sufficiently imbued with Germanism to accept the changeful moods of a
mystical mind, with all its visionary glimpses of light and shade, its
doubts, fears, hopes, and fancies, in lieu of real incidents and actual
events. Of adventures, properly speaking, he had none. The people he
met, the scenes in which he bore his part, were as commonplace as
need be. The whole narrative never soared above that bread and butter
life--Butter-brod Leben--which Germany accepts as romance; but,
meanwhile, the reflex of whatever passed around him in the narrator's
own mind was amusing; so ingeniously did he contrive to interweave the
imaginary with the actual, throwing over the most ordinary pictures
of life a sort of hazy indistinctness,--meet atmosphere for mystical
creation.

If I did not always sympathize with him in his brain-wrought wanderings,
I never ceased to take pleasure in his description of scenery, and
the heartfelt delight he experienced in Journeying through a world so
beautiful and so varied. There was also a little woodcut frontispiece
which took my fancy much, representing him as he stood leaning on his
horse's mane, gazing rapturously on the Elbe, from one of the cliffs off
the Saxon Switzerland. How peaceful he looked, with his long hair waving
gracefully on his neck, and his large soft eyes turned on the scene
beneath him I His clasped hands, as they lay on the horse's mane,
imparted a sort of repose, too, that seemed to say, "I could linger here
ever so long." Nor was the horse itself without a significance in the
picture; he was a long-maned, long-tailed, patient-looking beast, well
befitting an enthusiast, who doubtless took but little heed of how he
went or where. If his lazy eye denoted lethargy, his broad feet and
short legs vouched for his sure-footedness.

Why should not I follow Stebbe's example? Surely there was nothing too
exalted or extravagant in his plan of life. It was simply to see the
world as it was, with the aid of such combinations as a fertile fancy
could contribute; not to distort events, but to arrange them, Just as
the landscape painter in the license of his craft moves that massive
rock more to the foreground, and throws that stone pine a little further
to the left of his canvas. There was, indeed, nothing to prevent my
trying the experiment Ireland was not less rich in picturesque scenery
than Germany, and if she boasted no such mighty stream as the Elbe, the
banks of the Blackwater and th