glance, dear to the humble and unknown artist who had dared to hope-but we must not anticipate. Here we must leave him, listening but uncertain; and this was the song, sung by the tuneful trebles, tenors, and bass in the boat that glided up the stream, in the sonorous language of fatherland, which we thus roughly render into the vernacular:

The moon is up, the night is fair,

The stars begin to shine,
Our light sails catch the breezy air,
Our bark is on the Rhine;
How swiftly, o'er the rippling tide,
She cleaves, with snowy wing;
"Twere sweet for ever thus to glide,
And as we sail to sing.

The light shines from the castle wall,
Seen dimly, far away;

But we must reach that distant hall
Before the beams decay;

Then furl the sail and trim the boat;
Now, like a bird she'll spring;
How sweet for ever thus to float,
And as we sail to sing.

II.

THE DAWN OF GENIUS.

It will be necessary, before we proceed further, to inform the reader of the relative positions of Leopold Sternemberg, the young artist, and the owner of the pair of bright eyes, whom he already knows as a certain Geraldine Werner, and who gave him, to all appearance, a welcome look of recognition as she passed out of the minster of Bonn, albeit under the vigilant guardianship of her mother.

Leopold Sternemberg was the son of humble but respectable parents; not so poor that they could not pay for the education of their two children, but beyond this advantage they had nothing to bestow upon them.

For

many years the family of the Sternembergs had resided in Bonn, but, beyond commanding the respect of their fellow-townspeople, they had never risen to distinction, or even fulfilled any of those official stations appertaining to municipal or national affairs, distributed there, as elsewhere, among the leading personages of the place.

The father of our young artist was a small tradesman; in fact, a tailor. He employed several journeymen; but there is not much scope for a tailor in a town like Bonn, where so many of the

population are content to wear blouses. His wife, the Frau Sternemberg, employed her skill in behalf of the female sex in the same way that her husband devoted his to the male-she made their outer garments; and, as ladies love finery in whatever part of the world they may be located, it is probable that the Frau Sternemberg's share of the business was more conducive to the comforts of their domestic arrangements than that of her liege lord. Fortunately, the family circle of the Sternembergs was not large; indeed, as it was composed of four only, it was rather a quadrangle, and it is a misnomer to call it a circle at all. It consisted only of Sternemberg and his wife, Leopold, and Bertha, an only daughter.

Bertha was their eldest born, but she was only fifteen months older than her brother; she assisted her mother in the business, and was an expert in all matters of ornament and embroidery.

She was exceedingly beautiful, and had already, though scarcely turned twenty, had several offers of marriage. But Bertha, like her brother, to whom she was tenderly attached, had some peculiar notions on this point. Her young friends said she was a flirt, and didn't know her own mind; she said to herself that whenever she did marry it should be to one for whom it would not be necessary to work the ends of her fingers off; in a word, Bertha looked forward to making a match beyond her station.

"If my brother," she would argue to herself, "from his great talent, works his way, as I know he will, to an independent and honourable position, I should not like to be the means of connecting him with a brother-in-law that he would be ashamed of."

This was rather a jesuitical style of reasoning on her part, for that personal ambition had some share in forming her resolve is beyond a doubt.

Bertha, therefore, bided her time, and was content to await the chapter of events, flattered by the beaux who paid homage to her beauty, and satisfied to be called a flirt by those less favoured fair ones who found fewer admirers, and who would not have failed to have determined when the attentions of a casual acquaintance ended and those of a lover began.

From all this we may gather that Bertha had not, up to this period, been really and truly in love.

Leopold, the second born of the worthy tailor and his wife, had displayed at a very early age a great aptitude for drawing. Whether it was the figures in those books of Parisian fashions that were exposed in the window of his parents that first attracted his infant mind we will not pretend to say; the faculty of the artist is that of imitation, strengthened by strong perceptive powers, which divide themselves again into an appreciation of form, size,

and colour, but there must be a dawning on the mind of that faculty at some time-a beginning and a first cause.

In Leopold's case the first impression he remembered of being endowed with this gift was the making of a caricature of the mistress of a dame-school to which he went while yet in petticoats, and for which he was stuck upon a form with a dunce's cap on, to be laughed at in his turn by his schoolfellows, after enduring a smart taste of the rod, inflicted by the hands of the indignant dame.

It was when Leopold was about ten years of age that the attention of his parents was first seriously directed to his precocious talent, and it happened in this way:

Among the summer visitors who flock to the Rhine, bestowing a day to one town, half a day to another, and who cram as much sight-seeing as they possibly can into their fortnight or three weeks' holiday, there is generally a small batch of English artists who take the thing more leisurely.

Some of these, seeking for such accommodation as their limited means will allow, are content to take what the humbler houses of the tradespeople will afford them, and avoid the expenses and the publicity of the hotel or the general boarding-house. It was one of these, for distinction sake we shall call him Mr. Browning, an artist whose reputation has since become widely and deservedly extended, who hired the spare bedroom that the Sternembergs had to let, and who, when not away pursuing his studies in the immediate neighbourhood, shared their frugal meals.

