perhaps, be kept under arms for twenty hours in succession, quite motionless, that he might feast his eyes on its docility, though more frequently he kept it continually marching from place to place around the capital, regardless of the burning sun of July or the frosts of winter. In the latter case, and when the snow lay in drifts, or had been whirled into great hillocks, the inequality of the ground made no interruption to the symmetry of the column; if it did, woe to the offenders; to have their uniforms stripped off, and beaten by the flat of their comrades’ sabres until they fell fainting in their blood, was the mildest punishment they could anticipate.
WETZLAR ON THE LAHN.
PART I.
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To those whose admiration of Goëthe amounts to a sort of religious reverence (and they are not a few among his countrymen), Frankfort-on-the-Maine is the Mecca, and Weimar the Medina of Germany. At Frankfort, where he drew breath in 1749, his memory is honoured by a square named after him, and a statue in the midst of it, which represents the poet as if he had lain down to sleep in his clothes, and got up suddenly to write down his thoughts, taking the blankets with him. At Weimar, besides the double statue, which sensibly represents him in his ordinary dress, with his arm supporting the less physically strong Schiller, there is a sort of church in the park. On entering it, instead of a crucifix, or an altar-piece, one is struck by the sight of a colossal statue of Goëthe in a sitting position, looking like a Greek god: and ministered to by a miniature nude woman, who represents a Psyche, or the Spirit of Poetry. But between the Mecca and Medina of Goëthe, at a short distance out of the direct road from one to the other, not as the crow flies, but as the train goes (for modern pilgrims travel by rail), is a halting-place which has been immortalised by Goëthe in his “Sorrows of Werther.” This is Wetzlar. Here Goëthe abode in his youth, and in a lunar month wrote off that poetically beautiful, but very youthful romance. Here is to be seen, on the left of a large gloomy building which once belonged to the Teutonic Order, and is now used as a charity school, the little house where that Lottchen lived who charmed the imagination of the poet by cutting brown bread and butter for her eight little brothers and sisters; the latter are seen in an engraving, stretching their little hands up to her, as little birds do their bills to their mother when they are hungry. Here, too, is to be seen, in the lower town, a house by no means remarkable, where that Jerusalem committed suicide for the love of a married lady, from whom Goëthe took his idea of Werther, while he mixed the story up with that of his own passing attachment, from which he seems to have very soon recovered.
The Lahn rises in the so-called Red-Hair Moun-