It was, as Lewis had declared, a lovely evening; the sky was of that deep, clear blue which indicates a continuance of fine weather, a soft breeze sighed through the blossoms of the lime-tree beneath which they sat. Faust lay at Annie’s feet, gazing up into her face as though he loved to look upon her beauty, which perhaps he did, for Faust was a dog of taste, and particular in the selection of his favourites. Walter, stretched at his length upon the turf, was idly turning over the pages of a volume of coloured prints. Lewis opened the work they were translating; it was that loveliest of historical tragedies, Schiller’s “Piccolomini,” and Annie read of Max, the simple, the true, the noble-hearted, and thought that the world contained but one parallel character, and that he was beside her. They read on beneath the summer sky, and tracing the workings of Schiller’s master mind, forgot all sublunary things in the absorbing interest of the story. The scene they were perusing was that in which Max Piccolomini describes the chilling effect produced upon him when he for the first time beholds Thekla surrounded by the splendours of her father’s court, and says (I quote Coleridge’s beautiful translation for the benefit of my un-German readers, and in consideration of the shallowness of my own acquaintance with the language of the Fatherland)—
“Now, once again, I have courage to look on you,
To-day at noon I could not;
The dazzle of the jewels that play’d round you
Hid the belovèd from me.
This morning when I found you in the circle
Of all your kindred, in your father’s arms,