes. Some acquaintance has also been made with Baden and Wirtemberg, in South Germany, as these principalities have a population mainly Protestant; and Heidelberg, at least, has been a favorite resort for American students. But the same is not true of Catholic South Germany. Munich's collections and institutions of art—mainly the work of the late and still living King Lewis I.—have, indeed, become generally known. Mary Howitt, in her 'Art Student in Munich,' has given us some graphic delineations of life there. The talented and witty Baroness Tautphoens has done us still better service in her 'Initials' and 'Quits,' in relation both to life in the capital and in the mountains; yet the character, institutions, and customs of the people remain an almost unexplored field to the American reader.

In the middle of the twelfth century Munich was still an insignificant village on the Isar, and had not even been erected into a separate parish. About this time Henry the Lion added to his duchy of Saxony, that of Bavaria, and having destroyed the old town of Foehring, which lay a little below the site of Munich on the other side of the river, transferred to the latter place the market and the collection of the customs, which had till then been held by the bishops of Freising with the imperial consent. The emperor Frederic I., in the year 1158, confirmed, against the remonstrances of Bishop Otho I., the doings of Henry. The duke hastened to surround the village with a wall and moat to afford protection to those who might choose to settle there, and in twenty years it had become a city. But the duke fell into disgrace with the emperor, and the latter revoked the rights he had granted; but this was like taking back a slander which had already been circulated. The effect had been produced. Munich was to become a capital.

Bishop Otho's successor would gladly have destroyed the infant city and the bridge which had been the making of it. In consequence, however, of his early death, this beneficent purpose toward his see of Freising remained unexecuted. The next successor continued the same policy. He built a castle with the design of seizing the trading trains which should take the road to Munich, perhaps deeming this the best way of magnifying his office as a leader in the church militant. But before he could achieve his purpose of cutting off all supplies from the rival town, and turning trade and tribute all to his own place, a new defender of the rising city had sprung up in the house of Wittelsbocher—the same which still reigns over the kingdom of Bavaria,—and the matter of the feud was finally adjusted by the quiet surrender of the bridge and the tolls to the city.

The imperial decree, therefore, of 1158, must be regarded as having laid the foundation of Munich as a city, and accordingly the seven hundredth anniversary of its founding was celebrated in the year 1858. I shall place a notice of this fête at the head of the list of those which occurred during my residence in that capital.

It was a part of the plan that the ceremony of laying the foundation of a new bridge over the Isar should be performed by the king. This was deemed specially appropriate, because the springing up of the city had depended upon a bridge over the river to draw thither the trade which had gone to the old Freising. This occurred on Sunday, and I did not see it. I never heard, however, but that his majesty acquitted himself as well in this stone mason's work as he does in the affairs of court or state—just as well, perhaps, as one of our more democratic Chief Magistrates, accustomed to splitting rails or other kinds of manual labor, would have done. I took a walk with my children at evening, and met the long line of court carriages returning, followed by a procession on foot, the archbishop, with some church dignitaries, walking under a canopy and distributing, by a wave of the hand at each step of his progress, his blessing to the crowds which thronged both sides of the broad street. Some, perhaps, prized this more than we did, but I do not suppose that there was anything in the nature of the blessing or in the will of the benevolent prelate to turn it from our heretical heads.

The other parts of this celebration consisted in dinners, plays in the theatres, a meeting at the Rathhaus, at which were read papers on the development of Munich for the seven hundred years of its existence, and a procession, the whole occupying about a week. I shall only notice specially the procession, and in connection with it the art exhibition for all Germany, which closed at the same time, having been in progress for three months; for the two greatly contributed to each other.

