Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/155

Rh With all its dignity, the University gave me the horrors as a building. I am glad that I had nothing to learn in it. One cannot imagine such a narrow compass for a school, even though, as the student of a German university, one may have suffered a great deal on the benches of the auditorium. The anatomical theatre is a perfect model of the art of pressing students together. The audience are piled one above another in a tall, pointed funnel. They look down upon the narrow space where the table stands; and, as no daylight falls upon it, the professor must demonstrate by lamplight. The botanic garden is much more pretty and cheerful. Several plants can remain in the ground during the winter, if they are set near the walls or at no great distance from them. At the end of October the whole is built over, and the process of heating is carried on for the few remaining months. It is pleasant and instructive to walk through a vegetation that is strange to us. With ordinary plants, as well as with other objects that have been long familiar to us, we at last do not think at all; and what is looking without thinking? Amidst this variety which comes upon me quite new, the idea that all forms of plants may, perhaps, be developed from a single form, becomes more lively than ever. On this principle alone it would be possible to define orders and classes, which, it seems to me, has hitherto been done in a very arbitrary manner. At this point I stand fast in my botanical philosophy, and I do not see how I am to extricate myself. The depth and breadth of this business seem to me quite equal.

The great square, called Prato della Valle, is a very wide space, where the chief fair is held in June. The wooden booths in the middle of it do not produce the most favourable appearance; but the inhabitants assure me that there will soon be a fièra of stone here, like that at Verona. One has hopes of this already,