On the other hand, I felt strongly drawn to gain a closer
acquaintance of German history than I had secured at school. I
had Raumer's History of the Hohenstaufen within easy reach to
start upon. All the great figures in this book lived vividly
before my eyes. I was particularly captivated by the personality
of that gifted Emperor Frederick II., whose fortunes aroused my
sympathy so keenly that I vainly sought for a fitting artistic
setting for them. The fate of his son Manfred, on the other hand,
provoked in me an equally well-grounded, but more easily
combated, feeling of opposition.

I accordingly made a plan of a great five-act dramatic poem,
which should also be perfectly adapted to a musical setting. My
impulse to embellish the story with the central figure of
romantic significance was prompted by the fact of Manfred's
enthusiastic reception in Luceria by the Saracens, who supported
him and carried him on from victory to victory till he reached
his final triumph, and this, too, in spite of the fact that he
had come to them betrayed on every hand, banned by the Church,
and deserted by all his followers during his flight through
Apulia and the Abruzzi.

Even at this time it delighted me to find in the German mind the
capacity of appreciating beyond the narrow bounds of nationality
all purely human qualities, in however strange a garb they might
be presented. For in this I recognised how nearly akin it is to
the mind of Greece. In Frederick II. I saw this quality in full
flower. A fair-haired German of ancient Swabian stock, heir to
the Norman realm of Sicily and Naples, who gave the Italian