ble 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 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 the curtained court pew of the Lutheran Church, to
which he had presented its massive golden crucifix, to listen to the
chorales, the execution of which he had managed to time to his liking,
relishing, he could hardly explain why, those passages of a pleasantly
monotonous and, as it might seem, unending melody--which certainly
never came to what could rightly be called an ending here on earth; and
having also a sympathy