Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; A Novel Paperback - 2010

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: quaintances, and the partners, but every observing stranger is delighted at witnessing the joy with which the imprisoned sailor leaps ashore even before his vessel touches land, feeling that he is once more free, and can now confide to the faithful earth all that he has rescued from the treacherous waves. All our gain, my friend, does not depend on figures, happiness is the goddess of living men, and in order really to experience her favours we must exist and behold mankind, whose exertions are earnest and whose enjoyments are deep. CHAPTER XI. It is now time for us to become better acquainted with the parents of our two young friends. They were men of very different dispositions, but they agreed in considering commerce as the noblest of employments, and both were extremely attentive to the smallest advantage which any species of speculation could bring. Wilhelm's father on the death of his own parent had converted into money a valuable collection of paintings, drawings, engravings, and antiquities, had completely rebuilt and furnished his house in the newest style, and had made the remainder of his property profitable in every possible way. He had lent a great part of it to the elder Werner for purposes of trade, as the latter possessed the character of an active man of business, whose speculations were generally favoured by fortune. But old Merster desired nothing so anxiously as to endow his son with qualities which be did not himself possess, and to bequeath to his children advantages, to the enjoyment of which he attached the greatest advantage. But he himself entertained a love for magnificence, for those things which strike the eye, and at the same time possess a real and lasting value. He considered that everything in a house should be solid and massive, the supply ...