Go to Heidelberg, and you may listen to student-songs through which breathe the national spirit of hundreds of years.
The bands tell the story, legend, or romance of such towns at night, wherever they may play.
In one of the public grounds to which the Class went for an evening rest, one of the bands was playing the Fremersberg.
It related an old romance of the region of Baden-Baden: how that a nobleman was once wandering with his dogs in the mountains, and was overtaken by a storm; how he was about to perish when he heard the distant sounds of a monastery bell; how, following the direction of the sound, he heard a chant of priests; and how, at last, he was saved.
The piece was full of melody. The wind, the rain, the horns, the bells, the chant, while they told a story, were all delightfully melodious.
The ballad is almost banished from the intellectual American concert-rooms. In Germany a ballad is a gem, and is so valued. It is the best expression of national life and feeling.
The Class went to hear one of Germany’s greatest singers. She sang an heroic selection, and was recalled. Her first words on the recall hushed the audience: it was a ballad of the four stages of life. It began with an incident of a child dreaming under a rosebush:—
“Sweetly it sleeps and on dream wings flies
To play with the angels in Paradise,
And the years glide by.”
as an English translation gives it.
In the last stanza, the child having passed through the stages of life, was represented as again sleeping under a rosebush. The withered leaves fall upon his grave.