76 MORE POT-POURRI 



same kind of mixed awe and curiosity with which 

 Goethe speaks of it. There is a sketch of it in that 

 never-to-be-forgotten volume of our young days, 'The 

 Foreign Tour of Messrs. Brown, Jones, and Robinson,' 

 by Dickie Doyle. His drawing gives a somewhat spiteful 

 version of it, but it is a funny remembrance of this 

 swept -away quarter. Lewes says Goethe learnt much 

 from the society of the Jews in the strange, old, filthy, 

 but deeply interesting Judengasse. Like him, we have 

 all pondered over ' the sun standing still on Gideon and 

 the moon in the valley of Ajalon.' 



It was with a genuine thrill that I entered Goethe's 

 house, where he was born, where he lived, where he 

 played and ate and slept and loved Gretchen, and which 

 — angry and disappointed at being described as the boy 

 he really was — he left, with the indifference usual at 

 that age, to seek his fortunes in the world. As he says 

 himself : 'At certain epochs children part from parents, 

 servants from masters, prot4g4s from their patrons ; and 

 whether it succeed or not, such an attempt to stand on 

 one's own feet, to make one's self independent, to live 

 for one's self, is always in accordance with the will 

 of nature.' 



I am so fond of Goethe's sayings that they stick 

 somehow in my mind, in spite of my bad memory. He 

 says somewhere so truly, and it refers to this entrance 

 into life that all have to face : ' Every man has his 

 decoy, and every man is led or misled in a way peculiar 

 to himself.' How frequently Goethe's sayings remind 

 one of Lord John Russell's apt definition of a proverb, 

 'One man's wit and all men's wisdom! ' Goethe's house 

 in the Hirschgraben is now a museum, bought by the 

 Goethe Society, whose headquarters are at Weimar, and 

 restored by them with reverent care. Every effort is 

 made to preserve it and what it contains from decay. 



