ow in the shadow of pensive trees, and by the brinks of sunny meadows,
where the after-math wanders in heavy windrows, and the children sport
joyously over the smooth-mown surfaces in all the freedom that there is
in Germany. At last, after immemorial appropriation the owners of the
earth are everywhere expropriated, and the people come into the pleasure
if not the profit of it. At last, the prince, the knight, the noble
finds, as in his turn the plutocrat will find, that his property is not
for him, but for all; and that the nation is to enjoy what he takes from
it and vainly thinks to keep from it. Parks, pleasaunces, gardens, set
apart for kings, are the play-grounds of the landless poor in the Old
World, and perhaps yield the sweetest joy of privilege to some state-sick
ruler, some world-weary princess, some lonely child born to the solitude
of sovereignty, as they each look down from their palace windows upon the
leisure of overwork taking its little holiday amidst beauty vainly
created for the perpetual festival of their empty lives.

March smiled to think that in this very Weimar, where sovereignty had
graced and ennobled itself as nowhere else in the world by the
companionship of letters and the arts, they still were not hurrying first
to see the palace of a prince, but were involuntarily making it second to
the cottage of a poet. But in fact it is Goethe who is forever the prince
in Weimar. His greatness blots out its history, his name fills the city;
the thought of him is its chiefest imitation and largest hospitality. The
travellers remembered, above all other facts of the grand-ducal park,
that it was there he first met Christiane Vulpius, beautiful and young,
when he too was beautiful and young, and took her home to be his love, to
the just and lasting displeasure of Fran von Stein, who was even less
reconciled when, after eighteen years of due reflection, the love of
Goethe and Christiane became their marriage. They, wondered just where it
was he saw the young girl coming to meet him as the Grand-Duke's minister
with an office-seeking petition from her brother, Goethe's brother
author, long famed and long forgotten for his romantic tale of "Rinaldo
Rinaldini."

They had indeed no great mind, in their American respectability, for that
rather matter-of-fact and deliberate liaison, and little as their
sympathy was for the passionless intellectual intrigue with the Frau von
Stein, it cast no halo of sentiment