THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
thinker, who also possessed the courage of bold action. There was something of well-conditioned ease in his deportment, and when the sturdy, somewhat corpulent man sat down, looked at the listener with his uncommonly shrewd eyes, and then exposed his own opinion in well-formed, clear sentences, pronounced in slow and precise cadence, he made the impression of authority, the very presence of which was apt to convince, even before the argument had been conducted to its last conclusions. Loewe was not nearly as sanguine as most of us with regard to the possibility of a speedy change of things in Germany, although even he was not entirely untouched by the current illusions of the exiles' life. He expressed to me his doubts as to the chances of the projected national loan; but as he did not altogether repel the plan, and as I was anxious to win him for this enterprise by further conversations about it, I accompanied him on a tramp through the “Berner Oberland.”
Until then I had seen the snowy heads of the Alps only from afar. Now for the first time I came near to them and, so to speak, sat down at their feet. We walked from Bern to Interlaken and then by way of Lauterbrunnen and the Wengern Alp to Grindelwald; then we ascended the Faulhorn, and finally turned to the lakes by way of the Scheideck. We stopped at the most beautiful points long enough to see the finest part of this range. Of all the wonderful things that I saw, the deepest impression was produced upon me not by the vast panoramas, as from the top of the Faulhorn, where large groups and chains of the Alps are embraced in one view, but it was the single mountain peak reaching up into the blue sunny ether from a bank of clouds that separated it from the nether world, and standing there as something distinct and individual. It was the image of the eternally firm, unchangeable, certain, looking down as from a throne in serene sunlight upon
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