At Dresden, Bayard visited the picture-gallery, for the purpose of seeing Raphael’s Madonna and Child, known as the Madonna di San Sisto. His description of that painting, so unfortunately abridged in his book, was one of the finest examples of art criticism to be found in print. His appreciation of painting and sculpture was remarkable, indeed, for one who never made them a professional study, and whose rude sketches in pencil in his note books, contained nearly all of his undertakings as an amateur. His soul seemed cast in the proper mould for that kind of work, but his hand was never trained to materialize the pictures that filled the galleries of his imagination. He had all those finer sensibilities and acute instincts which fitted him for art in poetry or stone, and he saw in paintings and statuary, beauties or defects which thousands of colder but more studious critics failed to notice.

He spoke of that Madonna at Dresden, as a painting that moved his whole nature in admiration. He enjoyed it. He feasted on it. He read it as one follows an exciting romance. He felt the power of the picture as Raphael felt it, and seemed to appreciate it even more keenly than the artist. How much satisfaction and delight he found in the enormous collections of art in the Old World, cannot be told or understood by any one whose natural genius leads them not in such a direction. His mental appetite for such things grew so keen, as he went on from city to city and gallery to gallery, that he much preferred to leave his meals untasted, than pass a great painting without study. Like the true artist, his mind took in the grand ideals, and his respect and admiration for the divine handiwork in producing man and beast, caused him often to wince under the suggestive and degrading obtrusiveness of fig-leaves and rude drapery in sculpture. The human form in all its heavenly beauty and godlike majesty, as reproduced in marble by the great artists, was too sacred and pure to him, to be marred by the suggestions of sin. No man or woman will ever become an artist, in its highest, noblest sense, until their love for beauty, simplicity, and purity, lifts them above the impressions that are born of ignorance, vulgarity, and sin. Bayard, in after years, thus beautifully wrote of sculpture:—

This appreciation of the inner feelings of the sculptor and painter, is the more astonishing, because of the unusual disadvantages under which he first studied the works of the ancient masters. Aching limbs, bruised feet, and an empty stomach are not usually aids to the critic in forming a judgment of the symmetry or grace of any work of art. But his enthusiastic recitals of his visits to the celebrated paintings, show no less rapture when he saw them in fatigue and hunger, than when he looked upon them in rest and bodily satiety. Thus, most naturally, he became the companion and intimate friend of a large number of the European artists, and was sought and highly esteemed by all the American painters and sculptors whom he met in Europe. He understood them. He sympathized with their enthusiasm and sacrifices; while a great, cold world went by them without a comforting word or a smile of recognition.

Dresden was like a door to his higher art life, and its collection of paintings is worthy of such a place. There were, besides the Sistine Madonna, the “Ascension,” by Raphael Mengs, the “Notte,” by Correggio, and galleries of master-pieces by Titian, Da Vinci, Veronese, Del Sarto, Rubens, Vandyck, Lorraine and Teniers; with sculpture in marble, ivory, bronze and jewels, from Michael Angelo and his cotemporaries. Being the widest and most diversified collection in Germany, it was eagerly sought by Bayard, and more reluctantly left behind. More grand than the battle of Napoleon before its gates, and more lasting in their effects, were the historic works of art which Dresden is so proud to possess.

From Dresden, Bayard walked to Prague, leaving behind him, as he then thought forever, the cheerful, hospitable, kind-hearted people, with whose kin he afterwards became so intimately and advantageously connected. In Prague, he ascended the heights where the Bohemian kings and Amazon queens used to reside, heard the solemn mass in one of Europe’s most solemn Cathedrals, visited the bridge under which the Saint Johannes floated with the miraculous stars about his corpse, lost himself in the bedlam of Jewish clothing-shops, and then, staff in hand, hastened on over the monotonous plains, and through the highways almost fenced with wretchedly painted shrines, to the Paris of the west, Vienna.

There again were rare, treasures of art on which he might study, and in study, increase in that dignity and expansion of soul which only such contemplation can give. He was delighted to hear the composer Strauss, and his orchestra, and amusingly describes the queer antics of that nervous little musician. He gazed with awe at the stained banners of the Crusaders, and, with uncovered head, listened to the grand chants in St. Stephen’s Cathedral; but his pathetic mention of his visit to the tomb of Beethoven is the most characteristic.

