Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/182

 174 at that time already. In his Heimweh (Home Sickness), which was pubHshed for the first time in 1793, he says: "At the sound of these words I felt like the child listening to the apocryphal words of his mother on the day before Christmas; it has a presentiment of something glorious, but does not understand anything until it awakens in the morning, and is conducted to the illuminated tree of life, with the gilded nuts and the little lambs, the figure of the child Jesus, dolls, and plates with apples and sweetmeats." That sounds like a recollection of childhood.

Apart from this passage, it is Goethe who has first immortalised the Christmas-tree in German literature. In Goethe's birthplace, Frankfurt am Main, the Christmastree was unknown, and so young Goethe presumably passed his childhood without ever seeing one. For all that, the great poet got acquainted with the custom early in life, at the time when he was studying in Leipsic. According to Kunst und Leben (Art and Life), by Friedrich Förster, young Goethe saw the tree for the first time in 1765, in the house of Theodor Körner's grandmother, the wife of the engraver Stock, in Leipsic. The tree was there decorated with bonbons, and underneath were placed the manger with the child Jesus, made of sugar, and the Virgin Mary, also Joseph, and the ox and the ass. In front of it there stood a little table with brown gingerbread for the children.

In another book we find even more particulars. In Goethes Gespröche (Goethe's Conversations), edited by Biedermann, the daughter of the house, who afterwards married the lawyer Körner, who became Schiller's most intimate friend, gives a description of her acquaintance with young Goethe in the year 1767: "Goethe and my father (the engraver Stock) got into such high spirits, that they arranged a Christmas-tree covered with sweetmeats, on Christmas Eve for Jolly." So it appears that at that time the Christmas-tree was looked upon as something suitable for a joke, a proof that it was not yet an established custom. Athough Goethe's letters of that period