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Of his life in Frankfort, during the winter of 1845, he often speaks with great satisfaction. He made excellent progress in the language, and in that understanding of the habits of the people which Mr. Greeley had so pointedly urged upon him as an ambitious aspirant for the favors of the “Tribune.” He comes out of that study a matured thinker. His descriptions assume a more thoughtful tone. His sympathies are more often awakened for the people, and he sees as a man sees, and less juvenile are all his undertakings and communications. He there acquired a love of German poetry, and became acquainted with many of the noted men of Frankfort. He visited the aged Mendelssohn, and tells with charming simplicity how he was received by the composer of “St. Paul” and “Elijah.” Thus introduced to German literature, art, and music, he entered again upon his travels at the opening of spring, with new and increasing appreciativeness.

Again, on foot, he went into the untried way of Europe. His first attraction was for the Hartz Mountains, so intimately connected with Goethe’s “Faust,” with which Bayard was already in love, and which he afterwards translated in a masterly manner. So he went through Friedberg and Giessen, into Hesse-Cassel, making the acquaintance of peasants and merchants on his way, and moralizing upon the curious circumstance that the descendants of the Hessians, who fought so doggedly at Brandywine, should receive so hospitably the descendant of those who filled the “plains of Trenton with the short Hessian graves.” Thence by Münden, Göttingen and Osterode, enduring sickening fatigues and dangerous exposure, he reached the Brocken mountain, where, through thickets, rocks, chasms, snow and cold, he at last rested in a cottage at its summit, amid the associations awakened by the weird tales of witches and the superstitious explanations of that singular illusion,—the “Spectre of the Brocken.” If he had any “wish” on that “Walpurgis night,” which he passed on the highest mountain of the Hartz range, it was probably to be relieved of the tortures which his weak frame endured, and from which the physician had failed to relieve him. It would not be surprising if he recited from “Faust” the words of scene IV.:—