“No doubt this good lady near us, thinks so likewise,” answered the Baron laughing; “but she likes it, for all that.”

When the play was over the Baron begged Flemming to sit still, till the crowd had gone.

“I have a strange fancy,” said he, “whenever I come to the theatre, to see the end of all things.  When the crowd is gone, and the curtain raised again to air the house, and the lamps are all out, save here and there one behind the scenes, the contrast with what has gone before is most impressive.  Every thing wears a dream-like aspect.  The empty boxes and stalls,—­the silence,—­the smoky twilight, and the magic scene dismantled, produce in me a strange, mysterious feeling.  It is like a dim reflection of a theatre in water, or in a dusty mirror; and reminds me of some of Hoffmann’s wild Tales.  It is a practical moral lesson,—­a commentary on the play, and makes the show complete.”

It was truly as he said; only tenfold more desolate, solemn, and impressive; and produced upon the mind the effect we experience, when slumber is suddenly broken, and dreams and realities mingle, and we know not yet whether we sleep or wake.  As they at length passed out through the dimly-lighted passage, they heard a vulgar-looking fellow, with a sensual face and shaggy whiskers, say to some persons who were standing near him, and seemed to be hangers-on of the play-house;

“I shall run her six nights at Munich, and then take her on to Vienna.”

Flemming thought he was speaking of some favorite horse.  He was speaking of his beautiful wife, the ballet-dancer.

CHAPTER VIII.  OLD HUMBUG.

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 beheld and marvelled at when a boy; the cloister of the Barefooted Friars, through which he stole with mysterious awe 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 velvet cap, and the antique leather gloves, which he annually 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 Baron, 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 aspiring and desponding, stormy, impetuous, headlong;—­his romantic manhood, in which passion assumes the form of strength; assiduous, careful, toiling, without haste, without rest; and his sublime old age,—­the age of serene and classic repose, where he stands like Atlas, 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 hoary locks.”