the northern navigation being perfectly free
by the end of April. In Brussels, weather-
wise men bound Russia-wards, were quite
sanguine as to the first day of May being
first open water. But in Berlin, people
began to shake their heads, and whisper
ugly stories about the ice; and many advised
me to take a run down to Leipzig and
Dresden, and see the Saxon Switzerland;
telling me significantly that I would have
ample time to explore all central Germany
before the northern waters were ruffled
by the keel even of a cock-boat. There was
a little band of Britons purposing for Petersburg
at the table d'hôte of the Hôtel de
Russie, at Berlin, of whom I had the
advantage to make one; and we fed ourselves
from day to day (after dinner) with fallacious
hopes of early steamers. A Roman citizen
in a buff waistcoat, and extensively interested
in tallow (so at least it was whispered,
though the Fumden Blad said merely
Shortsix, Kaufmann aus England, and was
silent as to his speciality) was perfectly
certain that a steamboat would start from
Stockholm for Cronstadt on the fourth of
May, and he expressed his determination to
secure a passage by her; but as Sweden
happens to be on the other side of the Baltic,
and there was no bridge, and no water
communication yet opened therewith, the Stockholm
steamer was a thing to be looked at
(in lithography, framed and glazed in the
hall of the hotel) and longed for, rather than
embarked in. We were all of us perpetually
haunted by a sort of phantom steamer—a
very flying Russian—commanded, I presume,
by Captain Vanderdeckenovitch, whose
departure some one had seen advertised in an
unknown newspaper. This spectral craft
was reported to have left Hull some time
since—we all agreed that the passage money
out was nine guineas, inclusive of provisions
of the very best quality, but exclusive of
wines, liquors, and the steward's fee, and
she was to call (after doubling the cape, I
presume) at Kiel, Lubeck, Copenhagen,
Konigsberg; Jerusalem, Madagascar, and North
and South Amerikee, for aught I know. To
find this ghostly bark, an impetuous Englishman
—a north countryman with a head so
fiery in hue that they might have put him on
a post and made a lighthouse of him, and
pendant whiskers like carriage rugs, started
off by the midnight mail to Hamburg. He
came back in three days and a towering rage,
saying that there was ice even in the Elbe,
and giving us to understand that the free
cities of Hamburg, Lubeck, and Bremen,
had concurred in laughing him to scorn at
the bare mention of a steamer due north—
yet awhile at least. By degrees a grim
certainty broke upon us, and settled itself
convincingly in our minds. To the complexion
of the Preussischer-Adler we must come;
and that Post-Dampfschiff would start
from Stettin on Saturday, the seventeenth
of May at noon, and not one day or hour
before.

I thought the three long weeks would never
have come to an end. I might, had I been
differently situated, have taken my fill of enjoyment
in Berlin, and spent three pleasant weeks
there. Unter den Linden, the Thier-Garten,
Charlottenbourg, Potsdam, Krotts, the
Tonhalle, Sans Souci and Monbijou (pronounced
Zang-Zouzy and Mongpichow), are quite
sufficient to make a man delectably comfortable on
the spree: to say nothing of the art treasure-
stored Museum, Rauch's statue of the Great
Frederic, Kiss's Amazon, and the sumptuous
Opera-haus, with Johanna Wagner in the
Tannhaüser, and Marie Taglioni in Satanella.
But they were all caviare to the million of
Prussian blue devils which possessed me.
I felt that I had no business in Berlin—that
I had no right to applaud Fraulein Wagner—
that I ought to reserve my kidglove
reverberations for Mademoiselle Bagdanoff: that
every walk I took Unter den Linden was so
many paces robbed from the Nevsky Perspective,
and that every sight I took at the King
of Prussia and the Princes of the House of
Hohenzollern was a fraud on my liege literary
masters, the Emperor of Russia and the
scions of the house of Romanoff.

Conscience-stricken as I felt, though void
of guilt, I had my consolations—few and
spare, but grateful as Esmeralda's cup to the
thirst-tortured Quasimodo. I heard the
Oberon of Karl Maria von Weber performed
with such a fervour and solemnity of sincerity,
listened to with such rapt attention and
reverent love—drunk up by a thousand greedy
ears, bar by bar, note by note—from the
first delicious horn-murmur in the overture
to the last crash in the triumphant march,
that I began at last to fancy that I was in a
cathedral instead of a theatre, and half-
expected the people to kneel when the bell
rang for the fall of the curtain, and the
brilliant lamps grew pale. An extra gleam of
consolation was imparted to me, too, when I
read in the Schauspiel-zettel the printed
avowal that the libretto of the opera had
been into High Dutch rendered from the
English of the Herr-Poem-Konstruktor J. R.
Planché. Again; I saw the Faust of
Wolfgang von Goëthe—the Faust as a tragedy, in
all its magnificent and majestic simplicity. I
don't think I clearly comprehended fifty
phrases of the dialogue; I could scarcely read
the names of the dramatis personæ in the
play-bill; and yet I would not have missed
that performance for a pile of ducats; nor
shall I ever forget the actor who played
Mephistopheles. His name is a shadow to me
now; the biting wit, the searching philosophy,
the scathing satire in his speech were well
nigh Greek to me; but the hood, the gait,
the gestures, the devil's grin, the vibrating
voice, the red cock's feather, the long peaked
shoes, the sardonically up-turned moustache,
will never be erased from my mind, and will