not on his letter of
credit; he would have been willing to pay tribute to the Genius of
Finance in the percentage on at least ten pounds. But he consoled himself
by reflecting that he did not need the money; and he consoled Mrs. March
for their failure to penetrate to the interior of the Rothschilds'
birthplace by taking her to see the house where Goethe was born. The
public is apparently much more expected there, and in the friendly place
they were no doubt much more welcome than they would have been in the
Rothschild house. Under that roof they renewed a happy moment of Weimar,
which after the lapse of a week seemed already so remote. They wondered,
as they mounted the stairs from the basement opening into a clean little
court, how Burnamy was getting on, and whether it had yet come to that
understanding between him and Agatha, which Mrs. March, at least, had
meant to be inevitable. Then they became part of some such sight-seeing
retinue as followed the custodian about in the Goethe horse in Weimar,
and of an emotion indistinguishable from that of their fellow
sight-seers. They could make sure, afterwards, of a personal pleasure in
a certain prescient classicism of the house. It somehow recalled both the
Goethe houses at Weimar, and it somehow recalled Italy. It is a separate
house of two floors above the entrance, which opens to a little court or
yard, and gives access by a decent stairway to the living-rooms. The
chief of these is a sufficiently dignified parlor or salon, and the most
important is the little chamber in the third story where the poet first
opened his eyes to the light which he rejoiced in for so long a life, and
which, dying, he implored to be with him more. It is as large as his
death-chamber in Weimar, where he breathed this prayer, and it looks down
into the Italian-looking court, where probably he noticed the world for
the first time, and thought it a paved enclosure thirty or forty feet
square. In the birth-room they keep his puppet theatre, and the place is
fairly suggestive of his childhood; later, in his youth, he could look
from the parlor windows and see the house where his earliest love dwelt.
So much remains of Goethe in the place where he was born, and as such
things go, it is not a little. The house is that of a prosperous and
well-placed citizen, and speaks of the senatorial quality in his family
which Heine says he was fond of recalling, rather than the sartorial
quality of the ancesto