"May God forgive me if I am guilty of disrespect! I had determined to return home as a well-trained and respectable privy-councillor and courtier. But I am not to blame if the sight of your dear countenance scatters all my good resolutions to the winds. Let me embrace, let me kiss you once more, my dear duke and friend!" And he did so, again and again, with great ardor. The duke's laughter while submitting to this embrace seemed to be only assumed in order to conceal his emotion, and to make his friend believe that the tears which stood in his eyes had not come from the depths of his heart, but were only the consequence of his violent laughter. "I see you are still the same wild, unaccountable genius, Wolf! You are as capricious as a beautiful woman, and as imperious as a tyrant! You are still the same Goethe!" "Not at all times, my duke. I have determined that the sober-minded world here in Weimar, shall behold in me a sober-minded privy-councillor, and that I will give no further cause of offence to madame the Duchess Louise, and all other sensitive souls, by my wild behavior. But, for a quarter of an hour, and in the presence of my dear master, I let the mask fall, and am once more the old Goethe or the young Goethe. Your Goethe, my duke and friend!" "Thanks, Wolf, thanks! I hardly knew what to make of you, and was quite ill at ease when I saw you standing before me with your formal manner and courtier countenance. I thought to myself, 'This is not the Goethe you expected to see; this is only his outward form; the inner man has remained in Italy.'" "Alas! that such should be the case, my duke, but it is so," sighed Goethe. "The inner man has not yet quite returned; only after a painful struggle will it be able to tear itself from the beautiful home of art and poetry. But since I see you, my dear friend--since I behold your brave, handsome countenance, I feel that my wounds are healing--that I am coming home! They are healing under your loving glances, and I begin to rejoice in my return, and to consider what I did only from a sense of duty as a real pleasure." "Then you did not return gladly, Wolf? It was reason, and not your heart, that prompted you to return!"