In the middle of a wood of lofty beeches in Bernrieder Park, on the Starnberger See, there stands a small rotunda, within is a prattling fountain, right round the walls runs a frieze, depicting the legend of the "Beautiful Melusina." It is Schwind's monument. With him German Romanticism perished; reality itself had now become so marvellous. When, in 1850, Hübner had to paint a figure of Germania for a page in King Ludwig's album, he depicted a queenly woman, prone on the ground, with her face in the dust, amidst a desolate landscape and under a cloudy sky. The crown has fallen from her head and a skull lies by her side, while on the frame are inscribed these words from the Book of Lamentations: "Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the destruction of the daughter of my people; the crown of our head is fallen." When Schwind died, Germany had re-arisen. In the very year of his death, Lenbach painted his first Bismarck pictures: in Bismarck was embodied that power by means of which the dream of a nation was fulfilled. [Illustration: SCHWIND. NYMPHS AND STAG.] Thus Schwind's works are not only the sign of a completed period in German history, but also at the same time both the climax and the conclusion of an art-epoch. Schwind had lived through the entire revolution which German painting had at that time undergone. At his death the sound of the hunting horns of Romanticism had died away. He had lived long enough to have the opportunity of criticising neatly, as follows, the dry, unpoetical school of historical painting then making its appearance, as if introduced by gaudily costumed models, a school which made its first hit with Lessing's "Ezzelino": "I will explain the picture to you. Ezzelino is seated in his dungeon, and two monks are attempting to convert him. One of them recognises that all pains are thrown away upon the old sinner, and takes himself off, regretfully desisting from all further endeavour; the other still has hopes, and continues his exhortations. But Ezzelino only keeps his angry gaze fixed before him, muttering, 'Leave me alone! Don't you see that I am--posing as a model!'" He had had occasion to write to his friend Bauernfeld: "I have seen so many schools of so-called painting in my time that it is an absolute horror to me"; he had asked Piloty: "What calamity are you preparing for us now?" and had thought it his duty to address to one of the younger painters the question: "Are we then an academy of the Fine or of the Ugly Arts?" "A man like me, with his ideas, walks like a ghost amid the battle of the virtuosi, in which the whole life of art has gone astray," he used sadly to say. His last wonderful works stand alone in a time which was dazzled by the flash of arms characterising the Franco-Belgian school of art. It was not till much later that Hans Thoma took up the threads which connect the work of Schwind with the present epoch. When he died he was a solitary, isolated man taking leave of a