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but my small boy had never heard of it, and did n't know the way.

Tilleda, lying under my eyes, bared its deserted streets to the sun. There,

"Where do you come from, boy?" nevertheless, I found rest and refreshthe women asked.

"From Kelbra."

"Oh! ah! To be sure you don't know! The Kelbra people are blockheads and asses, every one of 'em. They think their Rothenburg is everything, when the good Lord knows that the Kaiser Red-beard never lived there a day of his life. From Kelbra, indeed! It's the Tilleda people that know how to guide strangers; you've made a nice mess of it, Herr, taking a Kelbra boy!"

Perhaps I had; but it was n't pleasant to be told of it in that way. So I took my boy, said farewell to Barbarossa's tower, and climbed down the steep of slippery grass and stones to the ruins of the lower castle. The scrubby oaks and alder thickets were almost impenetrable; a single path wound among them, leading me through three ancient gateways, but avoiding several chambers, the walls of which are still partially standing. However, I finally reached the chapel, -a structure more Byzantine than Gothic, about fifty feet in length. It stands alone, at the end of a court-yard, and is less ruined than any other part of the castle. The windows remain, and a great part of the semicircular chancel, but I could find no traces of sculpture. The floor had been dug up in search of buried treasure. Looking through an aperture in the wall, I saw another enclosure of ruins on a platform farther below. The castle of Kyffhäuser, then, embraced three separate stages of buildings, all connected, and forming a pile nearly a quarter of a mile in length. Before its fall it must have been one of the stateliest fortresses in Germany.

I descended the mountain in the fierce, silent heat which made it seem so lonely, so far removed from the bright world of the Golden Mead. There were no flocks on the dry pasture-slopes, no farmers in the stubblefields under them; and the village of

ment in a decent inn. My destination was the town of Artern, on the Unstrut, at the eastern extremity of the Golden Mead; and I had counted on finding a horse and hay-cart, at least, to carry me over the intervening nine or ten miles. But no; nothing of the kind was to be had in Tilleda, — even a man to shoulder my pack was an unusual fortune, for which I must be grateful. "Wait till evening," said the landlady, after describing to me the death of her husband, and her business troubles, "and then Hans Meyer will go with you."

The story being that the family of Goethe originally came from Artern, and that some of its members were still living in the neighborhood, I commenced my inquiries at Tilleda.

"Is there anybody of the name of Goethe in the village?" I asked the landlady.

"Yes," said she, "there's the blacksmith Goethe, but I believe he's the only one."

The poet's great-grandfather having been a blacksmith, and the practice of a certain trade or profession being so frequently hereditary among the Germans, I did not doubt but that this was a genuine branch of the family. All that the landlady could say of the man, in reply to my questions, was, "He's only a blacksmith."

The sun had nearly touched the tower on the Kyffhäuser when Hans Meyer and I set out for Artern; but the fields still glowed with heat, and the far blue hills, which I must reach, seemed to grow no nearer, as I plodded painfully along the field-roads. The man was talkative enough, and his singular dialect was not difficult to understand. He knew no tradition which had not already been gathered, but, like a genuine farmer, entertained me with stories of hail-storms, early and late frosts, and inundations. He was inveterately wedded to old fashions, and things of the past, had served

against the Republicans in 1849, and not a glimmering idea of the present national movement had ever entered his mind. I had heard that this region was the home of conservative land-owners, and ignorant peasants who believe in them, but I am not willing to take Hans Meyer as a fair specimen of the people.

It is wearisome to tell of a weary journey. The richest fields may be monotonous, and the sweetest pastoral scenery become tame, without change. I looked over the floor of the Golden Mead, with ardent longing towards the spire of Artern in the east, and with a faint interest towards the castle of Sachsenberg, in the south, perched above a gorge through which the Unstrut breaks its way. The sun went down in a splendor of color, the moon came up like a bronze shield, grain-wagons rolled homewards, men and women flocked into the villages, with rakes and forks on their shoulders, and a cool dusk slowly settled over the great plain. Hans Meyer was silent at last, and I was in that condition of tense endurance when an unnecessary remark is almost as bad as an insult; and so we went over the remaining miles, entering the gates of Artern by moonlight.

The first thing I did, in the morning, was to recommence my inquiries in regard to Goethe. "Yes," said the landlord, "his stammhaus (ancestral house) is here, but the family don't live in it any longer. If you want to see it, one of the boys shall go with you. There was formerly a smithy in it; but the smiths of the family left, and then it was changed."

I followed the boy through the long, roughly paved main street, until we had nearly reached the western end of the town, when he stopped before an old yellow house, two stories high, with a steep tiled roof. Its age, I should guess, was between two and three hundred years. The street-front, above the ground floor, which, having an arched entrance and only one small window, must have been the former smithy, showed its framework of VOL. XXI. NO. 127.

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timber, as one sees in all old German houses. Before the closely ranged windows of the second story, there were shelves with pots of gilliflowers and carnations in blossom. It was a genuine mechanic's house, with no peculiar feature to distinguish it particularly from the others in the street. A thin-faced man, with sharp black mustache, looked out of one of the windows, and spoke to the boy, who asked whether I wished to enter. But as there was really nothing to be seen, I declined.

According to the chronicles of Artern, the great-grandfather Goethe, the blacksmith, had a son who was apprenticed to a tailor, and who, during his wanderschaft, sojourned awhile in Frankforton-the-Main. He there captivated the fancy of a rich widow, the proprietress of the Willow-Bush Hotel (the present "Hotel Union"), and married her,—or she married him, a fact which presupposes good looks, or talents, or both, on his part. His son, properly educated, became in time the Councillor Goethe, who begat the poet. The latter, it is said, denied that the tailor was his grandfather, whence it is probable that an additional generation must be interpolated; but the original blacksmith has been accepted, I believe, by the most of Goethe's biographers. A generation, more or less, makes no difference. Goethe's ancestry, like that of Shakespeare, lay in the ranks of the people, and their strong blood ran in the veins of both.

