Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 6
1834-12-16
After looking over Emilia Galotti for the last time I concluded next to go to the fountain head and try Goethe’s Faust,1 which I began—A piece of originality of singular and characteristic quality but which in the very outset betrays great mental power.
Office. My time so absorbed there in Accounts that I went very far beyond my hours and lost my walk. Mr. Ladd my disagreeable Tenant came to pay me rent, and Mr. Brown. I sold and this day transferred some shares of the Fire and Marine Insurance Co. belonging to T. B. Adams and thereby have saved to him the heavy advance which they had cost and which he must in the end have lost. This has been worrying me ever since the purchase and still more as the repayment by the Company of a fourth of their Capital at par had thrown all the premium paid for it upon the remaining three quarters. I also transferred more of my father’s shares in the New England.
Home in time for Ovid. Afternoon Mrs. Jameson and the papers. Evening the same and Faust.
CFA borrowed from the Athenaeum both vol. 9 of Goethe’s Werke (26 vols., Vienna, 1816–1821), which contained Faust in the original, and the 1823 translation of the poem by Francis Leveson-Gower (Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere). His practice seems to have been to attempt the German text, at the same time consulting the translation; see entries for 19 and 22 Dec., below.