Friday, March 28:
R. has once again had dreams of vanity! He was apparently married to a princess, and all the princes at the Prussian Court were his relations!
He sings a poem by Goethe, the "Resurrection Hymn," to the tune of the "Sehnsuchts-Walzer," and says it lacks a conclusion, because all the stanzas are the same and there is no interchange of double and treble feet: "So something is lost which the Greeks understood so well and which struck me at once in my youth, and I made it the basis of my whole metrical pattern. Lope de Vega also has this alternation, less so Calderon, who argued more and needed regular trochees for that. With the five-foot iamb, people imagined that, since it contained two and three, it would provide a caesura, but that is not so - it is also a heavy meter and does not bear duplication."
He works on his article, completes it, and reads it to me, which leads to a discussion on architecture. R. remarked that except for Gothic churches all buildings are in fact built for their facades, and we possess no beautiful monuments which stand by themselves. This is what vexes him even in Venice - that everything is built from the point of view of the facade, with the exception of the Church of Saint Mark, which for this very reason makes an unusually fascinating impression on him.
Splendid weather, but the children not well and Fidi in bed. Go out in the morning in search of an ironing woman, since Käthchen is again indisposed, and my wanderings lead me to the top of the city tower, where, romantically enough, a girl is really working and ironing!
Herr Feustel visits me, and urges us to move into the house very soon. R. learns from the mayor that there is nothing to prevent our building our grave on our own land. Great joy about this.
At our evening meal I am given the last drop out of the bottle, which means the recipient will be married before the year is out. "Then I shall have to die," says R. "I know to whom I shall then be wedded," I say, thinking of death as I put my glass down; it gently touches the other glass and soundlessly breaks in two!
R. is tired; his protest against the Conversations-Lexikon has appeared.