his entrance into parliament, and longed for the day of election as the last limit Cornelia had perhaps allowed herself. One day, in his restlessness, he drove into the city to divert his thoughts. He wished to visit the Exhibition, and as he went up the broad staircase of the museum he noticed with secret pleasure that people whispered to each other, "That is Ottmar!" and looked at him with interest and approval. He entered the large hall where reigned the solemn silence with which men receive into their souls the wonders of art. The first and second rooms were empty of spectators. The dead and yet lifelike forms upon the walls looked down upon him with their eternal laughing, weeping, or anger. An exhibition is a mute world of a brilliant-hued medley of times, customs, and passions, petrified as if by some magic, and imprisoned in frames, condemned to remain motionless in the attitude assumed at the moment when the spell began to work. There a Magdalen repents with inexhaustible tears; yonder a Roman maiden allures, ever unsuccessfully, with her motionless, half-opened lips; and here an Alva rages in implacable fury, while close by a Huss burns in never-dying flames; below a wolf snaps in unappeasable hunger at a child, which, fortunately, he will never reach; a mother seeks to tear it away, and cannot draw it to her protecting breast; the poor woman is condemned to perpetual dread, and the spectator with her. Not far away is--and will forever remain--a pair of lovers in the act of exchanging a kiss. Upon the other side ships struggle with waves, nations contend in a never-decided battle, a vanquished man awaits the death-stroke of the conqueror, and high up, an a golden background, flooded by the light that streams through the glass dome, is enthroned the Virgin, in her calm peace, surrounded by her heavenly glory.