after the accession and marriage of her son, Karl August, lived and died the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia; and the house, as regards furniture and decoration, is in the state in which the gay, genial, pleasure-loving Duchess left it. Occasionally the present Grand Duke gives a fete in the old palace, at which the dishes and drinks are all those of the day of Anna Amalia, while the plate and china used are those which she used. Ladies and gentlemen come to these unique fêtes in the costume of the end. of the last, or the beginning of the present, century; and the servants wait in the liveries of the by-flown time. The effect is said to be illusion; but no Goethe is now among the guests. You see still in their quaint, old-fashioned condition the very rooms, the very furniture, that the Duchess and her friends used and knew. You see the wretched little bedroom, small and inconvenient, in which Anna Amalia, who was but thirty-six when her son came to the throne, slept and died. You see her small, delicate, high-heeled red shoes, which suggest coquettish charm; and on the walls hang, not only the portraits which she had collected, but the pictures which she possessed and loved. Like the paper on which an old letter has been written, the house is of a faint yellow colour, and its whole aspect suggests the forms of life of the day of powder, of patch, of wig, of feminine hooped dresses, and of masculine wide skirts. The ghosts of Weimar, in its time of glory, people these rooms, and live in, move in them; though in our vision of the past they move, and bow, and smile, With the splendour of a revel, On the second floor is the room of the Duchess's memorable lady-in-waiting, Fräulein von Göchhausen. This little lady, short, and even somewhat deformed, was the wittiest woman at the Court of Weimar, and could attract all the great men of its brilliant period. There in that little room of hers they have all sat, have jested, and have talked. It is recorded of Fräulein von Göchhausen, under her bust now at Ettersburg, that "she was happy in that she was the favourite of all the muses, but happier yet in that she was the favourite of Anna Amalia." Goethe sported with her. At Tiefurt he walled up the door of her room, and he was ready to play kindly practical jokes upon her, but he admired her wit, and cared for her opinion. She is one of the distinctive figures of the Glanz-Periode. The present ducal Schloss, dating from 1803, contains Dichterzimmer or rooms in which grateful royalty has sought to do honour in fresco to the great poets; but most memorable to me is the room in which, and the arm-chair from which, Goethe so often read aloud to the Court his own plays and poems, or those of other writers. Weimar contains, naturally, many portraits of its celebrities. Each palace has its own collection; but the art of portraiture, as represented by sculptor and by painter, finds its fittest home in the Bibliothek; once a palace, and the birthplace of Bernhard von Weimar; now a library, a portrait gallery, and a treasure-house of relics of the heroes of the little city, so small and yet so great. Its collection of old garments contains characteristic relics of the three It has the buff coat in great men who are most representative. which Gustav Adolf was shot (the bullet mark is just over the left shoulder-blade), the gown of Luther, and the ministerial uniform of Goethe. There, too, is Trippel's fine bust of Goethe, made. in Rome; there is Dannecker's nobly idealised, colossal bust of Schiller; and there is the gigantesque head of great Goethe, throughwhich David d'Angers, in 1831, has essayed to represent the poet in a fine, if theatrical, frenzy, inspired by the dæmonic afflatus which animated him when he conceived the Mephistopheles of his Faust. Of this fantastic, wild bust, Goethe said only, when he first saw it, "Kurios!" and we can but echo his perplexed exclamation. We find, also, a full-length, life-size portrait of Karl August, by Jagemann, the brother of Frau von Heygendorf. The Grand Duke is in the costume of a sportsman, of a "forester," and is about sixty years of age. The portrait, though valuable as a likeness, is not a masterpiece of painting. At that period of his life, the face, with its short upper lip and fallen-in mouth, of the genial Duke had become broad and squat; nor had his figure retained many traces of the youthful ideal which we find in earlier portraits of him. And here, all so still-as still as death-live the effigies of Herder and of Wieland, of Anna Amalia, of Göchhausen, of Madame de Staël, of Corona Schröter, of Zacharias Werner, of Lessing, and of Kant; of Oeser, Winckelmann, Ludwig and Friedrich Tieck; of Knebel and Einsiedel; of Musäus, Bode, Fernow, Heinrich Meyer-and, indeed, of all the heroes and heroines of that period of Weimar's intellectual glory of which Goethe is the chief and king. Portraits of Napoleon and-this latter is a bad one-of Cromwell, suggest great men of other lands; but the Bibliothek collection forms a Walhalla of, essentially, German genius. It may here be mentioned that one of the attendants at this gallery is, or was, Herr Karl Grosse, who was twenty-eight when Goethe died, in 1832; and who has often seen, and has spoken to, Germany's greatest poet and thinker. "Time rolls its ceaseless course;" and those who have seen Goethe with living eyes are now very few in number. Not without interest does one look upon, and speak with, the polite and friendly old Herr Karl Grosse. He has also seen Napoleon. May he long linger in his Bibliothek as a living man who has seen, and has known, Goethe! Not only in Weimar itself, but all round the city are haunts indissolubly connected with our memories of Goethe; and to look upon the very places in which he lived and worked (work and life were one to him) deepens our impression of the god-like man. Close to Weimar are the Lustschloss Belvedere, and the country palaces of Tiefurt and of Ettersburg. The two former places are each about three English miles from Weimar, but it takes two hours to drive to Ettersburg. In all three places Goethe has dwelt, has written, has lived; in all three he has caroused with Karl August, has worshipped fair and gifted women, has talked with noble friends. In each place is his room-always plain, and simple, and homely. As we look at the dining-rooms of the three ducal palaces, we hear the clinking of glasses, we see the sparkle of Rhine wine, or the foam of champagne; we hear once