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 about the Goethe cottage to suppose
that there his love-life with Christiane began. Mrs. March even resented
the fact, and when she learned later that it was not the fact at all, she
removed it from her associations with the pretty place almost
indignantly.

In spite of our facile and multiple divorces we Americans are worshipers
of marriage, and if a great poet, the minister of a prince, is going to
marry a poor girl, we think he had better not wait till their son is
almost of age. Mrs. March would not accept as extenuating circumstances
the Grand-Duke's godfatherhood, or Goethe's open constancy to Christiane,
or the tardy consecration of their union after the French sack of,
Weimar, when the girl's devotion had saved him from the rudeness of the
marauding soldiers. For her New England soul there were no degrees in
such guilt; and, perhaps there are really not so many as people have
tried to think, in their deference to Goethe's greatness. But certainly
the affair was not so simple for a grand-ducal minister of world-wide
renown, and he might well have felt its difficulties, for he could not
have been proof against the censorious public opinion of Weimar, or the
yet more censorious private opinion of Fran von Stein.

On that lovely Italo-American morning no ghost of these old dead
embarrassments lingered within or without the Goethe garden-house. The
trees which the poet himself planted flung a sun-shot shadow upon it, and
about its feet basked a garden of simple flowers, from which the sweet
lame girl who limped through the rooms and showed