mans meant Germany.
From Berlin, from Dresden, from Frankfurt, from Luxemburg, from a
hundred towns those who were most typically German, whether high or
low, rich or poor, made their joyous pilgrimage. Joy and solemnity,
exultation and the yearning that could never be satisfied drew them
here. And even as music was in Michael's heart, so Germany was there
also. They were the people who understood; they did not go to the opera
as a be-diamonded interlude between a dinner and a dance; they came
to this dreadful little town, the discomforts of which, the utter
provinciality of which was transformed into the air of the heavenly
Jerusalem, as Hermann Falbe had said, because their souls were fed here
with wine and manna. He would find the same thing at Munich, so Falbe
had told him, the next week.

The loves and the tragedies of the great titanic forces that saw
the making of the world; the dreams and the deeds of the masters of
Nuremberg; above all, sacrifice and enlightenment and redemption of the
soul; how, except by music, could these be made manifest? It was the
first and only and final alchemy that could by its magic transformation
give an answer to the tremendous riddles of consciousness; that could
lift you, though tearing and making mincemeat of you, to the serenity
of the Pisgah-top, whence was seen the promised land. It, in itself, was
reality; and the door-keeper who admitted you into that enchanted
realm was the spirit of Germany. Not France, with its little, morbid
shiverings, and its meat-market called love; not Italy, with its
melodious declamations and tawdry tunes; not Russia even, with the wind
of its impenetrable winters, its sense of joys snatched from its eternal
frosts gave admittance there; but Germany, "deep, patient Germany," that
sprang from upland hamlets, and flowed down with ever-broadening stream
into the illimitable ocean.

Here, then, were two of the initiations that had come, with the
swiftness of the spate in Alpine valleys at the melting of the snow,
upon Michael; his own liberty, namely, and this new sense of music. He
had groped, he felt now, like a blind man in that direction, guided only
by his instinct, and on a sudden the scales had fallen from his eyes,
and he knew that his instinct had guided him right. But not less
epoch-making had been the dawn of friendship. Throughout the week his
intimacy with Hermann Falbe had developed, shooting up like an
aloe flower, and rising into sunl