And
again I dreamed, and thought she changed and melted, glowed and
turned to me. And I - who had no merit but a love, slavish and
unerect - lay close, and durst not move for fear of waking.'
'Lie close,' she said, with a deep thrill of speech.
So they spake in the spring woods; and meanwhile, in Mittwalden
Rath-haus, the Republic was declared.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL POSTSCRIPT TO COMPLETE THE STORY
THE reader well informed in modern history will not require details
as to the fate of the Republic. The best account is to be found in
the memoirs of Herr Greisengesang (7 Bande: Leipzig), by our passing
acquaintance the licentiate Roederer. Herr Roederer, with too much
of an author's licence, makes a great figure of his hero - poses
him, indeed, to be the centre-piece and cloud-compeller of the
whole. But, with due allowance for this bias, the book is able and
complete.
The reader is of course acquainted with the vigorous and bracing
pages of Sir John (2 vols., London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and
Brown). Sir John, who plays but a tooth-comb in the orchestra of
this historical romance, blows in his own book the big bassoon. His
character is there drawn at large; and the sympathy of Landor has
countersigned the admiration of the public. One point, however,
calls for explanation; the chapter on Grunewald was torn by the hand
of the author in the palace gardens; how comes it, then, to figure
at full length among my more modest pages, the Lion of the caravan?
That eminent literatus was a man of method; 'Juvenal by double
entry,' he was once profanely called; and when he tore the sheets in
question, it was rather, as he has since explained, in the search
for some dramatic evidence of his sincerity, than with the thought
of practical deletion.
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