He was one of the first who at that time laid aside the prejudice against modern costume, and in his "Symphony" turned to artistic account, in one fantastic whole, even Franz Lachner's frockcoat and Fräulein Hetzenecker's modern society toilette. "If you may paint a man hidden in an iron stove--what is called a knight in armour--you may still more permissibly paint a man in a frockcoat. In general, one can paint what one will, provided always that one wills what one can." And it was only by means of this present-day temper that Romanticism could find so full-toned an expression in his works. Only because he was truly a citizen of the present day and felt its blood beating in his veins, could he feel the congenial elements of the past. To him the old-time legends were no antiquarian, erudite, pedantic lumber; they were a part of himself, and he interpreted them in more childlike simplicity of manner and with more delicate feeling than any artist of former times, because he observed them with the eye of the present age, with an eye made keen with longing. Just as in his "Wedding Journey" he raised all reality into the poetry of purest romance, so is his Romanticism saturated with a sense of reality charged with memories of home. Out of his fairy-tale pictures is breathed a charming fragrance of the long-vanished days of earth's first springtide, and yet for that very reason a breath of the most modern Décadence. He is distinguished from Marées and Burne-Jones, from Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau, by a very unmodern attribute--he is bursting with health. He is still naïvely childlike, free from that elegiac melancholy, that temper of weary resignation, which the end of the nineteenth century first brought into the world. [Illustration: SCHWIND. WIELAND THE SMITH.] [Illustration: _Neft, Helio._ SCHWIND. FROM THE STORY OF THE SEVEN RAVENS.]