the shock from
this he was sensible that he had not seen any woman-and-dog teams for
some time, and he wondered by what civic or ethnic influences their
distribution was so controlled that they should have abounded in
Hamburg, Leipsic, and Carlsbad, and wholly ceased in Nuremberg, Ansbach,
and Wurzburg, to reappear again in Weimar, though they seemed as
characteristic of all Germany as the ugly denkmals to her victories over
France.

The Goethe and Schiller monument which he had glimpsed the night before
was characteristic too, but less offensively so. German statues at the
best are conscious; and the poet-pair, as the inscription calls them,
have the air of showily confronting posterity with their clasped hands,
and of being only partially rapt from the spectators. But they were more
unconscious than any other German statues that March had seen, and he
quelled a desire to ask Goethe, as he stood with his hand on Schiller's
shoulder, and looked serenely into space far above one of the typical
equipages of his country, what he thought of that sort of thing. But
upon reflection he did not know why Goethe should be held personally
responsible for the existence of the woman-and-dog team. He felt that he
might more reasonably attribute to his taste the prevalence of classic
profiles which he began to note in the Weimar populace. This could be
a sympathetic effect of that passion for the antique which the poet
brought back with him from his sojourn in Italy; though many of the
people, especially the children, were bow-legged. Perhaps the antique
had: begun in their faces, and had not yet got down to their legs; in
any case they were charming children, and as a test of their culture, he
had a mind to ask a little girl if she could tell him where the statue
of Herder was, which he thought he might as well take in on his ramble,
and so be done with as many statues as he could. She answered with a
pretty regret in her tender voice, "That I truly cannot," and he was
more satisfied than if she could, for he thought it better to be a child
and honest, than to know where any German statue was.

He easily found it for himself in the place which is called the Herder
Platz after it. He went into the Peter and Paul Church there; where
Herder used to preach sermons, sometimes not at all liked by the
nobility and gentry for their revolutionary tendency; the sovereign was
shielded from the worst effects of his doctrine by worshipping apart