Afterwards the rest fell down and joined up; but this was almost an anti-climax.

Now that is very charming, and full of the best German domesticity.

It suggests truly what wild adventures the traveller can find by stopping at home.

But it also illustrates in various ways how that great German influence on England, which is the matter of these essays, began in good things and gradually turned to bad.

It began as a literary influence, in the lurid tales of Hoffmann, the tale of "Sintram," and so on; the revisualising of the dark background of forest behind our European cities.