more the now hushed voices, we see the figures, and we gaze upon eyes once so brilliant with frolic wit, or so calm in serene wisdom. Open-air theatres exist still at Tiefurt and at Belvedere. At Ettersburg he played Orestes, while winning Corona Schröter acted his own Iphigenia. The palaces, the theatres, are still there, though the actors are melted into air-into thin air-and are, like an insubstantial pageant, faded. These three places must be visited with reverence by every Goethe student. From a hill near Ettersburg you can see those Harz mountains, to which Goethe, as the landscape painter Otto Weber, once made his very memorable and charitable winter excursion. The principal church in Weimar is the Stadtkirche, an old, if scarcely venerable building. Just behind the church is the house of Herder, and in this church he often preached. Beneath its pavement sleeps Herder; the hypochondriac problematische Natur; and there rest also Anna Amalia, and Bernhard of Weimar. There is another remarkable church in Weimar-the bald and dreary Jakobskirche, in the churchyard of which were interred Goethe's wife, and Schiller. No stone, no record, marks the spot in which Madame von Goethe was buried, and no man now knows the place of her interment. Goethe, it is certain, never raised any memorial to mark the grave in which his wife was laid to rest. She died June 6, 1816, and left her great husband in "a state bordering on despair." It was in 1788 that Christiane Vulpius made. Goethe's acquaintance by presenting to him a petition in the Park. They were married October 17, 1806, in the Schlosskirche. We cannot avoid speculating upon the causes which led Goethe to abstain from rendering to her remains that last mark of tender remembrance which is implied by a gravestone, however simple. Had certain events in her life rendered him unwilling to perpetuate her memory or was his seeming want of respect and care merely a part of that want of reverence for the dead, which—as we shall see in the case of Schiller-obtained in small German cities so late as the early part of this century? On a gabled house stands the inscription "Hier wohnte Schiller"; and this is the house in which the most popular German poet passed the last three years of his life in Weimar-in that Weimar which he never loved, and in which he hoped not to die. But he did die in Weimar, and in this house. He bought the house. (February 1802) from Mr. Mellish, for 4,200 gulden. It then stood on what was called the Esplanade. Opposite to the house were then trees, and the city ditch; the place was open and was quiet. It is now called the Schillerstrasse, and opposite to Schiller's dwelling has arisen a row of, for Weimar, splendid mansions. Schiller's house is smaller than Goethe's house, but the rooms in which Schiller lived and worked are larger than those which Goethe used for himself. Schiller had a very little, Goethe had a good garden. As we cross the threshold of the house, we may remember that here Schiller and Goethe parted from each other for the last time. Schiller was going to the theatre (his last visit to it); Goethe, who was very unwell, was going home to his house in the Frauenplan. Hofrath Schwabe lived then on the ground-floor of Schiller's house. The Frau von Schiller, and her children, occupied the first floor; and Schiller himself, and his sister-in-law, Madame von Wolzogen, lived on the upper storey. And there are his rooms now, in pretty much the state in which he, dying in his forty-sixth year, left them for ever. That is the little bedstead upon which he died. A mask of the dead face, and Jagemann's picture of Schiller dead, stand at the head of the bed. On it are strewn laurels, ribbons; and there is a general aspect of disorder, which gives the impression that the body had just been removed from the bedstead. The room is full of relics of him. There is his simple furniture; his writing-table, in a drawer of which were contained those rotten apples which stimulated Schiller and revolted Goethe. The room has two windows toward the street (then no street), and one window toward the little sidestreet. There are manuscripts in his handwriting, the rather commonplace engravings of Palermo which he hung there, and a little spinnet lies by a guitar (with broken strings) on a small sofa. Yes, these are the rooms-a small room, looking out upon the garden, was Schiller's bedroom until he was seized with his last fatal illness, and was moved into the larger room-in which Schiller lived, and worked, and died. The memorable house now belongs to the city of Weimar, and is freely open to the public. Turn we now to the night of May 12-13, 1805. By the dim light of a single candle, placed on the landing-place of the stairs, we look into the room which we have just been visiting, and we see Rudolf, Schiller's servant, weeping as he watches by the coffin which contains the dead poet. It was then a custom in Weimar that the dead were carried to the grave by the members of one of the trades' guilds, and the guilds took this office in turns. When Schiller died it was the turn of the Tailors' Guild, and the members of it were already in attendance, when Hofrath Schwabe, indignant at the thought that Schiller should be borne to the grave by hireling hands, brought eleven of the poet's friends and admirers who were willing to carry Schiller's bier. The night was dark and rough, the air was cold, and the streets were, near midnight, wholly empty and deserted. One mourner only, wrapped in a horseman's cloak, followed the procession at a little distance. This mourner was Schiller's brother-in-law, Wilhelm von Wolzogen. Goethe was ill, and was confined to his house. On Into a common vault in the churchyard of the Jakobskirche, a vault which already contained ten or more coffins, the remains of Schiller were turned. Hofrath Schwabe afterwards possessed himself of the skull, which was for a time exhibited in the Bibliothek. November 17, 1827, the remains, or such remains of Schiller as could be found and identified, were collected together and transferred to the Fürstengruft. When they searched the vault in which Schiller had first been buried they found that thirteen coffins, which had been piled the one upon another, had all burst, so that the bones of their inmates were huddled together almost indistinguishably. The skeleton of Schiller was pieced together by the anatomists, and was found to be complete, with the exception of one bone of one arm. VOL. CCLXXXII. NO. 1996. DD |