Leopold, as a child, was exceedingly pretty; his chesnut hair hung in long waving curls over the collar of his little blouse almost like a girl's. He at once attracted the attention of the English student, but when he came to discover in him an intelligence far beyond his years, he was more than struck, he was almost fascinated by the child.

Thus it was that when Mr. Browning went with his folio and his colours to sketch in the neighbourhood, he was accompanied very frequently by the young Leopold, pretty much as we have seen that Leopold himself was attended by the vine-dresser's son, Johaan Zwick; only in Leopold's case he became really a pupil.

In one of these trips the boy-artist ventured, tremblingly, to show Mr. Browning a few pencil sketches he had made from nature, and which, with a child's timidity, he had not dared to submit to his parents; there was also a sketch in pen-and-ink, wonderful for so young a draughtsman, of his little sister Bertha.

It needed no second glance to convince Mr. Browning of the wonderful perceptive faculty that could produce at so tender an age, and wholly untaught, these sketches. True, they wanted

power, and perhaps feeling; but in form and detail they were sufficiently true to nature. But when he came afterwards to inspect a few sketches of goblins, imps, and such like, with which the little boy had actually illustrated one of his child's story-books, he saw that he was not deficient in imagination nor fancy either. "Here, then," thought the Englishman, "is a born artist-a boy gifted with all the powers of the pencil, as much as Keats or Shelley were the gifted children of song."

All that Leopold needed was to acquire the rules and rudiments of the art-nature had done the rest to his hands. It was with a true devotion to his craft, and an earnest desire that these gifts should not be misapplied or turned from their natural current, that Mr. Browning proposed to the father of his little friend that he should prolong his visit in order to give him the lessons requisite for starting him on the right road.

The generous praise of the stranger was received with feelings of proud satisfaction by the parents of Leopold, and, it is scarcely necessary to add, that the lodger remained as long as his engagements would permit him in the character of a guest.

And then opened to Leopold a new source of wonder and delight, for he began to work in colours.

It is needless to follow the progress of the young artist year by year; suffice it to say, that his advancement was even more rapid than his friend and patron had anticipated.

Left to follow the bent of his own inclinations-for, after the first year, Mr. Browning could not bestow upon his pupil more than the month's vacation that he allowed himself to rub off the dust, and rest from the incessant toil that the commissions he had to execute in his own metropolis necessitated-the youth Leopold luxuriated in his art, and indulged himself in all its vagaries.

At the end of five years, Mr. Browning was compelled to discontinue his visits to Bonn entirely, and his advice to his pupil was, that he should leave his native town for awhile and occupy himself with serious study in Rome, or one of the great Italian

cities.

It was in order to attain this end, which the limited means of his father did not permit him immediately to accomplish, that Leopold determined to dispose of such drawings as the passing visitors might be induced to purchase, and to give drawing lessons in the schools and families of his native town.

In the mean time, his general education was not neglected; he attended the classes and lectures of the university, not a very expensive affair with a native and resident, and, quick at learning as he was at drawing and painting, he managed to keep pace with all the students of his own age. Only in one thing he kept aloof

from them, he could seldom be induced to join their college orgies. There is something repellant to a delicate organisation in riot and dissipation, and we have seen that the mind of Leopold was imaginative and sensitive to an extraordinary degree.

Four or five years had passed between the time Mr. Browning took his final leave of him and the evening we found him loitering in the square; but yet Leopold had made no preparation for leaving Bonn; true he had promised his parents not to do so until he had completed his nonage, of which there still remained a few months, but there were other reasons which caused him to delay his departure.

Bertha Geraldine Werner, from a caprice which many young ladies are not exempt from, preferred to be called by her second sponsorial name; it was certainly the higher sounding one of the two, though whether it was a prettier is altogether a matter of taste; it, however, corresponded with her father's, which was Gerald, and as she was a pet of his, no doubt he was pleased to give way to her in adopting it.

The Werners had not resided in Bonn more than twelve months; nobody knew who they were, or where they came from; even their nationality was a disputed point, some asserting they were German and to the climate born, they all spoke the language so fluently; some inclined to the south of France as the place of their nativity; while others as boldly asserted that a flower as fair and fragile as their daughter, the Fraulein Geraldine, as she was called there, could only have been reared under the soft skies of sunny Italy.

They appeared to have ample means at their command, for they made up pleasure parties for excursions on the Rhine, and had post-horses put to their own carriage when they made little journeys into the country to enjoy the surrounding scenery. The house they occupied had formerly been the residence of a wealthy proprietor, who was travelling abroad, and they had hired it with all the means and appurtenances thereunto belonging—including the furniture, the fixtures, and even the servants of the former occupant.

There were brilliant parties given at this château-parties at which the lights gleamed from many-branched candelabra, and music resounded from the most tuneful voices and the most brilliant toned of pianofortes. Geraldine and her mother were both brilliant performers, and the Rhine wine flowed in flashing glasses. But this was not all: there was one excitement which surpassed that of music, wine, and song, and with which the dispenser of this splendid hospitality seemed never tired of indulging his guests, and that was play. Werner never proposed the stakes