“The greater reason for making good use of the morning sunshine, then.  Let us hasten to the castle, after which my heart yearns.”

CHAPTER VII.  LIVES OF SCHOLARS.

The forebodings of the Baron proved true.  In the afternoon the weather changed.  The western wind began to blow, and its breath drew a cloud-veil over the face of heaven, as a breath does over the human face in a mirror.  Soon the snow began to fall.  Athwart the distant landscape it swept like a white mist.  The storm-wind came from the Alsatian hills, and struck the dense clouds aslant through the air.  And ever faster fell the snow, a roaring torrent from those mountainous clouds.  The setting sun glared wildly from the summit of the hills, and sank like a burning ship at sea, wrecked in the tempest.  Thus the evening set in; and winter stood at the gate wagging his white and shaggy beard, like an old harper, chanting an old rhyme:—­“How cold it is! how cold it is!”

“I like such a storm as this,” said Flemming, who stood at the window, looking out into the tempest and the gathering darkness.  “The silent falling of snow is to me one of the most solemn things in nature.  The fall of autumnal leaves does not so much affect me.  But the driving storm is grand.  It startles me; it awakens me.  It is wild and woful, like my own soul.  I cannot help thinking of the sea; how the waves run and toss their arms about,—­and the wind plays on those great harps, made by the shrouds and masts of ships.  Winter is here in earnest!  Whew!  How the old churl whistles and threshes the snow!  Sleet and rain are falling too.  Already the trees are bearded with icicles; and the two broad branches of yonder pine look like the white mustache of some old German Baron.”

“And to-morrow it will look more wintry still,” said his friend.  “We shall wake up and find that the frost-spirit has been at work all night building Gothic Cathedrals on our windows, just as the devil built the Cathedral of Cologne.  Sodraw the curtains, and come sit here by the warm fire.”

“And now,” said Flemming, having done as his friend desired, “tell me something of Heidelberg and its University.  I suppose we shall lead about as solitary and studious a life here as we did of yore in little Gottingen, with nothing to amuse us, save our own day-dreams.”

“Pretty much so,” replied the Baron; “which cannot fail to please you, since you are in pursuit of tranquillity.  As to the University, it is, as you know, one of the oldest in Germany.  It was founded in the fourteenth century by the Count Palatine Ruprecht, and had in the first year more than five hundred students, all busily committing to memory, after the old scholastic wise, the rules of grammar versified by Alexander de Villa Dei, and the extracts made by Peter the Spaniard from Michel Psellus’s Synopsis of Aristotle’s Organon, and the Categories, with Porphory’s Commentaries.  Truly, I do not much wonder, that Eregina Scotus should have been put to death byhis scholars with their penknives.  They must have been pushed to the very verge of despair.”