His visit to the Brocken was one of the most fascinating trips of his whole pedestrian tour, notwithstanding his narrow escape from death in the snow, and from destruction by falling into the partially concealed caves that beset his way to the summit. He mentioned long afterward the view he had from the summit-house, through the rifts in the clouds, of the plains and cities of Germany. Thirty cities and several hundred villages lay within sight, and all of them more or less closely interwoven with the literature of Germany. The plains of Brunswick and Magdeburg stretch away for seventy miles, with all the various shadings of green intermingled with the sparkling silver of stream and lake. It is a scene so grand that no pen could portray its sublimity and no tongue accurately convey an idea of its varied beauty. With that romantic persistency which no amount of fatigue overcame, Bayard descended the mountain by that rugged and nerve-shaking path up which Faust was said to have ascended with Mephistopheles (scene XXI. of Taylor’s translation) who says:— “How sadly rises, incomplete and ruddy, The moon’s lone disk, with its belated glow, And lights so dimly, that, as one advances, At every step one strikes a rock or tree! Let us, then, use a Jack-o’-Lantern’s glances: I see one yonder, burning merrily. Ho, there! my friend! I’ll levy thine attendance: Why waste so vainly thy resplendence? Be kind enough to light us up the steep.” After which Faust, in a musing mood, looks down from the Brocken heights and replies:— “How strangely glimmers through the hollows A dreary light, like that of dawn! Its exhalation tracks and follows The deepest gorges, faint and wan. Here steam, there rolling vapor sweepeth; Here burns the glow through film and haze: Now like a tender thread it creepeth, Now like a fountain leaps and plays. Here winds away, and in a hundred Divided veins the valley braids: There in a corner pressed and sundered, Itself detaches, spreads and fades. Here gush the sparkles incandescent Like scattered showers of golden sand;— But, see! in all their height at present, The rocky ramparts blazing stand.” As Bayard leaped and stumbled down the rocky declivity into the narrow gorge that there divides the mountains to give an outlet for the river Bode, the very difficulties bound him closer to Goethe’s writings. He felt again how important a thing it is in literature to connect it by patriotic links with some actual landscape, and how much more vivid and permanent are the lessons an author would teach when the reader visits the mountains, plains, cities, buildings, and people mentioned in books of classic worth. Thus learning and growing the young traveller plodded on from inn to inn and village to village.