The illustrated weekly, published at Stuttgart by the well-known novelist Hacklaender, under the title of Ueber Land und Meer, refers to these festivities in the following terms:

'Munich, the South German metropolis of art, was, during the closing days of September, transformed into a festive city. The German artists had assembled from all parts of the country, that they might, within those walls, charmed by the genius of the muses, wander through the halls in which the academy had collected the best works of German art, and take counsel upon the common interests, as they had formerly done at Bingen and Stuttgart. The artists and the magistracy vied with each other in preparing happy days for the visitors—an emulation which was crowned with the most delightful results. The artists' festival, however, was but the harbinger to the the city of the great seventh centennial birthday festival of the Bavarian capital, which had been so long in preparation, and was waited for with such impatience. Concerts and theatres opened the festal series. Services in all the churches of both confessions consecrated the coming days, and the laying of the foundation of the new bridge over the Isar, leading to the Maximilianeum, formed, historically, a monumental memorial for the occasion. Favored by the fairest of weather, the city celebrated the main festival on the 27th of September. It was a historical procession, moved through all the principal streets of the city, and caused departed centuries to pass in full life before the eyes of the citizens and the vast assemblage of strangers there present. It was no masquerade, but a true picture of the civilization of the city, from its first appearance in history to the present day—'a mirrored image,' says a chronicler of the festival, 'of times long since gone by.

'The twelfth century opened the procession—representations of the present time in science, art, and industry, as developed under the reigns of Lewis and Maximilian, which have been so promotive of all that is great, closed it up. But one voice was heard in regard to the success of this festival.'

The plan was to let representatives of the people for this whole period of seven hundred years pass before the eyes of the spectators in the fashions and costumes of their respective ages, bearing the implements or badges of their several guilds or professions. The preparation had been begun months beforehand. Artists had been employed to sketch designs. The best had been selected. The costumes were historical. We see sometimes in every part of our country, costumes extemporized from garrets for old folks' concerts and other like occasions, but generally they do not correspond with each other, or with the performances. The result is committed to accident. The actors wear what their meagre wardrobes of the antique furnish. The wider the divergence from present fashions the better. Chance may bring together the styles of a dozen successive periods, and render the whole without coherence. In such an exhibition our interest is felt simply in the grotesque. It shows us how a countenance familiar to us is set off by a strange and outlandish costume. It represents no history. Such was not this procession. Its front had twelfth century costumes of peasants, burghers, and even the ducal family. So down to the very day of the festival; for statues of the present royal family on open cars closed up the long line. It did not seem indeed quite right that the successive ages of the dead should pass before us living, and the living age alone lifeless. In one part of the procession was an imperial carriage of state drawn by six horses, a man in livery leading each horse, with all the necessary footmen, outriders, and outrunners. The whole was antiquity and novelty happily combined. The costumes and insignia of all classes, with the tools and implements of all handicrafts, from the day when Duke Henry and Bishop Otho, seven hundred years before, had had their petty bickerings about the tolls of a paltry village, down to the present day, the whole transformed into a living panorama, and made to pass in about four hours before the eye.

To set forth great things by small, a bridal pair remove from the East and settle in our Western wilds. In a score of years they return to their native place, wearing the very garments in which they had stood up and been pronounced husband and wife. The picture is equal to a volume of history and one of comedy, the two bound in one. But here, instead of a score of years we have a score of ages, reaching back to a period farther beyond that great popular movement in which modern society had its birth, than that is anterior to our own age. If all the costumes, fashions, implements, and tools of the house, the shop, and the field, insignia and liveries, from those of the first Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, down to those of New York's belles, beaux, and beggars of the present day, should be made to pass in review before us, how absurdly grotesque would be the scene! That veritable 'History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrick Knickerbocker,' has perhaps shaken as many sides and helped digest as many dinners as almost any book since Cervantes gave the world his account of the adventures of his knight Don Quixote, and yet this great historical work hints but a part of that picture, though doubtless greatly improved by the author's delicate touches, which would pass before us in a procession illustrating two centuries of New York's history. Using such hints, the reader may partially judge of the impression made by this setting forth of seven centuries of a capital of Central Europe, and yet one can hardly tell, without the trial, whether he would rather smile at the grotesqueness of the pageant, or be lost in the profound contemplation of the magnificent march of history reënacted in this drama.

