Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/381

Rh artistic gratification consists chiefly in comparing the imitation with its living prototype.

Toward evening I made a merry acquaintance, as I entered the house of a small dealer in the Long Street, in order to purchase some trifles. As I stood before the window to look at the wares, a slight breeze arose, which eddying along the whole street, at last distributed through all the windows and doors the immense cloud of dust which it had raised. "By all the saints," I cried, "whence comes all the dust of your town? is there no helping it? In its length and beauty, this street vies with any in the Corso in Rome. On both sides a fine pavement, which each stall and shopholder keeps clean by interminable sweeping, but brushes everything into the middle of the street, which is, in consequence, so much the dirtier, and with every breath of wind sends back to you the filth which has just before been swept into the roadway. In Naples busy donkeys carry off, day by day, the rubbish to the gardens and farms. Why should you not here contrive and establish some similar regulation?"

"Things with us are as they are," he replied: "we throw everything out of the house, and it rots before the door. You see here horse-dung and filth of all kinds: it lies there and dries, and returns to us again in the shape of dust. Against it we are taking precautions all day long. But look, our pretty little and ever busy brooms, worn out at last, only go to increase the heap of filth before our doors."

And oddly enough it was actually so. They had nothing but very little besoms of palm-branches, which, slightly altered, might have been really useful; but as it was, they broke off easily, and the stumps were lying by thousands in the streets. To my repeated questioning, whether there was no board or regulations to prevent all this, he replied, "A story is current among the people, that those whose duty it was to provide