of an interest pathetically, almost amusingly,
faded. They intimate the classic temper to which his mind tended more
and more, and amidst the multitude of sculptures, pictures, prints,
drawings, gems, medals, autographs, there is the sense of the
many-mindedness, the universal taste, for which he found room in little
Weimar, but not in his contemporaneous Germany. But it is all less
keenly personal, less intimate than the simple garden-house, or else,
with the great troop of people going through it, and the custodians
lecturing in various voices and languages to the attendant groups, the
Marches had it less to themselves, and so imagined him less in it.

LX.

All palaces have a character of tiresome unlivableness which is
common to them everywhere, and very probably if one could meet their
proprietors in them one would as little remember them apart afterwards
as the palaces themselves. It will not do to lift either houses or men
far out of the average; they become spectacles, ceremonies; they cease
to have charm, to have character, which belong to the levels of life,
where alone there are ease and comfort, and human nature may be itself,
with all the little delightful differences repressed in those who
represent and typify.

As they followed the custodian through the grand-ducal Residenz at
Weimar, March felt everywhere the strong wish of the prince who was
Goethe's friend to ally himself with literature, and to be human at
least in the humanities. He came honestly by his passion for poets; his
mother had known it in her time, and Weimar was the home of Wieland
and of Herder before the young Grand-Duke came back from his travels
bringing Goethe with him, and afterwards attracting Schiller. The story
of that great epoch is all there in the Residenz, told as articulately
as a palace can.

There are certain Poets' Rooms, frescoed with illustrations of Goethe,
Schiller, and Wieland; there is the room where Goethe and the Grand-Duke
used to play chess together; there is the conservatory opening from
it where they liked to sit and chat; everywhere in the pictures and
sculptures, the engraving and intaglios, are the witnesses of the tastes
they shared, the love they both had for Italy, and for beautiful Italian
things. The prince was not so great a prince but that he could very
nearly be a man; the court was perhaps the most human court that ever
was; the Grand-Duke and the grand poet were first boon companions, and