the "Freischuetz" continually
kept them humming in his ears. In seven weeks the work was completed,
with the exception of the overture, which every day's pressing wants
retarded for a few weeks longer.

Leipzig and Munich promptly declined the work with which he had
proposed to salute his fatherland once more. The latter city declared
that the opera was not adapted to Germany! Through Meyerbeer's
influence it was then accepted in Berlin. Thus hated Paris led to the
production of two works in which he touched strings that find their
fullest response only in a German's heart. The prospect of returning
to his fatherland delighted him. What could be more natural than that
his mind strove to study more and more closely the spirit and
development of his fatherland, in order to raise other and better
monuments to it? He renewed his studies in German history, although
solely for the purpose of finding suitable material for operas. At
first, Manfred and the brilliant era of the Hohenstauffens attracted
him. But this historic world at once and utterly disappeared when he
beheld that figure in which the spirit of the Ghibellines attained in
human form its highest development and greatest beauty--_Tannhaeuser_!
His previous readings in German literature had made him familiar with
the story, but he now for the first time understood it. The simple
popular tale stirred him to such a degree that his whole soul was
filled with the image of its hero. It revealed the path to the
historic depths of our folk-lore to which Beethoven's and Weber's
music had long since given him the clues. The story had some
connection with the "Saengerkrieg auf Wartburg," and in this contest,
he saw at once the possibility of fully revealing the qualities of his
hero, who raises the first German protest against the pretended
culture and sham morality of the Latin world. The old poem of this
"Saengerkrieg," is further connected with the legend of Lohengrin.
Thus it was that in foreign Paris he was destined to gain at once and
permanently a realization of the native qualities of our common
nature, which, from primeval times, the German spirit has put into
these legends.

After a stay of more than three years abroad, he left Paris, April 7,
1842. "For the first time I saw the Rhine; with tears in my eyes, I, a
poor artist, swore to be ever loyal to my German fatherland," he says.
Have we not seen that this "poor artist" with the might of his magic
wand has cr