“The Grand Duke fixed on Schiller, when he was established here, an income of one thousand dollars yearly, and offered to give him twice as much in case he should be hindered by sickness from working.  Schiller declined this last offer, and never availed himself of it.  ’I have talent,’ said he, ‘and must help myself.’  But as his family enlarged of late years, he was obliged, for a livelihood, to write two dramas annually; and to accomplish this, he forced himself to write days and weeks when he was not well.  He would have his talent obey him at any hour.  He never drank much; he was very temperate; but, in such hours of bodily weakness, he was obliged to stimulate his powers by the use of spirituous liquors.  This habit impaired his health, and was likewise injurious to his productions.  The faults which some wiseacres find in his works I deduce from this source.  All the passages which they say are not what they ought to be, I would call pathological passages; for he wrote them on those days when he had not strength to find the right and true motives.  I have every respect for the categorical imperative.  I know how much good may proceed from it; but one must not carry it too far, for then this idea of ideal freedom certainly leads to no good.”

Amid these interesting remarks, and similar discourse on Lord Byron and the celebrated German authors, of whom Schiller had said that he liked Kotzebue best, for he, at any rate, produced something, the hours of evening passed swiftly along, and Goethe gave me the novel, that I might study it quietly at home.

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Wednesday, February 21.—­Dined with Goethe.  He spoke much, and with admiration, of Alexander von Humboldt, whose work on Cuba and Colombia he had begun to read and whose views as to the project for making a passage through the Isthmus of Panama appeared to have a particular interest for him.  “Humboldt,” said Goethe, “has, with a great knowledge of his subject, given other points where, by making use of some streams which flow into the Gulf of Mexico, the end may be perhaps better attained than at Panama.  All this is reserved for the future, and for an enterprising spirit.  So much, however, is certain, that, if they succeed in cutting such a canal that ships of any burden and size can be navigated through it from the Mexican Gulf to the Pacific Ocean, innumerable benefits would result to the whole human race, civilized and uncivilized.  But I should wonder if the United States were to let an opportunity escape of getting such work into their own hands.  It may be foreseen that this young state, with its decided predilection to the West, will, in thirty or forty years, have occupied and peopled the large tract of land beyond the Rocky Mountains.  It may, furthermore, be foreseen that along the whole coast of the Pacific Ocean, where nature has already formed the most capacious and secure harbors, important commercial towns will gradually arise, for the furtherance