longer seems to them too dirty and rugged for artistic treatment.  The most recent and splendid revival of landscape painting is intimately connected with the renewed absorption of the artist in the study of the forest.  We also find that, at the time when Goethe was writing his best songs, Mozart and Haydn were, with equal enthusiasm, composing music for the folk-song, as if they had “learned it listening to the birds” that is to say, to the birds in the woods, not, like one of the new branch schools of romantic miniature poets, to the birds singing their sickly songs in gilded cages in a parlor.

The forest alone permits us civilized men to enjoy the dream of a personal freedom undisturbed by the surveillance of the police.  There at least one can ramble about as one will, without being bound to keep to the common patented high road.  Yes, there a staid mature man can even run, jump, climb to his heart’s content, without being considered a fool by that old stickler, Dame Propriety.  These fragments of ancient Germanic sylvan liberty have happily been preserved almost everywhere in Germany.  They no longer exist in neighboring lands which have greater political freedom but where annoying fences very soon put an end to an unfettered desire to roam at will.  What good does the citizen of the large North American cities get out of his lack of police surveillance in the streets, if he cannot even run around at will in the woods of the nearest suburb because the odious fences force him, more despotically than a whole regiment of police, to keep to the road indicated by the sign-post?  What good do the Englishmen get out of their free laws, since they have nothing but parks inclosed by chains, since they have scarcely any free forest left?  The constraint of customs and manners in England and North America is insupportable to a German.  As the English no longer even know how to appreciate the free forest, it is no wonder that they require a man to bring along a black dress-suit and a white cravat, in addition to the ticket-money, in order to obtain entrance to the theatre or a concert.  Germany has a future of greater social liberty before her than England, for she has preserved the free forest.  They might perhaps be able to root up the forests in Germany, but to close them to the public would cause a revolution.

[Illustration:  AN OFFICIAL DINNER IN THE COUNTRY (painting by) BENJAMIN VAUTIER]

From this German sylvan liberty which peeps forth so strangely from amidst our other modern conditions, flows a deeper influence upon the manners and character of every class of the people than is dreamed of by many a stay-at-home.  On the other hand, in a thousand different characteristics in the life of our great cities we perceive how far the real forest has withdrawn from these cities, how alienated from the forest their inhabitants have grown to be.  One sees, of late, much more green in our large German cities; walks on the ramparts and municipal parks and public gardens