What most interested our travellers in the ancient city of Frankfort, was neither the opera nor the Ariadne of Dannecker, but the house in which Goethe was born, and the scenes he frequented in his childhood, and remembered in his old age. Such for example are the walks around the city, outside the moat; the bridge over the Maine, with the golden cock on the cross, which the poet beheld¹ and marvelled² at when a boy; the cloister³ of the Barefooted Friars, through which he stole with mysterious awe⁴ to sit by the oilcloth-covered table of old Rector Albrecht; and the garden in which his grandfather walked up and down among fruit-trees and rose-bushes, in long morning gown, black velvet⁵ cap, and the antique leather gloves, which he annually⁶ received as Mayor on Pipers-Doomsday, representing a kind of middle personage between Alcinous and Laertes. Thus, O Genius! are thy foot-prints hallowed; and the star shines forever over the place of thy nativity.  
"Your English critics may rail as they list," said the Baron⁷, while he and Flemming were returning from a stroll in the leafy gardens, outside the moat; "but, after all, Goethe was a magnificent old fellow. Only think of his life; his youth of passion, alternately aspiring⁸ and desponding, stormy, impetuous, headlong;--his romantic manhood, in which passion assumes the form of strength; assiduous, careful, toiling⁹, without haste, without rest; and his sublime¹⁰ old age,--the age of serene¹¹ and classic repose¹², where he stands like Atlas¹³, as Claudian has painted him in the Battle of the Giants, holding the world aloft upon his head, the ocean-streams hard frozen in his hoary¹⁴ locks."
 
"A good illustration of what the world calls his indifferentism."
 
"And do you know I rather like this indifferentism? Did you never have the misfortune to live in a community, where a difficulty in the parish seemed to announce the end of the world? or to know one of the benefactors¹⁵ of the human race, in the very `storm and pressure period' of his indiscreet enthusiasm? If you have, I think you will see something beautiful in the calm and dignified¹⁶ attitude which the old philosopher assumes."
 
"It is a pity, that his admirers had not a little of this philosophic¹⁷ coolness. It amuses me to read the various epithets¹⁸, which they apply to him; The Dear, dear Man! The Life-enjoying Man! The All-sided One! The Representative of Poetry upon earth! The Many-sided Master-Mind of Germany! His enemies rush into the other extreme, and hurl¹⁹ at him the fierce names of Old Humbug²⁰! and Old Heathen! which hit like pistol-bullets."
 
"I confess, he was no saint."
 
"No; his philosophy is the old ethnic²¹ philosophy. You will find it all in a convenient andconcentrated, portable form in Horace's beautiful Ode to Thaliarcus. What I most object to in the old gentleman is his sensuality."
 
"O nonsense. Nothing can be purer than the Iphigenia; it is as cold and passionless as a marble statue."
 
"Very true; but you cannot say the same of some of the Roman Elegies²² and of that monstrous²³ book the Elective Affinities²⁴."
 
"Ah, my friend, Goethe is an artist; and looks upon all things as objects of art merely. Why should he not be allowed to copy in words what painters and sculptors²⁵ copy in colors and in marble?"
 
"The artist shows his character in the choice of his subject. Goethe never sculptured an Apollo, nor painted a Madonna. He gives us only sinful Magdalens and rampant²⁶ Fauns. He does not so much idealize as realize."
 
"He only copies nature."
 
"So did the artists, who made the bronzelamps of Pompeii. Would you hang one of those in your hall? To say that a man is an artist and copies nature is not enough. There are two great schools of art; the imitative and the imaginative. The latter is the most noble, and most enduring; and Goethe belonged rather to the former. Have you read Menzel's attack upon him?"
 
"It is truly ferocious²⁷. The Suabian hews²⁸ into him lustily. I hope you do not side with him."
 
"By no means. He goes too far. He blames the poet for not being a politician. He might as well blame him for not being a missionary²⁹ to the Sandwich Islands."
 
"And what do you think of Eckermann?"
 
"I think he is a toady³⁰; a kind of German Boswell. Goethe knew he was drawing his portrait, and attitudinized accordingly. He works very hard to make a Saint Peter out of an old Jupiter, as the Catholics did at Rome."
 
"Well; call him Old Humbug, or Old Heathen, or what you please; I maintain, that, with all his errors and short-comings, he was a glorious specimen³¹ of a man."
 
"He certainly was. Did it ever occur to you that he was in some points like Ben Franklin? a kind of rhymed Ben Franklin? The practical tendency of his mind was the same; his love of science was the same; his benignant, philosophic spirit was the same; and a vast number of his little

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