No author ever studied himself with such a serene, objective coolness as Goethe; but when he speaks to the world, one always feels that there is a slight flavor of dichtung infused into his wahrheit. Or perhaps, with the arrogance natural to every great intellect, he reasoned outward, and assumed material from spiritual facts. Fiction being only Truth seen through a different medium, the poet who can withdraw far enough from his own nature to contemplate it as an artistic study, works under a different law from that of the autobiographer. So when Goethe illus

trates himself, we must not always look closely for facts. The only instance, which I can recall at this moment, wherein he speaks of his ancestors, is the poetical fragment:

"Stature from father, and the mood

Stern views of life compelling:
From mother I take the joyous heart,
And the love of story-telling;
Great-grandsire's passion was the fair -
What if I still reveal it?
Great-grandam's was pomp, and gold, and show,
And in my bones I feel it."

It is quite as possible, here, that Goethe deduced the character of his ancestors from his own, as that he sought an explanation of the latter in their peculiarities. The great-grandsire may have been Textor, of his mother's line; it is not likely that he knew much of his father's family-tree. The burghers of Frankfurt were as proud, in their day, as the nobility of other lands; and Goethe, at least in his tastes and habits, was a natural aristocrat. It is not known that he ever visited Artern.

Concerning the other members of the original family, the landlord said: "Not one of them lives here now. The last Goethe in the neighborhood was a farmer, who had a lease of the scharfrichterei" (an isolated property, set apart for the use of the government executioner), "but he left here some six or eight years ago, and emigrated to America." "Was he the executioner?" I asked. "O, by no means!" the landlord answered; "he only leased the farm; but it was not a comfortable place to live upon, and, besides, he did n't succeed very well." So the blacksmith in Tilleda and the American Goethe are the only representatives left. What if a great poet for our hemisphere should, in time, spring from the loins of the latter?

I ordered a horse and carriage with no compunctions of conscience, for I was really unable to make a second day's journey on foot. The golden weather had lasted just long enough

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to complete my legendary pilgrimage. The morning at Artern came on with cloud and distant gray sweeps of rain, which soon blotted out the dim headland of the Kyffhäuser. I followed the course of the Unstrut, which here reaches the northern limit of his wanderings, and winds southward to seek the Saale. The valley of the river is as beautiful as it is secluded, and every hour brings a fresh historical field to the traveller. No highway enters it; only rude country roads lead from village to village, and rude inns supply plain cheer. Tourists are here an unknown variety of the human race.

I passed the ruins of Castle Wendelstein, battered during the Thirty Years' War, a manufactory of beet-sugar now peacefully smokes in the midst of its gray vaults and buttresses, — and then Memleben, where Henry the BirdSnarer lived when he was elected Emperor, and Otto II. founded a grand monastery. Other ruins and ancient battle-fields followed, and finally Nebra, where, in 531, the Thüringians fought with the Franks three days, and lost their kingdom. On entering Nebra, I passed an inn with the curious sign of "Care" (Sorge),- represented by a man with a most dismal face, and his head resting hopelessly upon his hand. An inn of evilest omen; and, assuredly, I did not stop there.

Farther down the valley, green vineyards took the place of the oak forests, and the landscapes resembled those of the Main and the Neckar. There were still towns, and ruined castles, and battle-fields, but I will not ask the reader to explore the labyrinthine paths of German history. The atmosphere of the legend had faded, and I looked with an indifferent eye on the storied scenes which the windings of the river unfolded. At sunset, I saw it pour its waters into those of the Saale, not far from the railway station of Naumburg, where I came back to the highways of travel.

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THE NEXT PRESIDENT.

WE shall not claim greater honor publican Convention appointed for an

than prophets commonly receive

in their own country when the vote of the nation confirms the impression we feel that General Grant is to be the next President, though there are some things which make us aware of risk in the prediction. It is not long since General Grant was formally named for the Presidency by a class of persons in several of our large cities who conceived themselves singularly qualified to choose the head of a free people, because they had hitherto had little or nothing to do with politics, and were, as a class, less self-governed than any other part of our population. They proposed to take politics out of the hands of politicians, and to elect a President by the force of wealth and respectability; and, besides the dangerous favor of these down-trodden and quite helpless merchant-princes, General Grant has had the disadvantage of a literary father celebrating his boyhood in the "New York Ledger." But, on the other hand, there are Vicksburg and Richmond, and the great fact that General Grant has said nothing to injure himself, however mischievous his friendships and relationships may be. We take courage from what he has done and has not done, and find his surviving popularity an assurance of his success, at least before the Re

early day at Chicago.

It seems quite possible now that no one will appear there to dispute the nomination with him. The question has, up to this time, been solely between him and Chief Justice Chase; no other has had the slightest reason to hope for the nomination; and now the Chief Justice's influence with the party throughout the country seems fairly and finally tested by the action of the party in his own State, where there is scarcely a doubt that its whole strength will be given for Grant.

What manner of man this is who is to be our next President is plain enough. As we all know, he has of his own motion said little about it, yet he has done a vast deal about it; and, though a silent man, he has shown himself a very frank one. If we sketched him according to the popular ideal of a year ago (for the most part evolved, as we think, from the inner consciousness of the reporters and correspondents), he would appear as a smallish military gentleman, not too scrupulous in dress, who is in the pretty constant receipt of calls from eminent politicians anxious to sound him upon this and upon that, and who baffles all these wily intriguers by smoking speechlessly, with a scarcely perceptible quivering of the left eyelid, or else, with an impenetrable astuteness,

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