For a moment Ludwig was so astonished at what he saw that he could not speak. Then he turned to his mother with a question: “Who worked the tapestry? And how do _I_ come to be standing in the Landgraf’s robes, high on the Wartburg, with the valley and the town of Eisenach far beneath me, and a great star hanging low from the sky above my head?” His mother answered one part of his question: “The ‘Wise Nun’ in thy Father’s Convent of Eisenach has wrought it,” she said, and then stopped suddenly, and led him to the lateral wall. “This, too, hath the wise nun wrought?” he asked in growing astonishment. For the tapestry on this wall depicted a scene which had occurred in the Wartburg four years previously, with a fidelity which seemed impossible to anyone but an eye-witness. It was the celebrated “War of the Poets” on the Wartburg—the “Wartburgkrieg”—the memory of which is as fresh to-day as when young Ludwig looked on the “Wise Nun’s” tapestry, and saw it pictured in glowing colours and wealth of detail on the canvas. There on the “Minstrels’ Gallery” were the seats of Duke Hermann and Duchess Sophia. The Landgräfin had risen from hers, and with the folds of her mantle was covering a terror-stricken suppliant. In the Minstrel’s Hall, a step or two beneath the Gallery, were the other contestants. Ludwig recognises each of the angry faces that are turned towards the fugitive—Wolfram von Eschenbach, Walther von der Vogelweide, Heinrich von Zweten, and Heinrich Schreiber. A man, with the instruments of the executioner in his hand to label him for the spectator, is starting forward, but the quick movement is arrested by someone he sees in the opening door—a white-haired, venerable man, with a long beard. “It is Klingsohr, the Wise Man from Hungary, who has come just in time to save the life of Heinrich von Ofterdingen,” says Ludwig, while his mother nodded confirmation. Young Ludwig passed on. Here was the white-haired man again—in a garden this time before one of the little tables which have been in German inn-gardens since first such things were, and will be, until they are no more. He has risen from the table and is scanning the skies—and, behold! very low in them is hanging the star which shines about Ludwig’s own head in the piece of tapestry opposite. From the other tables, men in the knightly garb of peace, have risen likewise, neglecting their chess, and draughts, and dice, and drinking flagons, to follow the direction of the old man’s pointing arm. On the left wall another many-figured scene. A king and queen on their thrones in the midst of a full and splendid court. Between them, the wonderful star is poised; and at their feet are kneeling ambassadors, whom Ludwig recognises as those sent from his father’s court, to ask the hand of the little Hungarian Princess (whose birth had been announced to him by Klingsohr) for his eldest son, Hermann.