her not more beautiful than the rest of the angels,
and otherwise rather a commonplace spirit.

To Goethe I usually have myself excused. To borrow a little slang from
the critics, he 'draws' uncommonly well, especially when he draws
portraits. But I do not care to have my eye trained much by an artist
who has such an infirmity of color that he does not know black from
white.

Schiller meets with many a welcome, and rarely a heartier one than when
he brings his Wilhelm Tell or Jungfrau. I should be glad to ask some of
those who are more intimate with him than I am, whether he is not a good
deal like three wise men, whose plays Socrates and I used to go to see
performed at Athens, two or three thousand years ago, when I was there.
Further, I should be glad to ask whether it would not be better if, in
one respect, he were more like them still. As he at least has seemed to
me to do, they threw the strength of their invention into two or three
impersonations; but as he sometimes does, they always--to steal a term
from the nearest grocery--lumped all the merely necessary and accessary
people, and called them simply 'Chorus.' Thus the wise men's ingenuities
and our memories were spared the trouble of assigning and remembering a
host of insignificant names; and there was no looking back to the
_dramatis personae_, or _dramatos prosopa_, as we called them then, to
find out _who was who_.

A Government officer sometimes reports himself at my gates from Rydal,
with a washing tub of ink on castors, which he pushes about with him
wherever he goes, and in which, as in a Claude-Lorraine mirror, he
contemplates everything that he can both on earth and above. He is
constantly employed in fishing in it with a quill for ideas; and as
often as he catches one, even if it is half drowned, my door-keeper
opens to him.

Lady Geraldine was one of my most constant guests of an evening. But
after her courtship and marriage, she was too apt to bring in her
husband. I received him cordially enough two or three times,
particularly when he came with 'the good news from Ghent.' But on other
occasions his conversation was so far from agreeable, so unintelligible,
or, 'not to put too fine a point upon it,' unedifying, that at last my
porter was obliged to hand him out for immediate chastisement.[5] He
never came again. I do not quite see why not; for, if others are willing
to take pains for his good, he certainly should be no less so.

Mrs. Stowe