; but on this fine day the
music played and we dined outside.

An entrance fee, very small, served to make you respect the Palm
Garden, since humanity seldom respects what it pays nothing for. Most
unexpected show of all in this Palm Garden were the flowers under
glass. I had erroneously supposed that any German scheme of color
would be heavy, and possibly garish. Never had I beheld more exquisite
subtlety on so extended a scale of arrangement. One walked through
aisle after aisle of roses and other blooms in these
greenhouses--everywhere was the same delicate sense and feeling; the
same, in fact, in these flower schemes that one finds in German lyric
verse, and in the songs of Schubert, Schumann and Franz.

It was in the opera house--Frankfurt has a fine and commodious
one--that my whole impression of Germany's glory culminated. The
performances drew their light from no Melbas or Carusos, or other
meteors, but from a fixed constellation, now and then enriched by
some visitor; it was teamwork of drilled and even excellence, singers,
chorus, orchestra and scenery unitedly equal to the occasion, in
operas old and new, an immense sweep of repertory, with an audience to
match--an accustomed audience, to whom music was traditional food,
music having always grown hereabout plenteously, indigenously, so that
they took it as naturally as they took their Rhine wine, paying for it
as moderately, going to hear it in rather plain clothes, as a
rule--men in day dress, women in high-neck; not an audience that had
to put on its diamonds in order to listen conspicuously to a costly
and not comprehended exotic.

The difference between hearing opera where it grows and hearing it in
New York is the difference between eating strawberries warm from
their vines in June and strawberries in January that have come a
thousand miles by freight. Where opera grows, it is the blend of
native music, singers and listeners that gives a ripe flavor of a
warmth which Fifth Avenue can never purchase.

This, every performance in Frankfurt had; but even this could be
raised to a higher key of inspiration. I walked in one night and found
myself amid a pious ceremonial. They were giving an old work, of
bygone design, stiff in outline, noble, remote from all present
things. Why did they revive this somewhat pale and rigid classic? For
contrast, variety? Not at all. Two hundred years ago this day, Gluck
had been born. Gluck had written this opera. For this