im, with
so large intellectual capacity, there was, to speak properly, no
literature in his mother-tongue. Books there were, German books, but
of a dulness, a distance from the actual interests of the warm,
various, coloured life around and within him, to us hardly conceivable.
There was more entertainment in the natural train of his own solitary
thoughts, humoured 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 endeavour, 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 [131] already vindicated its
spiritual liberty. One and another of those North-german towns were
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 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 was
dedicate; and in his desire to refine and organise 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
favourite 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 t