then monarch and minister working together for the good of the country;
they were always friends, and yet, as the American saw in the light of
the New World, which he carried with him, how far from friends! At best
it was make-believe, the make-believe of superiority and inferiority,
the make-believe of master and man, which could only be the more painful
and ghastly for the endeavor of two generous spirits to reach and rescue
each other through the asphyxiating unreality; but they kept up the show
of equality faithfully to the end. Goethe was born citizen of a free
republic, and his youth was nurtured in the traditions of liberty; he
was one of the greatest souls of any time, and he must have known the
impossibility of the thing they pretended; but he died and made no
sign, and the poet's friendship with the prince has passed smoothly
into history as one of the things that might really be. They worked and
played together; they dined and danced, they picnicked and poetized,
each on his own side of the impassable gulf; with an air of its not
being there which probably did not deceive their contemporaries so much
as posterity.

A part of the palace was of course undergoing repair; and in the gallery
beyond the conservatory a company of workmen were sitting at a table
where they had spread their luncheon. They were somewhat subdued by the
consciousness of their august environment; but the sight of them was
charming; they gave a kindly interest to the place which it had wanted
before; and which the Marches felt again in another palace where the
custodian showed them the little tin dishes and saucepans which the
German Empress Augusta and her sisters played with when they were
children. The sight of these was more affecting even than the withered
wreaths which they had left on the death-bed of their mother, and which
are still mouldering there.

This was in the Belvedere, the country house on the height overlooking
Weimar, where the grand-ducal family spend the month of May, and where
the stranger finds himself amid overwhelming associations of Goethe,
although the place is so full of relics and memorials of the owners. It
seemed in fact to be a storehouse for the wedding-presents of the whole
connection, which were on show in every room; Mrs. March hardly knew
whether they heightened the domestic effect or took from it; but
they enabled her to verify with the custodian's help certain royal
intermarriages which she had be