Schwind, too, painted frescoes, and in them he is very unequal. All his life long he complained of the lack of important commissions; it was fortunate for him that he did not get more of them. Such a painter as he can execute no orders but his own,--just as good poems do not come to order. A long list of wall paintings--the Tieck room and the figure-frieze in the Habsburg Hall of the new palace at Munich, the frescoes in the Kunsthall and in the Hall of Assembly of the Upper House at Karlsruhe, those in the Castle of Hohenschwangau, even the theatre pieces in the loggia and in the foyer of the Vienna Opera House--could be easily struck out of Schwind's work, without detriment to his reputation. Only when the subject permitted him to strike a simple note of fairy music was he charming even in his wall-paintings, and therefore those which depict scenes from the life of St. Elizabeth in the Wartburg are rightly the most celebrated. Like Rethel in the field of the heroic, so Schwind in that of romantic legend reached the goal which the former kept before his eyes, for the revivifying of the time when there was an enthusiasm for fresco painting. His paintings are poor in colour, motley, magic-lantern views in the style of the heraldically treated figures seen in the frescoes and stained glass of the Romanesque and early Gothic Middle Ages, and yet in every line as delightful as the man himself. Nowhere do we find glaring contrasts, nowhere any violent agitation in the expression of the faces. It is by the avoidance of all landscape accessories, and by a hardly noticeable change in the simple plant-ornamentation in the background, that the events represented are made to lose touch with actual reality. In the first picture, bright-hued birds flit here and there among the rose-branches forming the decorative work; in that which treats of St. Elizabeth's expulsion, the Wartburg rises in the background, while little singing angels are perched upon the boughs of the bare winter-stripped trees that overlook the miserable cell in which St. Elizabeth dies. A touch of the true-heartedness of the ancient Teuton, a breath of peacefulness, permeates Schwind's Wartburg pictures like the waft of an angel's wings. [Illustration: MORITZ SCHWIND. _Graphische Künste._]