There was a most lovable trait in Bayard’s character, which became even more prominent in his after years of travel, which deserves mention in this connection. He never railed upon the dead, nor ridiculed the religious belief or acts of devotion of any people, however ignorant or heathenish. He often mentioned, with emotion, the efforts of the darkened human mind to find its Creator and Ruler. He treated with sincerest respect every act of devotion performed in his presence, whether by Protestant, Catholic, or Mahomedan. There was that in his nature, and his early Quaker education, that not only kept him in the paths of morality and on the side of virtue, but through all his writings there runs a thread of faith in God, which cannot be better expressed than by quoting one of his own sweet hymns.

After leaving Vienna, he went, by the way of Enns to Lintz, which is situated in one of the most picturesque landscapes of the Danube. The city is surrounded by towers unconnected by walls and has a very romantic history. Bayard in his letters speaks of the rural scenes about Lintz in terms of the highest admiration. It was in these Austrian landscapes that he composed that poem entitled “The Wayside Dream,” and in which we find the following descriptive lines:

From Lintz, over hills and by meadows, among the merry farmers and their light-hearted children, they walked on, through Salzburg and Hohenlinden, to Munich, where another magnificent display of paintings, sculpture, palaces, parks, and historic localities, rewarded him for his long walk and limited supply of food. He had so little money that he was compelled to live on twenty cents a day. There he found the great works of Thorwaldsen, Cornelius, and Schwanthaler, and copies in marble of almost every celebrated piece of antique sculpture. There were the gorgeous palaces of kings and dukes, the beautifully wrought halls and churches, with the spacious avenues and charming parks. No city in the world contains such rich decorations, such unique and profuse ornamentation, or such harmony of design and arrangement, as is shown in the palace halls and public edifices of Munich. How a visit to them sweetens everything else in after life, and how the memory of them ever lightens the burden of care! What American could walk those pavements and floors and not yearn for the power to give to his own country something to match those marvellous structures! Bayard must have felt that impulse in common with others; but, unlike many others, he kept his promise, which was to awaken a love in every American heart for art in its grand and stable forms; and many are the promptings and rebukes which we, as a people, have received from his pen as writer, and from his lips as a lecturer.

From Munich, the route chosen by Bayard lay through Augsburg, Ulm, and Wurtemberg, and when he entered the latter country, at Esslingen, he said the very atmosphere was permeated with poetry. He was delighted with the green vales, lofty hills, lovely vineyards, waving forests, and feudal ruins. He was grateful to the kind people, and was made happy by their universal cheerfulness and good-nature. It was the home of Schiller! There the first nine years of the poet’s life were spent, and scarce a nook is there about the interesting old cities which that boy did not explore. It was toward Wurtemberg, as his childhood’s home, Schiller exhibited the greatest regard; alas, it was there, too, in Stuttgart, that the tyrannical Duke imprisoned him for publishing his first play. There, too, the patriotic Uhland sat in the halls of legislation, and wrote those poems which fired the hearts of his countrymen to a brave defence of fatherland.

Bayard’s happy stay in Esslingen, and his word-pictures of its attractions, show the progress which he had already made in his love for that German poetry, of which he was to become so popular an expounder. He praises the river Neckar and its flowery banks, he lauds the people, he portrays the landscapes in the brightest colors which poetry may lend to prose. Bright day! one he never recalled without exclamations of pleasure!

After such interest as he exhibited in the country of Schiller, it is no surprise, the next day after leaving Esslingen, to find him in Stuttgart, looking up into the pensive face of Thorwaldsen’s colossal statue of Schiller. So attracted and entranced was he by the interpretation of Schiller, made by the natives, the scenery, and the old home, that when beautiful Stuttgart opens its avenues, parks, cathedrals, palaces, and galleries to him, he forsakes and neglects them all for this huge but faithfully wrought counterfeit in stone of the persecuted singer. To his naturally sentimental and sensitive character, the German poet was revealed in ideals more fascinating than any realities. He studied the face of his brother poet, praised his beauty, repeated a broken stanza of “William Tell,” and left the other attractions of Stuttgart unseen.

Passing the castle of Ludwigsburg, and skirting the village of Marbach, the birthplace of Schiller, a village then about the size of Kennett now, but obliged to push on for fear of starvation, he walked to Betigheim, and thence the next day to his first German home, Heidelberg.