She conducts him through the neighbouring
thicket, when an architrave, half-buried in the moss, and bearing an
effaced inscription, catches his eye. They reach the woman's hut,
which he finds to have been constructed from the stones of a ruined
temple. Asleep in the hut is the woman's infant son, whom she leaves
in the arms of the Wanderer, while she goes to fetch water from the
spring. She presses on him a piece of bread, the only food she has to
offer, and invites him to remain till the return of her husband to the
evening meal. He refuses her hospitality, and resumes his journey to
Cumae, his destination. Such is the outline of the poem, which is in
the form of a dialogue, in the irregular measure common to the odes
above mentioned. But in the _Wanderer_ there is nothing dithyrambic;
rather its characteristic is a reflective repose, which is in strange
contrast to the tumultuous outpouring of the _Wanderers Sturmlied_,
and which might induce us to assign its production to a later day in
Goethe's life, to the period of his sojourn in Italy, when years had
somewhat chastened him, and when he was under the spell of the
artistic remains of classical antiquity.
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