ure, has not been realized.

The exact order of events is now confused in my mind. I believe it was
on this first day that I dined with Hummel _en famille_. There I found
his wife, formerly the pretty singer, Miss Roeckel, whom I could well
remember in page's attire and close-fitting silk tights. Now she was an
efficient, respected housewife, who vied with her husband in amiability.
I felt myself strongly drawn to the whole family and, in spite of his
rather mechanical disposition, I honored and venerated Hummel as the
last genuine pupil of Mozart.

In the evening I attended the theatre with Chancellor Mueller, where an
unimportant play was being given, in which, however, Graff, Schiller's
first Wallenstein, had a role. I saw nothing particularly remarkable in
him, and when I was told that, after the first performance, Schiller had
rushed upon the stage, embraced Graff, and exclaimed that now for the
first time did he understand his Wallenstein, I thought to myself--how
much greater might the great poet have become had he ever known a public
and real actors! It is remarkable, by the way, that Schiller, who is not
at bottom very objective, lends himself so perfectly to an objective
representation. He became figurative, while believing himself to be only
eloquent--one more proof of his incomparable genius. In Goethe we find
the exact opposite. While he is ordinarily called objective and is so to
a great extent, his characters lose in the actual representation. His
figurativeness is only for the imagination; in the representation the
delicate, poetic tinge is necessarily lost. However, these are
reflections for another time; they do not belong here.

At last the momentous day with its dinner-hour arrived, and I went to
Goethe. The other guests, all of them men, were already assembled, the
charming Talvj having departed with her father the morning after the
tea-party and Goethe's daughter-in-law being absent from Weimar at the
time. To the latter and to her daughter, who died when quite young, I
later became very much attached. As I advanced into the room Goethe came
toward me, and was now as amiable and cordial as he had recently been
formal and cold. I was deeply moved. When we went in to dinner, and
Goethe, who had become for me the embodiment of German Poetry and,
because of the immeasurable distance between us, almost a mythological
being, took my hand to lead me into the dining-room, the boy in me
manifested itself