already full of people.  Seats had been erected around the monument for ladies, the singers and musicians.  A company of soldiers was stationed to keep an entrance for the procession, which at length arrived with music and banners, and entered the enclosure.  A song for the occasion was sung by the choir; it swelled up gradually, and with such perfect harmony and unity, that it seemed like some glorious instrument touched by a single hand.  Then a poetical address was delivered; after which four young men took their stand at the corners of the monument; the drums and trumpets gave a flourish, and the mantle fell.  The noble figure seemed to rise out of the earth, and thus amid shoutings and the triumphal peal of the band, the form of Goethe greeted the city of his birth.  He is represented as leaning on the trunk of a tree, holding in his right hand a roll of parchment, and in his left a wreath.  The pedestal, which is also of bronze, contains bas reliefs, representing scenes from Faust, Wilhelm Meister and Egmont.  In the evening Goethe’s house, in a street near, was illuminated by arches of lamps between the windows, and hung with wreaths of flowers.  Four pillars of colored lamps lighted the statue.  At nine o’clock the choir of singers came again in a procession, with colored lanterns, on poles, and after singing two or three songs, the statue was exhibited in the red glare of the Bengal light.  The trees and houses around the square were covered with the glow, which streamed in broad sheets up against the dark sky.

Within the walls the greater part of Frankfort is built in the old German style—­the houses six or seven stones high, and every story projecting out over the other, so that those living in the upper part can nearly shake hands out of the windows.  At the corners figures of men are often seen, holding up the story above on their shoulders and making horrible faces at the weight.  When I state that in all these narrow streets which constitute the greater part of the city, there are no sidewalks, the windows of the lower stories with an iron grating extending a foot or so into the street, which is only wide enough for one cart to pass along, you can have some idea of the facility of walking through them, to say nothing of the piles of wood, and market-women with baskets of vegetables which one is continually stumbling over.  Even in the wider streets, I have always to look before and behind to keep out of the way of the fiacres; the people here get so accustomed to it, that they leave barely room for them to pass, and the carriages go dashing by at a nearness which sometimes makes me shudder.