e to feel settled
anywhere. It don't seem right to go and come in this way. Of course,
they drive the cattle away from the mountain-meadows when the grass is
gone, but cattle aren't human beings. I can't help pitying my poor
prince, for there's nothing in his youth worth remembering. When he
gets older, he won't be able to say: 'I used to be at home here, and
saw these trees blossom and bear fruit; and then the snow covered them,
and, after that, the spring came'--and if the poor child hasn't that,
where'll it ever have a home?"

At breakfast, Irma repeated Walpurga's words, and found much that was
affecting and poetical in this identifying one's-self with nature, and
in this attachment to lifeless objects. The ladies and gentlemen in the
breakfast-room could not understand where the poetry lay, for to them,
it seemed narrow-mindedness. Baron Schoning interposed, and reminded
them that this attachment to the soil possessed its advantages; for it
was thus alone that solitary heights and valleys were inhabited. He
maintained that the common people could only be governed by the force
of habit; that man, as a free agent, must rid himself of such
restraint; and that the true poetic idea was that of Pegasus resting on
the earth, but yet able to wing his flight aloft.

Schoning looked about him as if he expected applause for his profound
remark. It failed, however, to produce an impression. He had so
constantly ministered to the amusement of the court, that all his
attempts to be serious were failures, suggesting the success with which
a well-known comedian or country bumpkin would undertake a tragic
_role_, Schoning imagined that Irma understood him better than any of
the others, but even she was not in a humor to assent that day. Gunther
was the first to take up the conversation, saying that the present
desire for incessant travel constituted a new impulse in the history of
mankind, and one which no former age had known to the same extent. The
generation which, even in its cradle, had heard the whistle of the
locomotive, must, of necessity, be different from its predecessors. But
yet poetry would never die, for every mother would teach her child to
sing, and time, the everlasting mother, would teach unto the children
of a new generation, new songs, different from those of the past but
none the less full of beauty and feeling.

The queen nodded to Gunther, and her face was mantled with blushes,
while she said that she agre