As to music, the Berlin Opera was then at the height of its reputation, the leading singer being the famous Joanna Wagner. But my greatest satisfaction was derived from the ``Liebig Classical Concerts.'' These were, undoubtedly, the best instrumental music then given in Europe, and a small party of us were very assiduous in our attendance. Three afternoons a week we were, as a rule, gathered about our table in the garden where the concerts were given, and, in the midst of us, Alexander Thayer, the biographer of Beethoven, who discussed the music with us during its intervals. Beethoven was, for him, the one personage in human history, and Beethoven's music the only worthy object of human concern. He knew every composition, every note, every variant, and had wrestled for years with their profound meanings. Many of his explanations were fantastic, but some were suggestive and all were interesting. Even more inspiring was another new-found friend, Henry Simmons Frieze; a thorough musician, and a most lovely character. He broached no theories, uttered no comments, but sat rapt by the melody and harmony--transfigured--``his face as it had been the face of an angel.'' In these Liebig concerts we then heard, for the first time, the music of a new composer,--one Wagner,--and agreed that while it was all very strange, there was really something in the overture to ``Tannh
user.''
At the close of this stay in Berlin, I went with a party of fellow-students through Austria to Italy. The whole journey was a delight, and the passage by steamer from Trieste to Venice was made noteworthy by a new acquaintance,--James Russell Lowell. As he had already written the ``Vision of Sir Launfal,'' the ``Fable for Critics,'' and the ``Biglow Papers,'' I stood in great awe of him; but this feeling rapidly disappeared in his genial presence. He was a student like the rest of us,--for he had been passing the winter at Dresden, working in German literature, as a preparation for succeeding Longfellow in the professorship at Harvard. He came to our rooms, and there linger delightfully in my memory his humorous accounts of Italian life as he had known it.
During the whole of the journey, it was my exceeding good fortune to be thrown into very close relations with two of our party, both of whom became eminent Latin professors, and one of whom,--already referred to,--Frieze, from his lecture-room in the University of Michigan, afterward did more than any other man within my knowledge to make classical scholarship a means of culture throughout our Western States. My excursions in Rome, under that guidance, I have always looked upon as among the fortunate things of life. The day was given to exploration, the evening to discussion, not merely of archaeological theories, but of the weightier matters pertaining to the history of Roman civilization and its influence. Dear Frieze and Fishburne! How vividly come back the days in the tower of the Croce di Malta, at Genoa, in our sky-parlor of the Piazza di Spagna at Rome, and in the old ``Capuchin Hotel'' at Amalfi, when we held high debate on the analogies between the Roman Empire and the British, and upon various kindred subjects.
An episode, of much importance to me at this time, was my meeting our American minister at Naples, Robert Dale Owen. His talks on the political state of Italy, and his pictures of the monstrous despotism of ``King Bomba'' took strong hold upon me. Not even the pages of Colletta or of Settembrini have done so much to arouse in me a sense of the moral value of political history.
Then, too, I made the first of my many excursions through the historic towns of Italy. My reading of Sismondi's ``Italian Republics'' had deeply interested me in their history, and had peopled them again with their old turbulent population. I seemed to see going on before my eyes the old struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, and between the demagogues and the city tyrants. In the midst of such scenes my passion for historical reading was strengthened, and the whole subject took on new and deeper meanings.
On my way northward, excursions among the cities of southern France, especially Nismes, Arles, and Orange, gave me a far better conception of Roman imperial power than could be obtained in Italy alone, and Avignon, Bourges, and Toulouse deepened my conceptions of mediaeval history.
Having returned to America in the summer of 1856and met my class, assembled to take the master's degree in course at Yale, I was urged by my old Yale friends, especially by Porter and Gilman, to remain in New Haven.
They virtually pledged me a position in the school of art about to be established; but my belief was in the value of historical studies, and I accepted an election to a professorship of history at the University of Michigan. The work there was a joy to me from first to last, and my relations with my students of that period, before I had become distracted from them by the cares of an executive position, were among the most delightful of my life.
Then, perhaps, began the most real part of my education.
The historical works of Buckle, Lecky, and Draper, which were then appearing, gave me a new and fruitful impulse;but most stimulating of all was the atmosphere coming from the great thought of Darwin and Herbert Spencer,--an atmosphere in which history became less and less a matter of annals, and more and more a record of the unfolding of humanity. Then, too, was borne in upon me the meaning of the proverb docendo disces. I found energetic Western men in my classes ready to discuss historical questions, and discovered that in order to keep up my part of the discussions, as well as to fit myself for my class-room duties, I must work as I had never worked before. The education I then received from my classes at the University of Michigan was perhaps the most effective of all.
