"I grow old," said he, looking from his work to the bust of the late queen which stood opposite. "I have carved the effigies of three generations of poets, and as many of princes. Twenty years ago I was at work on the tomb of the Duke of Oldenburg, and now I am at work upon _her's_ who gave me that order. All die away: soon I shall be left alone. Of my early friends none remain but Goethe. I shall die before him, and perhaps he will write my epitaph." He spoke with a smile, not foreseeing that he would be the survivor.
Three years afterwards[17] I again paid Dannecker a visit, but a change had come over him: his feeble, trembling hand could no longer grasp the mallet, or guide the chisel; his eyes were dim; his fine benevolent countenance wore a childish, vacant smile, now and then crossed by a gleam of awakened memory or thought--and yet he seemed so perfectly happy! He walked backwards and forwards, from his Christ to his bust of Schiller, with an unwearied self-complacency, in which there was something mournful, and yet delightful. While I sat looking at the magnificent head of Schiller, the original of the multifarious casts and copies which are dispersed through all Germany, he sat down beside me, and taking my hands between his own, which trembled with age and nervous emotion, he began to speak of his friend. "Nous etions amis dès l'enfance; aussi j'y ai travaillé avec amour, avec douleur--on ne peut pas plus faire." He then went on--"When Schiller came to Louisberg, he sent to tell me that he was very ill--that he should not live very long, and that he wished me to execute his bust. It was the first wish of my own heart. I went immediately. When I entered the house, I found a lady sitting on the _canapé_--it was Schiller's wife, and I did not know her; but she knew me. She said, 'Ah! you are Dannecker!--Schiller expects you;'--then she ran into the next room, where Schiller was lying down on a couch, and in a moment after he came in, exclaiming as he entered, 'Where is he? where is Dannecker?' That was the moment--the expression I caught--you see it here--the head raised, the countenance full of inspiration, and affection, and bright hope! I told him that to keep up this expression he must have some of his best friends to converse with him while I took the model, for I could not talk and work too. O if I could but remember what glorious things then fell from those lips! Sometimes I stopped in my work--I could not go on--I could only listen." And here the old man wept; then suddenly changing his mood, he said--"But I must cut off that long hair; he never wore it so; it is not in the fashion, you know!" I begged him for heaven's sake not to touch it; he then, with a sad smile, turned up the sleeve of his coat and showed me his wrist, swelled with the continual use of his implements--"You see I _cannot_!" And I could not help wishing at the moment, that while his mind was thus enfeebled, no transient return of physical strength might enable him to put his wild threat in execution. What a noble bequest to posterity is the effigy of a great man, when executed in such a spirit as this of Schiller! I assure you I could not look at it, without feeling my heart "overflow in silent worship" of moral and intellectual power, till the deification of great men in the old times appeared to me rather religion than idolatry. I have been affected in the same manner by the busts of Goethe, Scott, Homer, Milton, Howard, Newton;--never by the painted portraits of the same men, however perfect in resemblance and admirable in execution.