"You would like it better, if you knew it better," answered Flemming. "It is not harsh to me; but homelike, hearty, and full of feeling, like the sound of happy voices at a fireside, of a winter's night, when the wind blows, and the fire crackles, and hisses, and snaps. I do indeed love the Germans; the men are so hale and hearty, and the Fräuleins so tender and true!"
"I always think of men with pipes and beer, and women with knittingwork."
"O, those are English prejudices," exclaimed Flemming. "Nothing can be more--"
"And their very literature presents itself to my imagination under the same forms."
"I see you have read only English criticisms; and have an idea, that all German books smell, as it were, 'of groceries, of brown papers, filled withgreasy cakes and slices of bacon; and of fryings in frowzy back-parlours; and this shuts you out from a glorious world of poetry, romance, and dreams!"
Mary Ashburton smiled, and Flemming continued to turn over the leaves of the sketch-book, with an occasional criticism and witticism. At length he came to a leaf which was written in pencil. People of a lively imagination are generally curious, and always so when a little in love.
"Here is a pencil-sketch," said he, with an entreating look, "which I would fain examine with the rest."
"You may do so, if you wish; but you will find it the poorest sketch in the book. I was trying one day to draw the picture of an artist's life in Rome, as it presented itself to my imagination; and this is the result. Perhaps it may awaken some pleasant recollection in your mind."
Flemming waited no longer; but read with the eyes of a lover, not of a critic, the following description, which inspired him with a new enthusiasm for Art, and for Mary Ashburton.
"I often reflect with delight upon the young artist's life in Rome. A stranger from the cold and gloomy North, he has crossed the Alps, and with the devotion of a pilgrim journeyed to the Eternal City. He dwells perhaps upon the Pincian Hill; and hardly a house there, which is not inhabited by artists from foreign lands. The very room he lives in has been their abode from time out of mind. Their names are written all over the walls; perhaps some further record of them left in a rough sketch upon the window-shutter, with an inscription and a date. These things consecrate the place, in his imagination. Even these names, though unknown to him, are not without associations in his mind.