It was her request that this inscription should be put upon her headstone. The mother’s pride is in it, but so beautiful and so just! No man of this century has wrought himself more thoroughly into the German mind, and only one writer has led captive more minds in the world at large, than Johan Wolfgang Von Goethe, whose mother lies under this brick wall, with deep shade-trees hanging over her grave, and fresh flowers lying on it, though she was laid here sixty years ago. “From my dear little mother,” said the poet in one of his poems, “I derive my happy disposition and my love of story-telling.” And she said of herself, “Order and quiet are my characteristics. I despatch at once what I have to do, the most disagreeable always first, and I gulp down the devil without looking at him. I always seek out what is good in people, and leave what is bad to Him who made mankind, and knows how to round off the angles.” If this saying of Goethe’s mother could be told in all the world as a memorial of her, it is quite likely it would do as much for the good of mankind as all that her son ever wrote, though he was the prince of German poets, and the master intellect of the age. His coffin lies in the Duke’s vault at Weimar, or did when I was there, by the side of Schiller, and not by the side of the Duke, as royal etiquette forbade, even in the grave, such common dust as that of these two great poets to be laid along with that of royal clay. Yet the Duke is more honored by having had the friendship of the poets than by his crown or kingdom.