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Such are my memories of Frankfurt at work. Frankfurt at leisure was to be seen in its Palm Garden. This was the town’s place of general recreation; large, various, beautifully and intelligently planned; with space for babies to roll in safety, and there were the babies rolling, and their nurses; with courts for tennis, and thither I saw adolescent Frankfurt strolling in flannels and short skirts after business hours; with benches where sat the more elderly, taking the air and gazing at the games or the flowers or the pleasant trees; with paths more sequestered that wound among bowers, convenient for sweethearts–but I did not see any, because I forbore to look. A central building held tropic plants and basins, and large rooms for bad weather, I suppose, with a restaurant; but on this fine day the music played and we dined outside.

An entrance fee, very small, served to make you respect the Palm Garden, since humanity seldom respects what it pays nothing for. Most unexpected show of all in this Palm Garden were the flowers under glass. I had erroneously supposed that any German scheme of color would be heavy, and possibly garish. Never had I beheld more exquisite subtlety on so extended a scale of arrangement. One walked through aisle after aisle of roses and other blooms in these greenhouses–everywhere was the same delicate sense and feeling; the same, in fact, in these flower schemes that one finds in German lyric verse, and in the songs of Schubert, Schumann and Franz.

It was in the opera house–Frankfurt has a fine and commodious one–that my whole impression of Germany’s glory culminated. The performances drew their light from no Melbas or Carusos, or other meteors, but from a fixed constellation, now and then enriched by some visitor; it was teamwork of drilled and even excellence, singers, chorus, orchestra and scenery unitedly equal to the occasion, in operas old and new, an immense sweep of repertory, with an audience to match–an accustomed audience, to whom music was traditional food, music having always grown hereabout plenteously, indigenously, so that they took it as naturally as they took their Rhine wine, paying for it as moderately, going to hear it in rather plain clothes, as a rule–men in day dress, women in high-neck; not an audience that had to put on its diamonds in order to listen conspicuously to a costly and not comprehended exotic.

The difference between hearing opera where it grows and hearing it in New York is the difference between eating strawberries warm from their vines in June and strawberries in January that have come a thousand miles by freight. Where opera grows, it is the blend of native music, singers and listeners that gives a ripe flavor of a warmth which Fifth Avenue can never purchase.

This, every performance in Frankfurt had; but even this could be raised to a higher key of inspiration. I walked in one night and found myself amid a pious ceremonial. They were giving an old work, of bygone design, stiff in outline, noble, remote from all present things. Why did they revive this somewhat pale and rigid classic? For contrast, variety? Not at all. Two hundred years ago this day, Gluck had been born. Gluck had written this opera. For this reason, then, Frankfurt was assembled to hear Gluck’s music and remember him; and, as I looked at these living Germans honoring their classics, I thought it was truly a splendid people that not only possessed but practically nourished themselves with these masterpieces of their great dead.

But this was not all. This was Germany looking at its Past. In the Frankfurt opera house I also learned one of the ways in which Germany attends to its Future. It was on a Sunday afternoon. As I crossed the open space toward the opera house it seemed as though I were the only grown person bound there. Children by threes and fours, and in little groups, were streaming from every quarter, entering every door, tripping up the wide, handsome stairs, filling all the seats–boys and girls; it was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. After a few minutes I found that I was indeed almost alone amid a rippling sea of children–nearly two thousand, as I later learned. In the boxes here and there was a parent or two with a family party, and dotted about the house a few scattered older heads among the young ones.