ost marvellous work of the marvellous German erudition. The
little North German city, Weimar, is closely associated with the
great literary men of the last hundred years. Here several of them
accomplished their best work under the patronage of an enlightened
duke, and finally found their graves. An atmosphere of reverend
quiet seemed to hang over it as I walked through its shaded
streets,--streets where there is never bustle, and which appear to
be always remembering the great men who have walked in them. In the
burying-ground in the outskirts I found the mausoleum of the ruling
house, a decorated hall of marble with a crypt underneath in which
are the coffins. The members of the Saxe-Weimar family for many
generations are here; the warlike ancestor with his armour rusting on
the dusty lid, grand-duke and duchess, and the child that died before
it attained the coronet. But far more interesting than any of these
are two large plain caskets of oak, lying side by side at the foot of
the staircase by which you descend. In these are the bones of Goethe
and Schiller. The heap of wreaths, some of them still fresh, which lay
on the tops, the number on the coffin of Schiller being noticeably the
larger, showed how green their memory had been kept in the heart of
the nation. I was only one of a great multitude of pilgrims who are
coming always, their chief errand being to see the graves of these
famous dead within the quiet town. In the side of the Schloss Kirche,
in the city of Wittenberg, is an old archway, with pillars carved as
if twisted and with figures of saints overhead, the sharpness of the
cutting being somewhat broken and worn away through time. It is
the doorway which rang loud three hundred years ago to the sound of
Luther's hammer as he nailed up his ninety-five theses. Within the
church, about midway toward the altar and near the wall, the guide
lifts an oaken trap-door and shows you, beneath, the slab which covers
Luther's ashes. Just opposite, in a sepulchre precisely similar, lies
Melancthon, and in the chancel near by, in tombs rather more stately,
the electors of Saxony that befriended the reformers. A spot worthy
indeed to be a place of pilgrimage! attracting not only those who
bless the men, but those who curse them. Charles V. and Alva stood
once on the pavement where the visitor now stands, and the Emperor
commanded the stone to be removed from the grave of Luther. Did the
body turn in its coffin at the vio