This procession spoke but to the eye. It was but a tableau, dumb, though in its way eloquent. It detailed no actions; it only hinted them. It simply presented the men who acted, clad in the outward garb, and bearing the tools and weapons of their day. The cut of a garment, the form of a helmet or halberd, a saddle or a semitar, a hoe or a hatchet, or the cut of the hair or the beard, may speak of the heart and soul, only, however, by distant hints. But just as the representation is less distinct and detailed, is it a mightier lever for imagination to use in raising again to life centuries which had long slept in the dust. The superstructure of history, indeed, which we should rear upon such a basis, would be wide of the truth on one side, just as the narratives and philosophical disquisitions which come to us under that name are on the other. History generally relates those things in which all ages have been most alike—the same which have 'been from the beginning and ever shall be'—the intrigues of courts and of diplomacy—varied mainly by the influence of the religion of the Bible, as at first persecuted, then rising by degrees to a rank either with or above the state, and becoming a persecuting power, and then finally modifying and softening down the native rudeness of the human race, until mutual and universal tolerance is the result; court life, diplomacy, and war, however, remaining and still to remain the perpetual subjects of historical composition. But between this elevated range and the humble one of burghers' tools and costumes, lies a boundless field of aspect, variegated with all the forms which checker social and domestic life. Oh!—thought a little group of American spectators occupying a room near the corner of Ludwig and Theresien streets—could we but rend the veil of time which conceals Munich's seven hundred years of burgher and peasant life, how odd, how rude a scene would present itself! The reader's fancy may make the attempt. I will aid a little if I can, and there was indeed some material furnished in addresses prepared for that occasion, and in some other papers which have come into my hands.

The people of that little village on the banks of the Isar were but the owners and tillers of the barren soil. Nearly a century (1238) after Henry the Lion had surrounded it with walls, and a local magistracy had been chosen; when two parishes—those of St. Peter and St. Mary—had been already long established, we find a schoolmaster signing, doubtless by virtue of his office, a certificate of the freedom of a certain monastery from the city customs. That the school teacher must, ex officio, sign such papers, spoke volumes. How few could have had the learning, for it must indeed be done in Latin. And then the history of the city runs nearly a century back of this date. What was the burgher life of that first century of Munich's history? It is but the faintest echo that answers. Schools there were at that day and long before. Nay, the cloister schools were already in decay; but more than three hundred years were yet to elapse before the rise of the Jesuit schools. Three hundred years! How can we, of this age of steam, estimate what was slowly revolving in society in those years? In 1271 we find an order of the bishop of Freising requiring the parish rector to have a school in each parish of the city; half a century later than this we meet documentary evidence that school teaching had assumed a rank with other worldly occupations, and was no longer subject to the rector of the parish. If I could but set the reader down in a school room of that day, I might forego any attempt to portray the times; but, alas! I cannot. He would, however, doubtless see there groups of boys—for I half suspect that this was before girls had generally developed the capability of learning—the faces and garments clean or smutty, showing the grade of social progress which had been gained, for we may presume that the use of soap and water had been to some extent introduced, and if so, I have erred again, for the dirty and the ragged did not go to school. These could do without education. We should see, too, the beaming or the dull and leaden eye—if, indeed, the eye spoke then as now—proclaiming the master's success or failure. And then the schoolmaster, the chief figure in the group, would be found to have the otium cum dignitate, and especially the former, in a higher sense than is now known. And what was the staple information which circulated among the people? Of this we know more. It was made up of adventures of knights, miracles wrought by the host, by crucifixes and Madonnas, and apparitions of saints, leading some emperor or prince to found a church or monastery—a kind of history which few churches or other religious institutions want. If there was less of life in the humanity of that age than we have at present, there was as much more in other things; for even those holy pictures and statues could move their eyes and other parts. They found various ways of expressing approbation of the pious, and frowning upon scoffers. Crucifixes and Madonnas, carried by freshets over barren fields, brought fertility. The devil, too, figured more largely in the narratives of days before printed books formed the basis of education. He generally appeared in the persons of giants and witches, which latter were his agents by special contract. Their freaks had all shades of enormity, from the slight teasing of the housewife in her baking and churning to the peril of life and limb and endless perdition. The devil sometimes coming in one of these forms endangered the lives of the quiet people of the city by formally dismissing the watch between the hours of eleven and twelve o'clock at night. So hundreds of things which he has become too genteel in our day to practise.

