It was truly as he said; only tenfold more desolate, solemn, and impressive; and produced upon the mind the effect we experience, when slumber is suddenly broken, and dreams and realities mingle, and we know not yet whether we sleep or wake. As they at length passed out through the dimly-lighted passage, they heard a vulgar-looking fellow, with a sensual face and shaggy whiskers, say to some persons who were standing near him, and seemed to be hangers-on of the play-house;
"I shall run her six nights at Munich, and then take her on to Vienna."
Flemming thought he was speaking of some favorite horse. He was speaking of his beautiful wife, the ballet-dancer.
[CHAPTER VIII. OLD HUMBUG.]
What most interested our travellers in the ancient city of Frankfort, was neither the opera nor the Ariadne of Dannecker, but the house in which Goethe was born, and the scenes he frequented in his childhood, and remembered in his old age. Such for example are the walks around the city, outside the moat; the bridge over the Maine, with the golden cock on the cross, which the poet beheld and marvelled at when a boy; the cloister of the Barefooted Friars, through which he stole with mysterious awe to sit by the oilcloth-covered table of old Rector Albrecht; and the garden in which his grandfather walked up and down among fruit-trees and rose-bushes, in long morning gown, black velvet cap, and the antique leather gloves, which he annually received as Mayor on Pipers-Doomsday, representing a kind of middle personage between Alcinous and Laertes. Thus, O Genius! are thy foot-prints hallowed; and the star shines forever over the place of thy nativity.
"Your English critics may rail as they list," said the Baron, while he and Flemming were returning from a stroll in the leafy gardens, outside the moat; "but, after all, Goethe was a magnificent old fellow. Only think of his life; his youth of passion, alternately aspiring and desponding, stormy, impetuous, headlong;--his romantic manhood, in which passion assumes the form of strength; assiduous, careful, toiling, without haste, without rest; and his sublime old age,--the age of serene and classic repose, where he stands like Atlas, as Claudian has painted him in the Battle of the Giants, holding the world aloft upon his head, the ocean-streams hard frozen in his hoary locks."
"A good illustration of what the world calls his indifferentism."
"And do you know I rather like this indifferentism? Did you never have the misfortune to live in a community, where a difficulty in the parish seemed to announce the end of the world? or to know one of the benefactors of the human race, in the very `storm and pressure period' of his indiscreet enthusiasm? If you have, I think you will see something beautiful in the calm and dignified attitude which the old philosopher assumes."
"It is a pity, that his admirers had not a little of this philosophic coolness. It amuses me to read the various epithets, which they apply to him; The Dear, dear Man! The Life-enjoying Man! The All-sided One! The Representative of Poetry upon earth! The Many-sided Master-Mind of Germany! His enemies rush into the other extreme, and hurl at him the fierce names of Old Humbug! and Old Heathen! which hit like pistol-bullets."
"I confess, he was no saint."