arch even resented
the fact, and when she learned later that it was not the fact at all,
she removed it from her associations with the pretty place almost
indignantly.

In spite of our facile and multiple divorces we Americans are worshipers
of marriage, and if a great poet, the minister of a prince, is going
to marry a poor girl, we think he had better not wait till their son is
almost of age. Mrs. March would not accept as extenuating circumstances
the Grand-Duke's godfatherhood, or Goethe's open constancy to
Christiane, or the tardy consecration of their union after the French
sack of, Weimar, when the girl's devotion had saved him from the
rudeness of the marauding soldiers. For her New England soul there were
no degrees in such guilt; and, perhaps there are really not so many as
people have tried to think, in their deference to Goethe's greatness.
But certainly the affair was not so simple for a grand-ducal minister of
world-wide renown, and he might well have felt its difficulties, for
he could not have been proof against the censorious public opinion of
Weimar, or the yet more censorious private opinion of Fran von Stein.

On that lovely Italo-American morning no ghost of these old dead
embarrassments lingered within or without the Goethe garden-house. The
trees which the poet himself planted flung a sun-shot shadow upon it,
and about its feet basked a garden of simple flowers, from which the
sweet lame girl who limped through the rooms and showed them, gathered
a parting nosegay for her visitors. The few small livingrooms were above
the ground-floor, with kitchen and offices below in the Italian fashion;
in one of the little chambers was the camp-bed which Goethe carried with
him on his journeys through Italy; and in the larger room at the front
stood the desk where he wrote, with the chair before it from which he
might just have risen.

All was much more livingly conscious of the great man gone than the
proud little palace in the town, which so abounds with relics and
memorials of him. His library, his study, his study table, with
everything on it just as he left it when

"Cadde la stanca mana"

are there, and there is the death-chair facing the window, from which he
gasped for "more light" at last. The handsome, well-arranged rooms are
full of souvenirs of his travel, and of that passion for Italy which
he did so much to impart to all German hearts, and whose modern waning
leaves its records here