And the cuckoo’s shy, complaining note
Mocks the maidens in the corn.”
From Lintz, over hills and by meadows, among the merry farmers and their light-hearted children, they walked on, through Salzburg and Hohenlinden, to Munich, where another magnificent display of paintings, sculpture, palaces, parks, and historic localities, rewarded him for his long walk and limited supply of food. He had so little money that he was compelled to live on twenty cents a day. There he found the great works of Thorwaldsen, Cornelius, and Schwanthaler, and copies in marble of almost every celebrated piece of antique sculpture. There were the gorgeous palaces of kings and dukes, the beautifully wrought halls and churches, with the spacious avenues and charming parks. No city in the world contains such rich decorations, such unique and profuse ornamentation, or such harmony of design and arrangement, as is shown in the palace halls and public edifices of Munich. How a visit to them sweetens everything else in after life, and how the memory of them ever lightens the burden of care! What American could walk those pavements and floors and not yearn for the power to give to his own country something to match those marvellous structures! Bayard must have felt that impulse in common with others; but, unlike many others, he kept his promise, which was to awaken a love in every American heart for art in its grand and stable forms; and many are the promptings and rebukes which we, as a people, have received from his pen as writer, and from his lips as a lecturer.
From Munich, the route chosen by Bayard lay through Augsburg, Ulm, and Wurtemberg, and when he entered the latter country, at Esslingen, he said the very atmosphere was permeated with poetry. He was delighted with the green vales, lofty hills, lovely vineyards, waving forests, and feudal ruins. He was grateful to the kind people, and was made happy by their universal cheerfulness and good-nature. It was the home of Schiller! There the first nine years of the poet’s life were spent, and scarce a nook is there about the interesting old cities which that boy did not explore. It was toward Wurtemberg, as his childhood’s home, Schiller exhibited the greatest regard; alas, it was there, too, in Stuttgart, that the tyrannical Duke imprisoned him for publishing his first play. There, too, the patriotic Uhland sat in the halls of legislation, and wrote those poems which fired the hearts of his countrymen to a brave defence of fatherland.
Bayard’s happy stay in Esslingen, and his word-pictures of its attractions, show the progress which he had already made in his love for that German poetry, of which he was to become so popular an expounder. He praises the river Neckar and its flowery banks, he lauds the people, he portrays the landscapes in the brightest colors which poetry may lend to prose. Bright day! one he never recalled without exclamations of pleasure!
After such interest as he exhibited in the country of Schiller, it is no surprise, the next day after leaving Esslingen, to find him in Stuttgart, looking up into the pensive face of Thorwaldsen’s colossal statue of Schiller. So attracted and entranced was he by the interpretation of Schiller, made by the natives, the scenery, and the old home, that when beautiful Stuttgart opens its avenues, parks, cathedrals, palaces, and galleries to him, he forsakes and neglects them all for this huge but faithfully wrought counterfeit in stone of the persecuted singer. To his naturally sentimental and sensitive character, the German poet was revealed in ideals more fascinating than any realities. He studied the face of his brother poet, praised his beauty, repeated a broken stanza of “William Tell,” and left the other attractions of Stuttgart unseen.
Passing the castle of Ludwigsburg, and skirting the village of Marbach, the birthplace of Schiller, a village then about the size of Kennett now, but obliged to push on for fear of starvation, he walked to Betigheim, and thence the next day to his first German home, Heidelberg.