distinct in the minutest particulars, like a great picture with all
its colors fresh--the green trees, the sunshine on the stems, the blue
sky above. I saw every individual tree." Never was he more happy than
when alone with nature. "Saturday," he writes to his wife from
Frankfort, "I drove to Rüdesheim. There I took a boat, rowed out on
the Rhine, and swam in the moonlight, with nothing but nose and eyes
out of water, as far as the Mäuseturm near Bingen, where the bad
bishop came to his end. It gives one a peculiar dreamy sensation to
float thus on a quiet warm night in the water, gently carried down by
the current, looking above on the heavens studded with moon and stars,
and on each side the banks and wooded hilltops and the battlements of
the old castles bathed in the moonlight, whilst nothing falls on one's
ear but the gentle splashing of one's movements. I should like to swim
like this every evening." And what poet has more deeply felt than he
that vague musical longing which seizes one when far away from human
sounds, by the brook-side or the hill-slope? "I feel as if I were
looking out on the mellowing foliage of a fine September day," he
writes again to his wife, "health and spirits good, but with a soft
touch of melancholy, a little homesickness, a longing for deep woods
and lakes, for a desert, for yourself and the children, and all this
mixed up with a sunset and Beethoven."

His domestic affections were by no means limited to those united to
him by ties of blood; he cherished strong patriarchal feelings for
every member of his household, past or present. He possessed in a high
degree the German tenderness for little things. He never forgot a
service rendered to him, however small. In the midst of the most
engrossing public activity he kept himself informed about the minutest
details of the management of his estates, so that his wife could once
laughingly say that a turnip from his own fields interested him vastly