acific Ocean; and I am certain that they will
do it.

"Would that I might live to see it!--but I shall not. I should like to
see another thing--a junction of the Danube and the Rhine. But this
undertaking is so gigantic that I have doubts of its completion,
particularly when I consider our German resources. And thirdly, and
lastly, I should wish to see England in possession of a canal through
the Isthmus of Suez. Would I could live to see these three great works!
it would be well worth the trouble to last some fifty years more for the
very purpose."

* * * * *

_Thursday, May 3_.--The highly successful translation of Goethe's
dramatic works, by Stapfer, was noticed by Monsieur J. J. Ampere in the
_Parisian Globe_ of last year, in a manner no less excellent, and this
affected Goethe so agreeably that he very often recurred to it, and
expressed his great obligations to it.

"Ampere's point of view is a very high one," said he.

"When German critics on similar occasions start from philosophy, and in
the consideration and discussion of a poetical production proceed in a
manner that what they intend as an elucidation is only intelligible to
philosophers of their own school, while for other people it is far more
obscure than the work upon which they intended to throw a light, M.
Ampere, on the contrary, shows himself quite practical and popular. Like
one who knows his profession thoroughly, he shows the relation between
the production and the producer, and judges the different poetical
productions as different fruits of different epochs of the poet's life.

"He has studied most profoundly the changing course of my earthly
career, and of the condition of my mind, and has had the faculty of
seeing what I have not expressed, and what, so to speak, could only be
read between the lines. How truly has he remarked that, during the first
ten years of my official and court life at Weimar, I scarcely did
anything; that despair drove me to Italy; and that I there, with new
delight in producing, seized upon the history of Tasso, in order to free
myself, by the treatment of this agreeable subject, from the painful and
troublesome impressions and recollections of my life at Weimar. He
therefore very happily calls Tasso an elevated Werther.

"Then, concerning Faust, his remarks are no less clever, since he not
only notes, as part of myself, the gloomy, discontented striving of the
principal character,