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the purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical well-being, the delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles tighten down the thigh, console him for the absence of the others, and bring him to his destination still content.

Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You come to a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep ways meet under trees; and off goes the knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink into yourself, and the birds come round and look at you; and your smoke dissipates upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and turns aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an evil conscience. You may dally as long as you like by the roadside. It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember times and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live for ever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy. I know a village where there are hardly any clocks, where no one knows more of the days of the week than by a sort of instinct for the Fête on Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of the month, and she is generally wrong; and, if people were aware how slow Time journeyed in. that village, and what armfuls of spare hours he gives, over and above the bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster than the other, as though they were all in a wager. And all these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery along with him, in a watchpocket! It is to be noticed, there were no clocks and watches in the much-vaunted days before the flood. It follows of course, there were no appointments, and punctuality was not yet thought upon. “Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," says Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot deprive him of his covetousness." And so I would say of a modern man of business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give him the elixir of life-he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his business habits. Now, there is no time when business habits are more mitigated than on a walking tour. And so during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost free.

But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour comes. There are no such pipes to be smoked as those that follow a good day's march; the flavour of the tobacco is a thing to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, so full and so fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, you will own there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If you read a book-and you will never do so save by fits and starts-you find the language strangely racy and harmonious; words take a new

meaning; single sentences possess the ear for half an hour together; and the writer endears himself to you, at every page, by the nicest coincidence of sentiment. It seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a dream! To all we have read on such occasions we look back with special favour. "It was on the 10th of April, 1798," says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, "that I sat down to a volume of the new Héloïse, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." I should wish to quote more, for though we are mighty fine fellows now-a-days, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs; and for Tristram Shandy I can pledge a fair experience.

If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that you taste Joviality to the full significance of that audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk with anyone, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if a hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch provincial humours develope themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now grave and beautiful like an old tale.

Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the night, and surly weather imprisons you by the fire. You may remember how Burns, numbering past pleasures, dwells upon the hours when he has been "happy thinking." It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming dial plates. For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when we must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a changed world for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours without discontent, and be happy thinking. We are in such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of which these are but the parts—namely, to live. We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep. And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking. To sit still and contemplate,-to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to VOL. XXXIII.-NO. 198. 33.

remain where and what you are-is not this to know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happiness? After all, it is not they who carry flags, but they who look upon it from a private chamber, who have the fun of the procession. And once you are at that, you are in the very humour of all social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big, empty words. If you ask yourself what you mean by fame, riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you go back into that kingdom of light imaginations, which seems so vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring after wealth, and so momentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions of the world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split differences between two degrees of the infinitesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman Empire, a million of money or a fiddle-stick's end.

You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely into the darkness, your body full of delicious pains, your mind enthroned in the seventh circle of content; when suddenly the mood changes, the weathercock goes about, and you ask yourself one question more: whether, for the interval, you have been the wisest philosopher or the most egregious of donkeys Human experience is not yet able to reply; but at least you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the kingdoms of the earth. And whether it was wise or foolish, to-morrow's travel will carry you, body and mind, into some different parish of the infinite.

R. L. S.

Walther von der Vogelweide.

WHEN the history of medieval poetry comes to be written we shall understand, perhaps, what must remain very dark till then, how it was that during the marvellous twelfth century, amid all the chaos of the shattering and building of empires, such sudden simultaneous chords of melody were shot crosswise through the length and breadth of Europe, interpenetrating Iceland and Provence, Acquitaine and Austria, Normandy and Italy, with an irresistible desire for poetic production. In that mysterious atmosphere, in an air so burdened with electric force, the ordinary rules of germination and growth were set aside; out of barbarous races, and wielding the uncouthest of tongues, poets sprang full-armed, so many Athenes born suddenly adult from the forehead of the new Gothic civilization. That was an age of rapid movement and brilliant development, an age thirsting for discovery and invention, ready with one hand to fill the West with the new-found marvel of the pointed arch, with the other to push with sword and cross far into the fabulous East. It was at such a time, under such violent auspices, that poetry was born, full-grown, in Germany; the rude bud of folksong blossoming in one single generation into the most elaborate art, only to wither again, as is the wont of such sudden blooms, in as short a time as it had taken to expand. No more such brilliant verse was written in German, until the time of Goethe, as was produced between the years 1150 and 1220, by a group of poets residing mainly at the courts of Austria and Thuringia. It would be out of place here to give any sketch, however slight, of the influences brought to bear upon them from without. We must hurry over the various cardinal points which demand mention before we can intelligibly introduce the subject of this memoir. It was about the year 1140 that an Austrian knight, whose name has not been preserved, gathered into epical shape the scattered ballads which form what we know as the Nibelungenlied. Somewhat later, another Austrian, of equally obscure personality, collected the priceless epos of Kudrun. The minne-song, the lyric of love, was at the same epoch invented or imported by the first great German lyrist, Heinrich von Veldecke, and his example was shortly followed by the simultaneous outburst of the four great poetic voices of medieval Germany-the nightingales as they called themselves-Gottfried von Strassburg, Hermann von Ouwe, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide. The genius of the first three of these was essentially epical. In the Tristran of Gottfried, in the Iwein of Hermann, in the 33-2 Hartmann

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Parzival and the Titurel of Wolfram, we have the four great epics of romance literature, the four poetic pillars on which the whole structure of High-German language and literature rests. In these unique works, steeped in the purest colours of knight-errantry and chivalry, and written in verse-forms of astonishingly delicate art, we have in its original and undiluted form that spirit of romance that has so often since fascinated and bewitched the youth of Europe into more or less fatuous imitation. But this epical literature was not the sole product of the age; a lyrical growth accompanied it, represented by myriads of minor singers and one man that by common consent ranks as high as the three great epicists. This first of medieval German song-writers was Walther von der Vogelweide.

Over the earliest years of his life there rests an obscurity which is likely to remain impenetrable. We know neither the year nor the place of his birth, his rank in society, nor the name of his family. In lack of clearer data than his own verses give us, we may roughly put his birth down at about the year 1170, or nearly a century before that of Dante. That he was of gentle, but not noble birth is judged by the title given him by all of his contemporaries of Meister Herr Walther, the "Herr" being the token of the knightly middle class. Over his appellative "von der Vogelweide" a great deal of ingenious speculation has been expended. "Walther of the Bird Meadow" has been fancifully supposed to be a name adopted by himself, either to signify that he was born in some hamlet secluded in the midst of the forest, among the birds, or else merely in token of his own great love for wild places and little birds. But Fogilweida is understood to mean aviarium in old High German, that is to say, an enclosed space where birds are artificially confined. It would therefore be difficult to believe that the lover of wild things would take this name from choice, and fortunately the difficulty has been cleared up very lately by the discovery in an old manuscript of the 13th century, of the existence of an estate called Vogelweide in the Tyrol, now long since disappeared, and there is little doubt that it was hence our poet came, especially as one of his friends and followers, a sweet minor minne-singer of that time, Leutolt von Seven, was born, we know, in that very valley in Tyrol. This mountain province, even in that early time, had not a little thirst after literary glory, and several of its poets, contemporary with Walther, have been fortunate enough to have their Lieder preserved, now to be piecemeal printed by modern admirers. Walther, however, was not satisfied with a local reputation, and very early in life he seems to have left the paternal home to seek his fortune in Vienna.

There was no more attractive city in Germany to a young man with his life before him than the capital of Austria in 1190. No part of the Empire was so prosperous or so devoted to the graceful arts as the neighbourhood of the Viennese court, and, what would have special fascination for Walther, nowhere were the poets so brilliant, so popular,

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