The founding of the city was near the close of that great movement known as the crusades. What a world of material these furnished to be used in popular education! The feats of knights, instead of assuming distinct forms and being stereotyped and told to them in books, were surrendered to the popular mouth for preservation and propagation. Saints, angels, and demons attached themselves from time to time to these circulating myths. Original characters often dropped out, and the discrimination of the wisest believer in the real and ideal, became confused. Then came the period of the Hussite war. This gave rise to many a miracle of divine judgment. The Bohemian mocker of the holy mass, or of some wonder-working statue of the Virgin, is pursued with divine vengeance. The Jews—how suggestive the name, in the history of mediæval Europe, of mystery, miracle, and murder!—were early allowed to settle in Munich. They were assigned to a particular street. In the year 1285 a story was started—it had been long stereotyped, and editions of it circulated in every part of Christendom—of the murder of a Christian child. A persecution of the Jews was the result—one hundred and forty were burned in their own houses—and the poor Israelites must doubtless suffer without redress, although many of them were then, as they now are, bankers and brokers to the spiritual and temporal lords. Not far from the same time the ducal mint was destroyed, because the people were enraged to find the metal in their coin growing alarmingly less. For this the city must pay a fine.

From our first knowledge of this town it continued gradually, but very slowly, to advance in intelligence—we should rather say from century to century than from year to year; for during this period progress was too slow to be perceptible, unless the observation were verified by the pillars erected to mark the boundary lines between successive centuries. The inquirer into the past often sighs out the wish that art had found a way to transmit full impressions of all departed generations to the latest living one. Perhaps he prudently limits the desired favor to himself, otherwise the wish would not be wise; its realization would place every lazy observer upon the same level with the studious investigator. The cumbrous details, too, of sixty centuries piled upon one mind would crush it, unless human nature were a very different thing from that which we now behold. It is in accordance with a wise plan of Providence that the deeds of past ages should perish with them, except the few needed to cast their gleam of light upon the world's future pathway. We are made capable of rescuing just enough for the highest purposes of life, not enough to overwhelm and burden us in our march toward the goal before us. It is thought by some that the point and finish of the ancient Greek authors, as compared with the moderns, is attributable to the fact that they were less perplexed with accumulated lore and the multiplication of books and subjects of study. Their minds were not subject to the dissipating effects of large libraries, and daily newspapers with telegraphs from Asia, Africa, and Hesperia. I shall not discuss this question. The amount of information handed down from past ages even now is but as the spray which rises above the ocean's surface to the vast depths which lie below. The historical fossils of those ages are therefore left to exercise the genius of the Cuviers of historical inquiry. As that naturalist could, from a single bone of an extinct animal species, make up and describe the animal, so have inquirers into the past succeeded in picturing a departed age from the few relics left of it. Hence we are treated occasionally with such agreeable surprises in the march of history as the discovery of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Nineveh. The genius of our Wincklemanns, Champollions, Humboldts, and Layards has found a worthy field. Such days as that I am attempting to describe, representing seven centuries of a modern capital before the admiring eyes of the present generation of its people, become possible. Instead of the monotony of a perpetual observation, we have the charm of alternate lulls and surprises.

