This procession spoke but to the eye. It was but a tableau, dumb, though in its way eloquent. It detailed no actions; it only hinted them. It simply presented the men who acted, clad in the outward garb, and bearing the tools and weapons of their day. The cut of a garment, the form of a helmet or halberd, a saddle or a semitar, a hoe or a hatchet, or the cut of the hair or the beard, may speak of the heart and soul, only, however, by distant hints. But just as the representation is less distinct and detailed, is it a mightier lever for imagination to use in raising again to life centuries which had long slept in the dust. The superstructure of history, indeed, which we should rear upon such a basis, would be wide of the truth on one side, just as the narratives and philosophical disquisitions which come to us under that name are on the other. History generally relates those things in which all ages have been most alike--the same which have 'been from the beginning and ever shall be'--the intrigues of courts and of diplomacy--varied mainly by the influence of the religion of the Bible, as at first persecuted, then rising by degrees to a rank either with or above the state, and becoming a persecuting power, and then finally modifying and softening down the native rudeness of the human race, until mutual and universal tolerance is the result; court life, diplomacy, and war, however, remaining and still to remain the perpetual subjects of historical composition. But between this elevated range and the humble one of burghers' tools and costumes, lies a boundless field of aspect, variegated with all the forms which checker social and domestic life. Oh!--thought a little group of American spectators occupying a room near the corner of Ludwig and Theresien streets--could we but rend the veil of time which conceals Munich's seven hundred years of burgher and peasant life, how odd, how rude a scene would present itself! The reader's fancy may make the attempt. I will aid a little if I can, and there was indeed some material furnished in addresses prepared for that occasion, and in some other papers which have come into my hands.