Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

[312] Cranach (it seems as if half the pictures I had seen lately at Nuremberg and other places were by him and Musaeus); in the new churchyard, the tombs of Goethe and Schiller.

And now, you see, I have at length torn myself away from Munich. Have n't you sometimes had misgivings that I intended to cut you all at home, and had married and settled down in Munich for life? No, I have left, and, what's more, I have seen Nuremberg! I don't think I can make an attempt at description. It has given me more pleasure than all that I had seen before.

It is all old; it is all rich; it is all history; it is all carving,— carving in brown stone of every pattern and figure. No fish, flesh, or fowl that is not carved there. And then those old fellows, who, so to speak, left their lives everywhere about their dear old city,—Albert Durer, Adam Kraft, Veit Stoss, and Peter Vischer too. And yet the Bavarian court resides at Munich, a city on a perfect flat, no beauty in the houses, and the worst climate in the world.

It had been his intention to spend another studious winter in Berlin; but the damp and chilly climate proved so unfavorable to his health, that he was compelled to retreat to Italy, where he enjoyed himself to the utmost. ‘In no city have I enjoyed so much as in Rome,’ he writes April 1, 1856, ‘and the parting will be a sad one.’ After a short stay in France and England, he returned home that summer.

He passed the remaining season of fine weather in vain search for a farm where he might carry out his plans and use the knowledge of agriculture he had long been acquiring. The decided wish of his father, however, induced him to devote himself to the study of the law during the following winter, attending the lectures at Cambridge and reading at home. But his constitution was wholly unfit for a sedentary life; and his taste leading him otherwise, it was without regret on his own account that he relinquished his studies, though it pained him to disappoint his friends. In the following letter, after speaking of the uncertainty from which he had suffered before deciding, he says:—

I gave up the study of the law last week, and have returned the ponderous volumes to the library at Cambridge, and have settled