This picture has a further likeness to the naturalist's description made from the fossils of extinct genera of animals. In the latter the animal is made to stand before us. We have the data necessary to infer his habits. But we see him not perfect in his wilderness home of unnumbered ages past. We see him not the pursuer or the pursued; we hear not the fierce growls or the plaintive note of alarm or distress. These we must imagine. So, too, the slowly and peacefully moving train which passes our windows, setting forth the sleeping centuries of this city. There is the emperor in state—dukes in ducal magnificence—knights in armor with horses richly and fancifully caparisoned—citizens in the dress of their times—the various mechanics' and traders' guilds, with their implements, their badges and their banners, with priests thickly scattered through the whole line, which is ever changing as the representatives of one age succeed those of another. The whole is calm and quiet. The fierce contests, the angry broils, private and public—now throwing the whole city into a ferment of innocent alarm, now deluging its streets with blood—the rage of plagues, sealing up the sources of human activity, and causing the stillness of the grave to settle over the scene—all these we must supply; and surely the thoughtful mind is busy in doing this as it contemplates the passing train. We conceive rival claimants for the ducal throne, contending, regardless of dying counsel, until death again settles what death had thrown open to contest. Everything which has ever transpired on the theatre of the world's great empires, may be conceived as enacted on this narrower stage. The difference is less in talents and prowess than in the extent of the field and the numbers of actors.

From the period of the Reformation down we can form the picture with more distinctness. Seehofen, son of a citizen of Munich, while a student at Wittenberg, received Luther's doctrine, and through him many of his townsmen. The most learned and able opponent whom the Reformer had to encounter was John Eck, chancellor of the Bavarian University of Ingolstadt—one of the most renowned at that day in Europe—which, by removal to the capital, has now become the University of Munich. In 1522 Duke William, of Bavaria, issued an edict forbidding any of his people to receive the reformed doctrine. Bavaria, therefore, remained Catholic, and Munich became the headquarters of German Catholicism. The electoral duke, Maximilian, of Bavaria, was head of the Catholic league which carried on the 'Thirty Years' War' against the Protestants under Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, in the early part of the seventeenth century. The city is full of sayings derived from this whole period, such as to leave us no ground to wonder that few Catholics are inclined to become Protestants. The only Protestant church in the city was built within the last thirty years. It is but a few years since the house was still shown in Scudlinger street, in which Luther, in his flight from Augsburg, whither he had been called to answer for his teaching before Cardinal di Vio in 1518,[8 - Luther was not in Munich at that time, if indeed he ever was.] stopped, his horse all in a foam, to take a drink, and in his hurry forgot to pay for the piece of sausage which he ate. In the market place was a likeness of Luther and his 'Katherl.'[9 - Catherine Bora, Luther's wife.] There are also numerous derisive pictures, such as the Reformer riding upon a swine, with a sausage in his hand, which, however, all originated in the mockery of the Jews, who were afterward compelled to surrender some of them to the leading spirit of the Reformation. At Saurloch, a little distance south of Munich, there were still, in 1840, to be seen pictures of Luther and his wife in a group made up of chimney sweeps, buffoons, and many others of the class. As this age passed before the eyes of the spectators, they would doubtless give it new life by attributing to it the spirit exemplified in these choice and tasteful pictures and sayings, amusing at this day, doubtless, to both parties.

The period of the 'Thirty Years' War' and the visit to Munich of Gustavus Adolphus has left more sayings and monuments, and thus do more honor to the people. After the Catholic victory near Prague, in 1620, the elector celebrated a public entry into the city amid the jubilations of the people and the Jesuits. A pillar was erected in remembrance of the victory, and dedicated, eighteen years afterward, to the Virgin, in accordance with a vow. The city was also variously adorned. The rejoicing was somewhat premature. In 1632 the duchess and ducal family had to remove to Salzburg for safety, whither they carried with them the bones of St. Benno, the patron saint of the city, and other valuables. The king of Sweden entered the walls under a promise, which he had made in consideration of three hundred thousand florins, to be paid to him by the people, to secure them against fire, sword, and plunder. Ladies freely gave up their precious ornaments to make up the amount. But they failed. The conqueror took forty-two priests of the religious orders, and twenty respectable citizens, as hostages for the payment. These wandered around with his camp for three years, and then all returned except four, who died during the time. The traditions of the people give the king credit for having strictly abstained from plunder, and executed the only man who transgressed his rule, although the citizens failed on their part. How beautifully the brilliant and the glorious mingle with the sad and the sombre in the picture which we form of this age as the passing train brings it before our minds! How religion, variously tinged with the sable hues of superstition, wrought upon that age! The Swedish king, the moment victory turns in his favor, dropping upon his knees in the midst of the dead and the dying, the clouds of smoke and dust as yet unsettled, pours out his soul in fervent prayer and thanksgiving.[10 - Vide Schiller's 'Geschichte des dreisigjährigen Krieges.'] He but represents his army and his age. The Catholic army are not less devout in their way. Germany is full of monuments and sayings of this period. Those of Munich are of the Catholic side. There stands in a public square an equestrian statue of colossal size, in bronze, of the elector Maximilian, head of the Catholic League—his pillar to the Virgin still stands—and the great general of the League, Count Tilley, represented in bronze, is among the prominent objects viewed by the visitor to this capital. On the other hand, the greatest organization in Europe for the aid of Protestants in Catholic lands, having branches everywhere, bears the name of Gustavus Adolphus. Let the reader then conceive the visions which flit through the minds of the spectators as this age passes in review before them.

