Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/243

Rh works which have been written from the fifteenth century to the present day. The first artists and scholars have occupied their whole lives with these objects.

And this vastness has a strangely tranquillising effect upon you in Rome, while you pass from place to place in order to visit the most remarkable objects. In other places one has to search for what is important: here one is oppressed and borne down with numberless phenomena. Wherever one goes and casts a look around, the eye is at once struck with some landscape, forms of every kind and style; palaces and ruins, gardens and statuary, distant views of villas, cottages and stables, triumphal arches and columns, often crowding so close together, that they might all be sketched on a single sheet of paper. He ought to have a hundred hands to write, for what can a single pen do here? And besides, by the evening one is quite weary and exhausted with the day's seeing and admiring.

, Nov. 7, 1786.

But my friends must pardon me, if in future I am found chary of words. During travel one usually rakes together all that he meets on his way: every day brings something new, and he then hastens to reflect upon and judge of it. Here, however, we come into a very great school indeed, where every day says so much, that we cannot venture to say anything of the day itself. Indeed, people would do well, if, tarrying here for years together, they observed awhile a Pythagorean silence.

I am very well. The weather, as the Romans say, is brutto. The south wind, the sirocco, is blowing, and brings with it every day more or less of rain. For my part, I do not find the weather disagreeable: such as it is, it is warmer than the rainy days of summer are with us.