riety to the eye,
for sometimes it was clothed in budding groves, sometimes displayed
picturesque bare cliffs, and again vineyards in which labourers were
working. From the farthest distance the steeples of Ratisbon offered the
first greeting to the resting horseman.
What a wealth of memories this pleasant landscape awoke in the mind of
the returning traveller! How often he had walked through these charming
valleys, climbed these heights, stopped in these villages! It was
difficult for him to turn from this view, but he let his bay horse have
its way when the companion whom he had left behind overtook him here,
and the animal followed the other's black Brabant steed, with which it
had long been on familiar terms. He rode slowly at his friend's side
into the valley.
Both silently feasted their eyes upon the scene opening with increasing
magnificence before them.
As they reached the village of Winzer, the victorious sun was
approaching the western horizon, and diffused over it a fan of golden
rays. The gray cloud bank above, which a light breeze was driving before
it, was bordered with golden edges. The young green foliage, refreshed
by the rain, glittered as richly and magnificently as emerald and
chrysoprase, and the primroses and other early spring flowers, which had
just grown up along the roadside and in the meadows, shone in brighter
colours than in the full light of noon. The big fresh drops on the
leaves and blossoms sparkled and glittered in the last rays of the sun.
Now Ratisbon also appeared.
The city, with its throng of steeples, was surrounded by a damp
vapour which the reflection of the sun coloured with a faint, scarcely
perceptible roseate hue. The notes of bells from the twin towers of the
cathedral and the convent of Nieder Munster, from St. Emmeram on the
right, and the church of the Dominicans on the left, echoed softly in
this hour when Nature and human activity were at rest--often dying away
in the distance--to greet the returning citizen.
Obeying an involuntary impulse, Wolf Hartschwert raised his hat. Within
the shelter of the walls of this venerable city he had played as a
boy, completed his school and student days, and early felt the first
quickened throbbing of the heart. Here he had first been permitted to
test what knowledge he had won in the schools of poetry and music.
He had remained in Ratisbon until his twenty-first year, then he had
ventured out into the world, and, after
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