Railway from Lindau here; and such a succession of pictures! Long, green valleys, dotted with picturesque villages; chains of wooded knolls; ranges of dark, pine-covered mountains, overtopped in places with a vast jumble of cones; snow-covered Alps again, that shone in the sunlight like molten silver! Words avail little toward reproducing such a panorama. Only one’s own eyes can do it even the faintest justice. I hope you have seen it, or, if not, will some day soon, before you grow an old man. Have had a long, lazy, inconsequential, just-going-anywhere-I-pleased stroll this perfect afternoon. The sky is without a fleck; the air crystal clear; the sunshine just that happy mingling of warmth and bracing quality that makes mere animal existence an ecstasy. I could have walked to the uttermost ends of the earth in it. The streets are wide, clean, admirably paved, handsomely built; fine houses of beautiful designs in a soft, creamy-white stone. Parks, gardens, avenues, open squares, trees, flowers, grass, and grand monuments are innumerable. I felt as if I were under a spell of enchantment. What a place to shrink from was “indoors!” I stayed out till the very last moment.
What a city indeed is this München, the capital of “pretentious little Bavaria!” Think of the days of delight before me in its vast halls of art! I am sure you will, and with an added invocation out of your kind heart for whatever else may be good for me.
L. G. C.
MÜNCHEN.
HIS moment finished the second reading of yours of 22d. Ah! there are some things you don’t have any conception of; for instance, you don’t know how good it is to get a letter from home in a foreign land. I do. Oh! Oh! Oh!
I came in from the opera, Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” in German, in a “rapt ecstasy,” and, in the act of seating myself at our “after the play little supper,” I saw your letter lying on my plate. I am intuitive; I knew it was from you. I picked it up and laid it down with the address on the under side. What would “Goggles” say to that? No; he is not a woman; he is not Miss S——. The French have a proverb that runneth in this wise: “La patience c’est la genie.” If it had been wisdom those keen little epigrammatists would not have missed it so. However, I do not wish to discourage you in the exercise of that passive virtue; rather let it “work its good and perfect work.” Miss S——, not “Goggles,” then said: “Why are you not going to read your letter; will it keep?” Of course I blushed and hung down my head and simpered, and—but you’ve seen the process many a time. Now, what would you give to know how soon I got through with that dainty meal, and hurried away to be “all alone to myself,” to pore over the letter that confessed to two “love letters” to another woman. It does not need you or anybody else to convince me I am the superarchangelic creature I was reported to you. I know it myself now! See how good I am to write at this late hour, not finding it possible to put you off to that will-o’-the-wisp time, “a more convenient season.” And so glad of the love letters; not jealous a bit, because they went where I want them to go! “Don’t worry in well doing,” “effuse,” “flow like the lava,” “let all the currents of your being set that way,” and so come into possession of that great estate which all the kingdoms of the earth cannot match—“a noble woman nobly planned.” Oh, please, I did not write those letters for any one but my sister-in-law. She cut them up, and pieced them together again to suit them to “print,” After they were published she wrote what she had done, begging my forgiveness, but making such an appeal in behalf of the paper I not only could not condemn, I even had to tell her she might do as she pleased with my letters to her, only my name must not be known in connection with them. You fairly frighten me when you speak of them in the same breath with your friends Mr. W—— and “E. A.” Indeed, I feel timid about writing to you, since you have such letters as theirs. Only, we write to each other for the simple “fun of the thing,” not giving much heed to anything else, don’t we? And, on the whole, I hail from “Old Kaintuck,” and that doesn’t mean cowardice in any direction exactly!
I wish you could have been with me in Nuremberg—my heart city. You’d have seen things too—all that I did not see; and between us there would not have been much left behind. I am going back there some day—ah! that misty future—it may be as the children are credited with saying, though I never heard them, “before soon,” and it may be when I die and am resurrected there. This Bavarian soil has a curiously homey tread. I can easily see how I might linger here, “maybe for years, maybe forever.” So much to do; so many places to go to; so much to see; such food for thought, imagination, for dolce far niente. You know the kind of pabulum that witching state of existence claims, but who can describe it? I am tempted to give you “a sample day” out of this wonder life in Munich. Do I count egotistically when I admit I count on your caring for it, because I count on the interest of friendship? Did I tell you to expect and excuse repetitions? Think how many letters I write, and every one wishes to hear everything, and I try not to disappoint.
We are fortunate in pensions. I am on Maximilian Platz, and my windows look out on, first, the Schiller Monument Platz, an exquisite memorial platz, all to itself; a semi-circle, with a thick half belt of trees for the background; in front an oval plat of grass, bordered with a bed of flowers, in the center of which stands the statue in bronze on a white marble pedestal. Just in front of it, grown in the grass, is an evergreen wreath; beyond it rise, above a thicket of trees in their rich Autumn tints, the towers of the Wittelsbach Palace, the residence of Ludwig (grandfather of the present king) after his abdication, Brienner strasse on one side and Maximilian Platz (a great semicircular street) on the other. By the way, they converge, the latter here running into the other, and thus making an end of itself, from a spacious boulevard and driveway, around which are blocks of fine edifices in a cream-colored stone. Immediately beneath my windows is a small triangular platz, a bijou of a beer garden, in trees and vines, a gorgeous mosaic of greens, golds, browns and scarlets, and bowers and tables, and chairs and shaded lamps, the kind that make moonlight.