had to make changes in his “Tannhauser” twenty years later.  He failed in both efforts, and afterward wrote an account of the performance for a German newspaper, which is one of the best specimens of the feuilleton style which his sojourn in Paris provoked.  There was no need of telling his countrymen what the Wolf’s Glen was, for it had been the most familiar of all scenes in the lyric theatres of Germany for a score of years, but for the Parisians he pictured the place in which Weber’s hero meets Samiel very graphically indeed:—­

“In the heart of the Bohemian Forest, old as the world, lies the Wolf’s Glen.  Its legend lingered till the Thirty Years’ War, which destroyed the last traces of German grandeur; but now, like many another boding memory, it has died out from the folk.  Even at that time most men only knew the gulch by hearsay.  They would relate how some gamekeeper, straying on indeterminable paths through wild, untrodden thickets, scarce knowing how, had come to the brink of the Wolf’s Gulch.  Returning, he had told of gruesome sights he had there seen, at which the hearer crossed himself and prayed the saints to shield him from ever wandering to that region.  Even on his approach the keeper had heard an eerie sound; though the wind was still, a muffled moaning filled the branches of the ancient pines, which bowed their dark heads to and fro unbidden.  Arrived at the verge, he had looked down into an abyss whose depths his eye could never plumb.  Jagged reefs of rock stood high in shape of human limbs and terribly distorted faces.  Beside them heaps of pitch-black stones in form of giant toads and lizards; they moved and crept and rolled in heavy ragged masses; but under them the ground could no more be distinguished.  From thence foul vapors rose incessantly and spread a pestilential stench around.  Here and there they would divide and range themselves in ranks that took the form of human beings with faces all convulsed.  Upon a rotting tree-trunk in the midst of all these horrors sat an enormous owl, torpid in its daytime roost; behind it a frowning cavern, guarded by two monsters direly blent of snake and toad and lizard.  These, with all the other seeming life the chasm harbored, lay in deathlike slumber, and any movement visible was that of one plunged in deep dreams; so that the forester had dismal fears of what this odious crew might wake into at midnight.

“But still more horrible than what he saw, was what he heard.  A storm that stirred nothing, and whose gusts he himself could not feel, howled over the glen, paused suddenly, as if listening to itself, and then broke out again with added fury.  Atrocious cries thronged from the pit; then a flock of countless birds of prey ascended from its bowels, spread like a pitch-black pall across the gulf, and fell back again into night.  The screeches sounded to the huntsman like the groans of souls condemned, and tore his heart with anguish never felt before.  Never had he heard such cries, compared to which the