Whenever or wherever you are in the company of Germans you notice their pleasure and their keen interest in the subjective, rather than in the objective side of life. It is from within out that they are stirred, not as we are, by outside things working upon us. They are still the dreaming, drinking, singing, impulsive Germans of Tacitus. Titus Livius, Plutarch, and Machiavelli, all maintained that the successive invasions of the Germans into Italy were for the sake of the wine to be found there. Plutarch writes that "the Gauls were introduced to the Italian wine by a Tuscan named Arron, and so excited were they by the desire for more that, taking their wives and children with them, they journeyed across the Alps to conquer the land of such good vintages, looking upon other countries as sterile and savage by comparison. Even if this be not history, it is an impression; and at any rate, from that day to this the Germans have agreed with the dictum of Aulus Gellius: "Prandium autem abstemium, in quo nihil vini potatur, canium dicitur: quoniam canis vino caret." When the Roman historian first came into contact with them he notes, that their bread was lighter than other bread, because "they use the foam from their beer as yeast." Tacitus writes of them: "The Germans abound with rude strains of verse, the reciters of which, in the language of the country, are called 'Bards.'" I visited a private stable in Bavaria, as well ordered and as well kept as any private stable in America or in England, and the head coachman was a reader of poetry; and though he had received numerous offers of higher wages in the city, declined them, giving as one reason that the view from the window of his room could not be equalled elsewhere! Where can one find a stable-man in our country who reads Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe, or who ever heard of William James and Pragmatism? I may be doing an injustice to the stable-men of Boston, but I doubt it. There are scores of pages of notes to my hand, recounting similar if not such startling examples of the German temperament among high and low. Musical, melancholic, gregarious, subjective, these are their true characteristics, but the superficial among us do not see these things because they are hidden behind the great army, the new navy and mercantile marine, the factories, the increased commercial values, the strenuous agricultural and industrial pushing ahead of the last thirty years. But they are there, they represent the German temperament, they are the internal character of Germania, always to be taken into account in judging her, or in wondering why she does this or that, or why she does it in this or that way. "As imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name."