Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/247

Rh has again drawn me out of reality. For, as even the most correct engravings furnish no adequate idea of these buildings, so the case is the same with respect to the marble original of this statue as compared with the plaster models of it, which, however, I formerly used to look upon as beautiful.

Nov. 10, 1786.

Here I am now living with a calmness and tranquillity to which I have for a long while been a stranger. My practice to see and take all things as they are, my fidelity in letting the eye be my light, my perfect renunciation of all pretension, have again come to my aid, and make me calmly but most intensely happy. Every day has its fresh, remarkable object; every day its new, grand, unequalled paintings, and a whole which a man may long think of and dream of, but which, with all his power of imagination, he can never reach.

Yesterday I was at the Pyramid of Cestius, and in the evening on the Palatina, on the top of which are the ruins of the Palace of the Cæsars, which stand there like walls of rock. Of all this, however, no idea can be conveyed. In truth, there is nothing little here, although, indeed, occasionally something to find fault with,—something more or less absurd in taste; and yet even this partakes of the universal grandeur of all around.

When, however, I return to myself, as every one so readily does on all occasions, I discover within me a feeling which affords me infinite delight, which, indeed, I even venture to express. Whoever here looks around with earnestness, and has eyes to see, must become in a measure solid: he cannot but apprehend an idea of solidity with a vividness which is nowhere else possible.

The mind becomes, as it were, primed with capacity, with an earnestness without severity, and with a