only that it might in time find its true language and incomparable phrase
at last--that it might await the day of life in its proper German. I
found it there (and knew at once the authentic verse, and knew at once
for what tongue it had been really destined) in the pages of the prayer-
book of an apple-woman at an Innsbruck church, and in the accents of her
voice.




A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY


There is hardly a writer now--of the third class probably not one--who
has not something sharp and sad to say about the cruelty of Nature; not
one who is able to attempt May in the woods without a modern reference to
the manifold death and destruction with which the air, the branches, the
mosses are said to be full.

But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice of
the curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of death and of the
dead throughout this landscape of manifest life. Where are they--all the
dying, all the dead, of the populous woods? Where do they hide their
little last hours, where are they buried? Where is the violence
concealed? Under what gay custom and decent habit? You may see, it is
true, an earth-worm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking a
snail's shell; but these little things are, as it were, passed by with a
kind of twinkle for apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly some
little solecism which is too slight for direct mention, and which a
meaner man might hide or avoid. Unless you are very modern indeed, you