h wanders in heavy windrows, and the children sport
joyously over the smooth-mown surfaces in all the freedom that there is
in Germany. At last, after immemorial appropriation the owners of the
earth are everywhere expropriated, and the people come into the pleasure
if not the profit of it. At last, the prince, the knight, the noble
finds, as in his turn the plutocrat will find, that his property is not
for him, but for all; and that the nation is to enjoy what he takes from
it and vainly thinks to keep from it. Parks, pleasaunces, gardens, set
apart for kings, are the play-grounds of the landless poor in the
Old World, and perhaps yield the sweetest joy of privilege to some
state-sick ruler, some world-weary princess, some lonely child born to
the solitude of sovereignty, as they each look down from their palace
windows upon the leisure of overwork taking its little holiday amidst
beauty vainly created for the perpetual festival of their empty lives.

March smiled to think that in this very Weimar, where sovereignty
had graced and ennobled itself as nowhere else in the world by the
companionship of letters and the arts, they still were not hurrying
first to see the palace of a prince, but were involuntarily making it
second to the cottage of a poet. But in fact it is Goethe who is forever
the prince in Weimar. His greatness blots out its history, his name
fills the city; the thought of him is its chiefest imitation and largest
hospitality. The travellers 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. M