Well, I begin the day with my breakfast in my own apartment, all alone. That’s the custom of the country, you know, not my indolence. With that spectacle to interest and claim my eager eyes, I shall give you day before yesterday. At 10 a. m. Miss S—— and I went to the palace, which means an entire square composed of three immense palaces—the Konigsbau, the Alte Residenz, or Old Palace, and the Festsaalbau—each occupying one side of the square; the fourth being filled up with the Court Chapel and Court Theater. The greater part of all these is accessible, which makes so much to be seen it has to be taken in “broken doses,” so zu sagen. The Schatzkammer (Treasury) was our objective point. We ran the gauntlet of soldiers on guard, a spacious court with a handsome fountain, a kind of cloistered stretch with a wonderful grotto of shells, a maze of small ante-rooms, till finally, in a state of perfect bewilderment, we were taken in hand by the major-domo, who procured our tickets (a little ceremony requiring your cards and a silver mark), and ushered us into—oh! Monte Christo, the Arabian Nights, that stately pleasure dome that Kublai-Khan decreed in Zanadu! We wandered through them all. First, through a long gallery called the Stammbaum (Genealogical Tree), containing the portraits of the princes and princesses of the house of Wittelsbach. The room itself is most attractive in gold, gilt and white ornamentation, what space is left from the pictures—a collection that any family might be proud of. At the end, “Open Sesame,” and a great door flies back, and we enter. I wish I had Ovid’s pen, with which he wrote the description of the Palace of the Sun! Such a blaze of diamonds and rubies, and pearls and emeralds, and all the gems of the earth! There was the Hausdiamant, a monster brilliant “in the Order of the Golden Fleece;” and the Palatinate pearl, half black, half white; strings of buttons by the yard of diamonds, a central one as large as a silver quarter, encircled by smaller ones; breast-plates, as it were, of pear-shaped pearls dangling from a mesh of diamonds; crowns of diamonds that had a blinding brilliancy; cabinets filled with vessels made from rich stones and inlaid with the most precious stones; a copy of Trajan’s Pillar it took the goldsmith twenty years to execute; and more of such royal belongings than I could get into a day’s description.
And one thing not put down in the catalogue: As I was standing transfixed by some ornaments in pink rubies and diamonds, over my shoulder sounded the tones of a woman’s voice in American English. You ought to have heard the suppressed fervor of my exclamation under my breath: “Oh, you blessed American tongue!” I turned to confront a most agreeable countrywoman, just as eager as myself for recognition on that ground alone. I met her again at the opera to-night, and we had another chat. I think her husband is an artist, as they live in Florence, and he told me he had been over here sixteen or seventeen years, and was “longing to get back home.” On leaving the palace, Miss S—— came home; but I wasn’t half ready for indoors—never am except at meal-times and bed-time! So I wandered around the streets in the sunshine, looking in the shop windows and picking up a picture here and there—among
them that of the “Vier Konige,” as the old Kaiser calls it, himself holding his baby great-grandson with as proud an air as if it was his own first-born son, with his son and grandson on either side. Four living generations in the same picture is indeed a spectacle to be made a note of.
Another picture was that including the empress, crown princess, and the young mother herself holding her little king. It is a picture beaming with both pride and happiness. That must have been one of life’s happy moments—one of the few supreme flashes of earthly felicity. And on compulsion—dinner, always in Germany a mid-day meal. I am a true Bohemian now; but I was a housekeeper once, and I don’t like to derange the order of a household, so I am always “on time.” After dinner, out again by myself, Miss S—— having a German lesson. First, a call at a book-store for a variety of Munich gossip. The proprietor is a handsome young man—cultivated, traveled, of good family—his father being a captain in the army, and a very genial, well-mannered person. I drop in on him quite often. He has been all over the United States, even to Cincinnati. I did not ask him about W——! As I sauntered out—I do everything just as the whim takes me—I thought I’d have a droschke drive, so I hailed one and stepped in. Oh! the earth, air and sky of these Munich days! A whole week of them, too, of that kind that makes one exclaim, “Mere existence is a luxury.”
After awhile I dismissed it at the door of the Kaulbach Gallery. It is not a large one, only a large room, as full as it can hold of the sketches and a few pictures of that popular Munich artist. It is on a retired street; a very pretty, tasteful building in a garden. A few, from one to three or four persons at a time, were coming and going the hour and a half I loitered. I am not going to bore you or any one with a catalogue or description of pictures, but one was so beautiful and touching I want you to look at it a moment through the lens of my—pen. A city still in the shadow of the night; gleams of dawn in the east; just floating up into the clear, higher air an angel clasping a little child in its arms, with only the words “Zu Gott;” such a common idea, so simply wrought out, but I could not get away from it.
The sketches were intensely interesting. Some were outlines with pencil or pen; others quite fully worked out, of nearly all his great masterpieces.