could not have been what they demanded, and at the same time have given to his country and the world what he did.

As a courtier and favorite of Fortune, it was inevitable that Goethe should have enemies. They have done what they could to blacken his name; and to this day the shadow they have cast upon it in part remains. But of this be sure, that no selfish, loveless egoist could have had and retained such friends.

The man

whom the saintly Fräulein von Klettenberg chose for her friend, whom clear-sighted, stern-judging Herder declared that he loved as he did his own soul; the man whose thoughtful kindness is celebrated by Herder's incomparable wife, whom Karl August and the Duchess Luise cherished as a brother; the man whom children everywhere welcomed as their ready playfellow and sure ally, of whom pious Jung Stilling lamented that admirers of Goethe's genius knew so little of the goodness of his heart, can this have been a bad man, heartless, cold?

II. THE WRITER.

I HAVE said that to Goethe, above all writers, belongs the distinction of having excelled, not experimented merely, that, others have also done, but excelled in many distinct kinds. To the lyrist he added the dramatist, to the dramatist the novelist, to the novelist the mystic seer, and to all these the naturalist and scientific

discoverer. The history of literature exhibits no other instance in which a great poet has supplemented his proper orbit with so wide an epicyle.

In poetry, as in science, the ground of his activity was a passionate love of Nature, which dates from his boyhood. At the age of fifteen, recovering from a sickness caused by disappointment in a boyish affair of the heart, he betook himself with his sketch-book to the woods. "In the farthest depth of the forest," he says, "I sought out a solemn spot, where ancient oaks and beeches formed a shady retreat. A slight declivity of the soil made the merit of the ancient boles more conspicuous. This space was inclosed by a thicket of bushes, between which peeped moss-covered rocks, mighty and venerable, affording a rapid fall to an affluent brook."

The sketches made of these objects at that early age could have had no artistic value, although the methodical father was careful to mount and preserve them. But what the pencil, had it been the pencil of the greatest master, could never glean from scenes like these, what art could never grasp, what words can never formulate, the heart of the boy then imbibed, assimilated, resolved in his innermost being. There awoke in him then those mysterious feelings, those unutterable yearnings, that pensive joy in the contemplation of Nature, which leavened all his subsequent

life, and the influence of which is so perceptible in his poetry, especially in his lyrics.

The first literary venture by which Goethe became widely known was "Götz von Berlichingen," a dramatic picture of the sixteenth century, in which the principal figure is a predatory noble of that name. A dramatic picture, but not in any true sense a play, it owed its popularity at the time partly to the truth of its portraitures, partly to its choice of a native subject and the truly German feeling which pervades it. It was a new departure in German literature, and perplexed the critics as much as it delighted the general public. It anticipated by a quarter of a century what is technically called the Romantic School.

"Götz von Berlichingen" was soon followed by the "Sorrows of Werther," - one of those books which on their first appearance have taken the world by storm, and of which Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is the latest example. It is a curious circumstance that a great poet should have won his first laurels by prose composition. Sir Walter Scott eclipsed the splendor of his poems by the popularity of the Waverley novels. Goethe eclipsed the world-wide popularity of his "Werther" by the splendor of his poems.

Of one who was great in so many kinds, it may seem difficult to decide in what department he most excelled.

Without undertaking to measure and compare what is incommensurable, I hold that Goethe's genius is essentially lyrical. Whatever else may be claimed for him, he is, first of all, and chiefly, a singer. Deepest in his nature, the most innate of all his faculties, was the faculty of song, of rhythmical utterance. The first to manifest itself in childhood, it was still active at the age of fourscore. The lyrical portions of the second part of "Faust," some of which were written a short time before his death, are as spirited, the versification as easy, the rhythm as perfect, as the songs of his youth.

As a lyrist he is unsurpassed, I venture to say unequalled, if we take into view the whole wide range of his performance in this kind, from the ballads, the best-known of his smaller poems, and those light fugitive pieces, those bursts of song which came to him without effort, and with such a rush that in order to arrest and preserve them he seized, as he tells us, the first scrap of paper that came to hand and wrote upon it diagonally, if it happened so to lie on his table, lest, through the delay of selecting and placing, the inspiration should be checked and the poem evaporate, — from these to such stately compositions as the "Zueignung," or dedication of his poems, the "Weltseele" and the Orphic Sayings," in short, from poetry that writes itself, that springs spontaneously in the mind, to poetry

that is written with elaborate art. There is this distinction, and it is one of the most marked in lyric verse. Compare in English poetry, by way of illustration, the snatches of song in Shakspeare's plays with Shakspeare's sonnets; compare Burns with Gray; compare Jean Ingelow with Browning.

Goethe's ballads have an undying popularity; they have been translated, and most of them are familiar to English readers. .

...

In the Elegies written after his return from Italy, the author figures as a classic poet inspired by the Latin Muse. The choicest of these elegies — the "Alexis and Dora" - is not so much an imitation of the ancients as it is the manifestation of a side of the poet's nature which he had in common with the ancients. He wrote as a Greek or Roman might write, because he felt his subject as a Greek or Roman might feel it.

"Hermann und Dorothea," which Schiller pronounced the acme not only of Goethean but of all modern art, was written professedly as an attempt in the Homeric 1 style, motived by Wolf's "Prolegomena" and Voss's "Luise." It is Homeric only in its circumstantiality, in the repetition of the same epithets applied to the same persons, and in the Greek realism of Goethe's nature. The theme is very un-Homeric; it is thoroughly modern and German,

1 "Doch Homeride zu sein, auch noch als letzter, ist schön."