leaves its records here of an interest pathetically, almost amusingly,
faded. They intimate the classic temper to which his mind tended more and
more, and amidst the multitude of sculptures, pictures, prints, drawings,
gems, medals, autographs, there is the sense of the many-mindedness, the
universal taste, for which he found room in little Weimar, but not in his
contemporaneous Germany. But it is all less keenly personal, less
intimate than the simple garden-house, or else, with the great troop of
people going through it, and the custodians lecturing in various voices
and languages to the attendant groups, the Marches had it less to
themselves, and so imagined him less in it.




LX.

All palaces have a character of tiresome unlivableness which is common to
them everywhere, and very probably if one could meet their proprietors in
them one would as little remember them apart afterwards as the palaces
themselves. It will not do to lift either houses or men far out of the
average; they become spectacles, ceremonies; they cease to have charm, to
have character, which belong to the levels of life, where alone there are
ease and comfort, and human nature may be itself, with all the little
delightful differences repressed in those who represent and typify.

As they followed the custodian through the grand-ducal Residenz at
Weimar, March felt everywhere the strong wish of the prince who was
Goethe's friend to ally himself with literature, and to be human at least
in the humanities. He came honestly by his passion for poets; his mother
had known it in her time, and Weimar was the home of Wieland and of