in which the dew on the buds glistened, and the mignonette seemed to exhale a double perfume, and a dreamy melody of Mendelssohn sung by two sweet girl-voices floated out about the “pleached bower,” like a song of nightingales.  Then toward the end came the scene of the chapel and Hero’s tomb.  No lovelier form was ever sculptured than that of the beautiful Queen Louisa of Prussia, as she lies in the mausoleum at Charlottenburg, carved by Rauch, asleep on the tomb in white purity.  To the eye, our Hero’s tomb was just such a block of spotless marble seen against a background of black, with just such a fair figure recumbent upon it, whose palms and lids and draping the chisel of an artist seemed to have folded and closed and hung,—­all idealised again by the magic of the magnesium-light.  As the crimson curtain was drawn apart, an organ sounded, and a far-away choir sent into the hush the Ave Verum of Mozart, low-breathed and solemn.

It was not Munich, Fastidiosus.  They were American young men and young women, with no resources but those of a rural college, and such as their own taste and the woods and gardens could furnish; but the young men were shapely and intelligent, and the young women had grace and brightness; their hearts were in it, and in the result surely there was a measure of “sweetness and light” for them and those who beheld.

You fear it may beget in young minds a taste for the theatre, now hopelessly given over in great part to abominations.  Why not a taste that will lift them above the abominations?  Old Joachim Greff, schoolmaster at Dessau in 1545, who has a place in the history of German poetry, has left it on record that he trained his scholars to render noble dramas in the conscientious hope “that a little spark of art might be kept alive in the schools under the ashes of barbarism.”  “And this little spark,” says Gervinus, “did these bold men, indeed, through two hundred years, keep honestly until it could again break out into flame.”  Instead of fearing the evil result, rather would I welcome a revival of what Warton calls “this very liberal exercise.”  Were Joachim Greffs masters in our high schools and in the English chairs in our colleges, we might now and then catch a glimpse of precious things at present hidden away in never-opened store-houses, and see something done toward the development of a taste that should drive out the opera-bouffe.

Here, at the end, Fastidiosus, is what I now shape in mind.  Hippolyte Taine, in one of his rich descriptions, thus pictures the performance of a masque: 

The elite of the kingdom is there upon the stage, the ladies of the court, the great lords, the queen, in all the splendour of their rank and their pride, in diamonds, earnest to display their luxury so that all the brilliant features of the nation’s life are concentrated in the price they give, like gems in a casket.  What adornment!  What profusion of magnificence!