We put up at the Berner Hof. On our first arrival, although it was late in the evening, we met many of our friends of the Rome Congress,—Frédéric Passy, Ducommun, the Moscheles pair, Hodgson Pratt, Pandolfi, Émile Arnaud, and many others. The next morning a new, joyous surprise: the glass door of our room opened out on a great terrace, and from here the gaze swept over the hotel garden, over the city, and over the horizon of snow-glittering peaks of the surrounding mountains.
“It is beautiful here, my Löwos!”
“Yes, My Own, beautiful; and we will have our breakfast here on the terrace.”
So the luminous pictures flash, so fresh breezes of happiness blow over from the past into my gray, lonely present, as I look back upon the journeys which we two took together, when we carried with us everywhere, into the most serious days filled with work and political problems and into the different imposing surroundings, our modest, sunshiny bit of home. On that first morning in the capital of the Swiss Confederation the mail brought me various letters,—from Count Hoyos a poem dedicated “to the Peace Council at Bern,” and entitled
Never Throw Down your Weapons
Wenn blinder Haft die Krallen regt
When blindfold Hatred’s claws are shown
And Falsehood’s wings come dark behind,
Stand to your arms, and lay not down
The weapons of the Mind!