"There is something about the big, stately house, where the Immortal One had received all the minor Olympians, or their homage, which makes one feel why that grandson gradually left it to the portraits of the Friends and the Sweethearts, and to the Plaster-casts (gathering a garment of sooty dust), which seem in some hieratic relation to the busts and paintings and prints and silhouettes of that Man-God, portrayed at every age, and with every unlikeliness of smirk and frown, from the eye-flashing aquiline youth with locks tied back in a bag, half-Werther, half-Wilhelm Meister, through every variety of Goethe travelling through life with Roman ruins or grand ducal palaces as background, to Goethe in all the different forbiddingnesses of old age. Forbidding, but not enough, alas I for the sycophancies of Eckermann, the theatricalities of Byron, the shakable sentimental conceit of Jane Welsh Carlyle, who sends him a copy of verses and (of all embarrassing untidy presents) a long tail of "a woman's hair." (Faugh!) There he presides, variously Olympian, over the dreary 1820 wallpapers and sofas and card-tables, key-patterned or sham Gothic, but all faded and dust-engrained; among the dismal collections of ores and crystals and skulls and stuffed birds: a pantalooned and stocked and swallow-tailed Rentier Faust. And round him that court of huge blackened casts, Ludovisi Junos and Rondanini Joves, and various decapitated Adorantes and Ilioneuses; that other company of faded ladies, stomachered or short-waisted, Lottes and Lilis and Maximilianes and Christianes, Suleikas, Gretchens, and Ottilies, on whose love and love for him (as on the succulent roast ox-thighs of Homeric days) the god Wolfgang nourished and increased his own divinity."