Schwind remains a personality by himself--the last of the Romanticists, and one of the most amiable manifestations in German art. He was free from the malady of that sham Romanticism which sought the salvation of art in the resurrection of the Middle Ages, misunderstood, and grasped sentimentally, and as it were by stencil. He was spiritually permeated by that which had given Romanticism the capacity to exist: the sense of that forgotten and imperishable world of beauty which it has again discovered. The others sought for the "blue flower," Schwind found it; resuscitated in all its faëry beauty that "fair night of enchantment which holds the mind captive." He incorporated the romantic idea in painting as Weber did in music, and his works, like the _Freischütz_, will live for ever. Many a man listened to him holding forth upon water-nymphs, gnomes, and tricksy kobolds, as of beings of whose existence he appeared to have no doubt whatever. On one occasion, while out walking near Eisenach in the Annathal, a friend laughingly observed to him that the landscape really looked as if gnomes had made the pathway and had had their dwellings there. "Don't you believe it was so? _I_ believe it," answered Schwind in all seriousness. He _lived_ in the world of legend and fairy-tale. If ever a fairy stood beside the cradle of a mortal man, assuredly there was one standing by Schwind's; and all his life long he believed in her and raved about her. Born in the land where Neidhart of Neuenthal had sung and the Parson of the Kahlenberg had dwelt, to his eyes Germany was overshadowed with ancient Teutonic oaks: for him, elves hovered about watersprings and streams, their white robes trailing behind them through the dewy grass; a race of gnomes held their habitation on the mountain heights, and water-nymphs bathed in every pool. In him part of the Middle Ages came back to life, not in livid, corpse-like pallor, but fanned by the revivifying breath of the present day.