Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/238

224 Roman Church has never been very fond of celebrating with remarkable pomp any common festival: and so she leaves every order to celebrate in silence the especial memory of its own patron; for the name "festival," and the day especially set apart to each saint, is properly the occasion when each receives his highest commemoration.

Yesterday, however, which was the Festival of All Souls, things went better with me. This commemoration is kept by the Pope in his private chapel on the Quirinal. I hastened with Tischbein to the Monte Cavallo. The piazza before the palace has something altogether singular, so irregular is it, and yet so grand and so beautiful! I now cast eyes upon the Colossuses! Neither eye nor mind was large enough to take them in. Ascending a broad flight of steps, we followed the crowd through a splendid and spacious hall. In this antechamber, directly opposite to the chapel, and in sight of the numerous apartments, one feels somewhat strange to find one's self beneath the same roof with the vicar of Christ.

The office had begun. Pope and cardinals were already in the church,—the Holy Father, of a highly handsome and dignified form; the cardinals, of different ages and figures. I was seized with a strange, longing desire that the head of the Church might open his golden mouth, and, speaking with rapture of the ineffable bliss of the happy soul, set us all, too, in a rapture. But as I only saw him moving backward and forward before the altar, and turning, now to this side, and now to that, and only muttering to himself, and conducting himself just like a common parish priest, the original sin of Protestantism revived within me, and the well-known and ordinary mass for the dead had no charms for me. For most assuredly Christ himself—he who, in his youthful days and even as a child, excited men's wonder by his oral