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Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow SCENE IX.—: Street before the Prison at Heilbronn. - Goethe's Works, vol. 3 (Goetz von Berlichingen, Iphigenia in Tauris, Tarquato Tasso, etc)

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SCENE IX.—: Street before the Prison at Heilbronn. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Works, vol. 3 (Goetz von Berlichingen, Iphigenia in Tauris, Tarquato Tasso, etc) [1885]

Edition used:

Goethe’s Works, illustrated by the best German artists, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: G. Barrie, 1885). Vol. 3.

Part of: Goethe’s Works, 5 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


SCENE IX.—

Street before the Prison at Heilbronn.

ElizabethandLerse.

Lerse.

Heaven relieve your distress, gracious lady! Maria is come.

Elizabeth.

God be praised! Lerse, we have sunk into dreadful misery. My worst forebodings are realized! A prisoner—thrown as an assassin and malefactor into the deepest dungeon.

Lerse.

I know all.

Elizabeth.

Thou knowest nothing. Our distress is too—too great! His age, his wounds, a slow fever—and, more than all, the despondency of his mind to think that this should be his end.

Lerse.

Ay, and that Weislingen should be commissioner!

Elizabeth.

Weislingen?

Lerse.

They have acted with unheard-of severity. Metzler has been burned alive—hundreds of his associates broken upon the wheel, beheaded, quartered and impaled. All the country round looks like a slaughter-house, where human flesh is cheap.

Elizabeth.

Weislingen commissioner! O Heaven! a ray of hope! Maria shall go to him: he cannot refuse her. He had ever a compassionate heart, and when he sees her whom he once loved so much, whom he has made so miserable—where is she?

Lerse.

Still at the inn.

Elizabeth.

Take me to her. She must away instantly. I fear the worst.

[Exeunt.