Page:Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Essays and leaves from a note-book.djvu/349

 the Gartenhaus but several other modest villas are placed. From this little height one sees to advantage the plantations of the park in their autumnal coloring; the town with its steep-roofed church, and castle clock-tower, painted a gay green; the bushy line of the Belvedere chaussée, and Belvedere itself peeping on an eminence from its nest of trees. Here, too, was the place for seeing a lovely sunset,—such a sunset as September sometimes gives us,—when the western horizon is like a rippled sea of gold, sending over the whole hemisphere golden vapors, which, as they near the east, are subdued to a deep rose-color.

The Schloss is rather a stately, ducal-looking building, forming three sides of a quadrangle. Strangers are admitted to see a suit of rooms called the Dichter-Zimmer (Poets' Rooms), dedicated to Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland. The idea of these rooms is really a pretty one: in each of them there is a bust of the poet who is its presiding genius, and the walls of the Schiller and Goethe rooms are covered with frescos representing scenes from their works. The Wieland room is much smaller than the other two, and serves as an ante-chamber to them; it is also decorated more sparingly, but the arabesques on the walls are very tastefully designed, and satisfy one better than the ambitious compositions from Goethe and Schiller.

A more interesting place to visitors is the library, which occupies a large building not far from the Schloss. The principal Saal, surrounded by a broad gallery, is ornamented with some very excellent busts and some very bad portraits. Of the busts, the most remarkable is that of Gluck, by Houdon—a striking specimen of the real in art. The sculptor has given every scar made by the small-pox; he has left the nose as pug and insignificant, and the mouth as common, as Nature made them; but then he has done what, doubtless. Nature also did—he has spread over those coarsely cut features the irradiation of genius. A specimen of the opposite style in art is Trippel's bust of Goethe as the young Apollo, also fine in its way. It was taken when Goethe was in Italy; and in the "Italianische Reise," mentioning the progress of the bust, he says that he sees little likeness to himself, but is not discon-