k-green velvet, falling loosely on his
shoulders, and his large grey eyes, now widely opened with astonishment
at some piece of intelligence a boy would have heard without amazement,
then twinkling with sly humour at the droll thoughts passing through his
mind; while around him sat his brother professors and their families,
chatting pleasantly over the little news of their peaceful community
--the good vraus knitting and listening, and the frauleins demurely
sitting by, wearing a look of mock attention to some learned
dissertation, and ever and anon stealing a sly glance at the handsome
youth who was honoured by an invitation to the soiree.

How charming, too, to hear them speak of the great men of the land
as their old friends and college companions! It was not the author of
_Wallenstein_ and _Don Carlos_, but Frederick Schiller, the student of
medicine, as they knew him in his boyhood--bold, ardent, and ambitious;
toiling along a path he loved not, and feeling within him the working
of that great genius which one day was to make him the pride of his
Fatherland; and Wieland, strange and eccentric, old in his youth, with
the innocence of a child and the wisdom of a sage; and Hoffman, the
victim of his gloomy imagination, whose spectral shapes and dark
warnings were not the forced efforts of his brain, but the companions of
his wanderings, the beings of his sleep. How did they jest with him on
his half-crazed notions, and laugh at his eccentricities! It was strange
to hear them tell of going home with Hummel, then a mere boy, and how,
as the evening closed in, he sat down to the pianoforte, and played
and sang, and played again for hours long, now exciting their wonder
by passages of brilliant and glittering effect, now knocking at their
hearts by tones of plaintive beauty. There was a little melody he played
the night they spoke of--some short and touching ballad, the inspiration
of the moment--made on the approaching departure of some one amongst
them, which many years after in _Fidelio_ called down thunders of
applause; mayhap the tribute of his first audience was a sweeter homage
after all.

While thus they chatted on, the great world without and all its mighty
interests seemed forgotten by them. France might have taken another
choleric fit, and been in march upon the Rhine; England might have once
more covered the ocean with her fleets, and scattered to the waves the
wreck of another Trafalgar; Russia might be pour