Of course, I remember very well the perturbation of spirit with which, as a lad of nineteen, I received the long-expected intimation that the Herr Geheimrath would see me on such a morning.  This notable audience took place in a little antechamber of his private apartments, covered all round with antique carts and bas-reliefs.  He was habited in a long grey or drab redingote, with a white neckcloth and a red ribbon in his button-hole.  He kept his hands behind his back just as in Rauch’s statuette.  His complexion was very clear, bright, and rosy.  His eyes extraordinarily dark, piercing, and brilliant.  I felt quite afraid before them, and remember comparing them to the eyes of the hero of a certain romance called “Melmoth the Wanderer,” which used to alarm us boys thirty years ago; eyes of an individual who had made a bargain with a Certain Person, and at an extreme old age retained these eyes in their awful splendour.  I fancy Goethe must have been still more handsome as an old man than even in the days of his youth.  His voice was very rich and sweet.  He asked me questions about myself, which I answered as best I could.  I recollect I was at first astonished, and then somewhat relieved, when I found he spoke French with not a good accent.

Vidi tantum. I saw him but three times.  Once walking in the garden of his house in the Frauenplan; once going to step into his chariot on a sunshiny day, wearing a cap and a cloak with a red collar.  He was caressing at the time a beautiful little golden-haired granddaughter, over whose sweet fair face the earth has long since closed, too.

Any of us who had books or magazines from England sent them to him, and he examined them eagerly. Fraser’s Magazine had recently come out, and I remember he was interested in those admirable outline portraits which appeared for a while in its pages.  But there was one, a very ghastly caricature of Mr. Rogers, which, as Madame de Goethe told me, he shut up and put away from him angrily.  “They would make me look like that,” he said; though, in truth, I can fancy nothing more serene, majestic, and healthy-looking than the grand old Goethe.

Though his sun was setting, the sky round about was calm and bright, and that little Weimar illumined by it.  In every one of those kind salons the talk was still of Art and Letters.  The theatre, though possessing no extraordinary actors, was still connected with a noble intelligence and order.  The actors read books and were men of letters and gentlemen, holding a not unkindly relationship with the Adel.  At Court the conversation was exceedingly friendly, simple, and polished....  In the respect paid by this court to the Patriarch of Letters, there was something ennobling, I think, alike to the subject and the sovereign.  With a five-and-twenty years’ experience since those happy days of which I write, and an acquaintance with an immense variety of human kind, I think I have never seen a society more simple, charitable, courteous, gentlemanlike, than that of the dear little Saxon city where the good Schiller and the great Goethe lived and lie buried.