custodian about
in the Goethe horse in Weimar, and of an emotion indistinguishable from
that of their fellow sight-seers. They could make sure, afterwards, of
a personal pleasure in a certain prescient classicism of the house.
It somehow recalled both the Goethe houses at Weimar, and it somehow
recalled Italy. It is a separate house of two floors above the entrance,
which opens to a little court or yard, and gives access by a decent
stairway to the living-rooms. The chief of these is a sufficiently
dignified parlor or salon, and the most important is the little chamber
in the third story where the poet first opened his eyes to the light
which he rejoiced in for so long a life, and which, dying, he implored
to be with him more. It is as large as his death-chamber in
Weimar, where he breathed this prayer, and it looks down into the
Italian-looking court, where probably he noticed the world for the first
time, and thought it a paved enclosure thirty or forty feet square. In
the birth-room they keep his puppet theatre, and the place is fairly
suggestive of his childhood; later, in his youth, he could look from the
parlor windows and see the house where his earliest love dwelt. So much
remains of Goethe in the place where he was born, and as such things go,
it is not a little. The house is that of a prosperous and well-placed
citizen, and speaks of the senatorial quality in his family which Heine
says he was fond of recalling, rather than the sartorial quality of the
ancestor who, again as Heine says, mended the Republic's breeches.

From the Goethe house, one drives by the Goethe monument to the Romer,
the famous town-hall of the old free imperial city which Frankfort once
was; and by this route the Marches drove to it, agreeing with their
coachman that he was to keep as much in the sun as possible. It was
still so cold that when they reached the Romer, and he stopped in a
broad blaze of the only means of heating that they have in Frankfort
in the summer, the travellers were loath to leave it for the chill
interior, where the German emperors were elected for so many centuries.
As soon as an emperor was chosen, in the great hall effigied round
with the portraits of his predecessors, he hurried out in the balcony,
ostensibly to show himself to the people, but really, March contended,
to warm up a little in the sun. The balcony was undergoing repairs that
day, and the travellers could not go out on it; but under the spell of
t