Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 4.djvu/420

388 adapted for tillage, excellently prepared, verdant, and ripening, and the best and richest spots marked by hamlets and farmhouses, and this great and immeasurable plain, prepared for man, like a new paradise, bounded far and near by mountains partly cultivated, partly overgrown with woods, he will then conceive the rapture with which I blessed my fate, that it had destined me, for some time, so beautiful a dwelling-place.

Such a fresh glance into a new land in which we are to abide for a time has still the peculiarity, both pleasant and foreboding, that the whole lies before us like an unwritten tablet. As yet no sorrows and joys which relate to ourselves are recorded upon it; this cheerful, varied, animated plain is still mute for us; the eye is only fixed on the objects so far as they are intrinsically important, and neither affection nor passion has especially to render prominent this or that spot. But a presentiment of the future already disquiets the young heart; and an unsatisfied craving secretly demands that which is to come and may come, and which at all events, whether for good or ill, will imperceptibly assume the character of the spot in which we find ourselves.

Having descended the height, I still tarried awhile before the face of the venerable pile; but what I could not quite clearly make out, either the first or the following time, was, that I regarded this miracle as a monster, which must have terrified me, if it had not, at the same time, appeared to me comprehensible by its regularity, and even pleasing in its finish. Yet I by no means busied myself with meditating on this contradiction, but suffered a monument so astonishing quietly to work upon me by its presence.

I took small, but well-situated and pleasant, lodgings, on the north side of the Fish-market, a fine, long street, where the everlasting motion came to the assistance of