But here I shall close this part of the picture. The description of the city as it now exists belongs in other connections. It has been suggested, as greatly adding to the interest of this birthday festival of the capital, that it concurred in time with the exhibition of the art of all Germany in the Crystal Palace. Although the two had no natural connection, yet they became so intertwined in fact as not easily to be separated. I shall therefore just touch upon the art display.

Works of art are dry subjects of description, and that too just in the proportion of their exquisiteness to behold. Things made for the eye must be presented to the eye. Works of a coarse and comic nature can, indeed, be described so as to produce their effect. Here, for instance, is a railroad-station man. Such in Bavaria, dressed in their quaint little red coats, must stand with the hand to the hat as if in token of profound respect for the train while it passes. This one, when lathered and half shaved, was suddenly called by the train, and in this predicament he stands while it passes. The best new work in the exhibition was one in water colors by Professor Schwind, of Munich, setting forth the popular German myth of the seven ravens. It sold to a prince for seven thousand florins. I know better than to attempt a description. The 'Raising of Jairus' Daughter,' a picture sent on by the king of Prussia, gave the best impression I have ever had of life once departed, and now suddenly beginning again to quiver on the lip and gleam in the eye; or as Willis has it:

'And suddenly a flush
Shot o'er her forehead and along her lips,
And through her cheek the rallied color ran;
And the still outline of her graceful form
Stirred in the linen vesture;'

thus changing the sadness of the family assembled round the couch into a lustre sympathetic with that of her own reopened eyes.

These specimens have been given to show that such subjects are incapable of description. The exhibition continued from June to October, and the collection was so extensive that a shorter period would have been scarcely sufficient for the study of works exhibited. During this time the characteristic enthusiasm and jealousies of the artists were variously exemplified. The delightful hours spent in walking through these halls will be among my latest remembrances.

This whole festive period culminated with the closing days of September. The city had been unusually full all summer, but as its great birthday festival approached, the crowds thickened, until its capacity for lodging room had been transcended. All parts of Germany were represented, nor did delegates from the rest of the civilized world fail.

The question naturally arises, whether New York, Boston, or Philadelphia has a history which would appear well in such a drama! Although our history extends back over little more than one fourth of the period occupied by that of Munich, it might afford this material. The annals of public events would be found preserved with great fulness and distinctness—the archives of city and state councils and of the churches would supply the needed facts—but who could furnish the fashions, tools, and implements of each successive age from that of the Pilgrim fathers to that of the great rebellion? Who would perform the labor of research necessary to ascertain what they were? Where is the American court, supported at an expense of several millions per annum, to preserve all these in collections, or to get them up for court theatres? Who would pay for making all these for a procession of twenty thousand persons, with all the necessary horses and carriages? And surely, if we could not feel the confidence that everything was historical, all our interest in the display would be gone. I am apprehensive that we shall be obliged to leave such exhibitions to those countries which have hereditary heads, and, making a virtue of necessity, console ourselves with the thought that we have something better.