The words “March conquests” have been uttered by jeering lips, but I think at the present time there are few among the more far-sighted conservatives who would like to dispense with them.  To me and, thank Heaven, to the majority of Germans, life deprived of them would seem unendurable.  My mother afterward learned to share this opinion, though, like ourselves, in whose hearts she early implanted it, she retained to her last hour her loyalty to the king.

CHAPTER XI.

IN KEILHAU

Keilhau!  How much is comprised in that one short word!

It recalls to my memory the pure happiness of the fairest period of boyhood, a throng of honoured, beloved, and merry figures, and hundreds of stirring, bright, and amusing scenes in a period of life rich in instruction and amusement, as well as the stage so lavishly endowed by Nature on which they were performed.  Jean Paul has termed melancholy the blending of joy and pain, and it was doubtless a kindred feeling which filled my heart in the days before my departure, and induced me to be particularly good and obliging to every body in the house.  My mother took us once more to my father’s grave in the Dreifaltigkeits cemetery, where I made many good resolutions.  Only the best reports should reach home from Keilhau, and I had already obtained excellent ones in Berlin.

On the evening of our departure there were numerous kisses and farewell glances at all that was left behind; but when we were seated in the car with my mother, rushing through the landscape adorned with the most luxuriant spring foliage, my heart suddenly expanded, and the pleasure of travel and delight in the many new scenes before me destroyed every other feeling.

The first vineyard I saw at Naumburg—­I had long forgotten those on the Rhine—­interested me deeply; the Rudelsburg at Kosen, the ruins of a real ancient castle, pleased me no less because I had never heard Franz Kugler’s song: 

       “Beside the Saale’s verdant strand
        Once stood full many a castle grand,
        But roofless ruins are they all;
        The wind sweeps through from hall to hall;
        Slow drift the clouds above,”

which refers to this charming part of the Thuringian hill country.  We were soon to learn to sing it at Keilhau.  Weimar was the first goal of this journey.  We had heard much of our classic poets; nay, I knew Schiller’s Bell and some of Goethe’s poems by heart, and we had heard them mentioned with deep reverence.  Now we were to see their home, and a strange emotion took possession of me when we entered it.