make this distinction palpable. In science there are men whose active imaginations carry them into hypothesis and speculation, all the more easily because they do not bring hypothesis to the stern confrontation with fact. The mere delight in combining ideas suffices them: provided the deductions are logical, they seem almost indifferent to their truth. There are poets of this order; indeed most poets are of this order. Goethe was of a quite opposite tendency. In him, as in the man of positive science, an imperious desire for reality controlled the errant facility of imagination.

Hence we see why he was led to portray Men and Women, instead of Demigods and Angels: no Posas and Theklas, but Egmonts and Clärchens. Hence also his portraitures carry this moral with them, in them, but have no moral' superposed - no accompanying verdict as from some outstanding judge. Further, and this is a point to be insisted on, his style, both in poetry and prose, is subject to the same law. It is vivid with images, but it has scarcely any imagery.' Most poets describe objects by metaphors or comparisons; Goethe seldom tells you what an object is like, he tells you what it is. Shakespeare is very unlike Goethe in this respect. The prodigal luxuriance of his imagery often entangles, in its overgrowth, the movement of his verse. It is true, he also is eminently concrete: he sees the real object vividly, and he makes us see it vividly; but he scarcely ever paints it save in the colors of metaphor and simile. Shakespeare's imagery bubbles up like a perpetual spring: to say that it repeatedly overflows, is only to say that his mind was lured by its own sirens away from the direct path. He did not master his Pegasus at all times, but let the wild careering creature take its winged way. Goethe, on the contrary, always masters his. Perhaps because his steed

had less of restive life in its veins. Not only does he master it, and ride with calmer, more assured grace; he seems so bent on reaching the goal that he scarcely thinks of anything else. To quit metaphor, he may be said to use with the utmost sparingness all the aids of imagery, and to create images of the objects, rather than images of what the objects are like.

Shakespeare, like Goethe, was a decided realist. He, too, was content to let his pictures of life carry their own moral with them. He uttered no moral verdict;' he was no Chorus preaching on the text of what he pictured. Hence we cannot gather from his works what his opinions were. But there is this difference between him and Goethe, that his intense sympathy with the energetic passions and fierce volitions of our race made him delight in heroic characters, in men of robuster frames and more impassioned lives. Goethe, with an infusion of the best blood of Schiller, would have made a Shakespeare; but, such as Nature made him he was, not Shakespeare.

Turning from these abstract considerations to the two earliest works which form the text, we observe how the youth is determined in the choice of his subject by the realistic tendency. Instead of ranging through the enchanted gardens of Armida instead of throwing himself back into the distant Past, and escaping from the trammels of a modern subject which the confrontation of reality always makes more difficult, this boy fashions into verse his own experience, his own observation. He looks into his own heart, he peers into the byways of civilization, walking with curious observation through squalid streets and dark fearful alleys. Singular, moreover, is the absence of any fierce indignation, any cry of pain at the sight of so much corruption underlying the surface of so

ciety. In youth the loss of illusions is generally followed by a cynical misanthropy, or a vehement protest. But Goethe is neither cynical nor indignant. He seems to accept the fact as a thing to be admitted, and quietly striven against, with a view to its amelioration. He seems to think with the younger Pliny, that indulgence is a part of justice, and would cite with approval the favorite maxim of the austere yet humane Thraseas, qui vitia odit homines odit, — he who hates vice hates mankind.* For in the Mitschuldigen he presents us with a set of people whose consolation is to exclaim' Rogues all!' and in after years he wrote of this piece, that it was dictated, though unconsciously, by far-sighted tolerance in the appreciation of moral actions, as expressed in the eminently Christian sentence, "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone."'

How great is the anticipation of moral development implied in those words! how little Christians have in practice taken that profound saying to their hearts! and yet how deeply the universal heart affirms the truth of the saying which universal practice denies! Who does not say Amen to the words, and who is not ready to cast the first stone upon any and every offender? Nay, so ready are we to cast stones, that Goethe will not escape for having shown so much moral laxity' (that is one of the adroit phrases with which men whisper away good names); so much indifference' under the mask of tolerance; so great a power of representing life, with so utter an absence of any moral verdict on the scenes presented.

* Pliny, lib. viii. 22. Years after the text was written, Schöll published Goethe's note book kept at Strasburg, wherein may be read this very aphorism transcribed. It was just the sort of passage to captivate him.

CHAPTER III.

ART STUDIES.

FRAU BÖHME died. In her he lost a monitress and friend, who had kept some check on his waywardness, and drawn him into society. The Professor had long since. cooled towards him, after giving up all hopes of making him another Heineccius. It was pitiful: another ornament to jurisprudence irrecoverably lost! A youth with such remarkable dispositions, who would not be assiduous in attendance at lecture, and whose amusement during lecture was to sketch caricatures of various law dignitaries in his note book! Indeed, the collegiate aspect of this Leipsic residence is not one promising to professors; but we — instructed by the result - know how much better he was employed, than if he had filled a hundred volumes of note books by diligent attendance at lecture. He studied much — in his desultory manner in his desultory manner; he studied Molière and Corneille; he began to translate Le Menteur. The theatre was a perpetual attraction; and even the uneasy, unsatisfied condition of his affections, was instructing him in directions whither no professor could lead him. But greater than all was the influence of Shakespeare, whom he first learned a little of through Dodd's Beauties of Shakespeare, a work not much prized in England, where the plays form part of our traditional education, but which must have been a revelation to the Germans,

something analogous to what Charles Lamb's Specimens of the Old English Drama was to us. The marvellous strength and beauty of language, the bold and natural imagery of these Beauties, startled the young poets of that day, like the huge fossil remains of some antediluvian fauna; and to gratify the curiosity thus awakened, there came Wieland's prose translation of several plays, which Goethe studied with enthusiasm.

There are no materials to fill up the lacunæ of his narrative here, so that I am forced to leave much indistinct. For instance, he has told us that Käthchen and he were no longer lovers; but we find him writing to her in a friendly and even lover-like tone from Frankfurt, and we know that friendly intercourse still subsisted between them. Of this, however, not a word occurs in the Autobiography. Nor are we accurately informed how he made the acquaintance of the Breitkopf family. Breitkopf was a bookseller in Leipsic, in whose house Literature and Music were highly prized. Bernhard, the eldest son, was an excellent performer, and composed music to Goethe's songs, which were published in 1769, under this title: Neue Lieder in Melodieen gesetzt von Bernhard Theodor Breitkopf. The poet is not named. This Liederbuch contains twenty songs, the majority of which were subsequently reprinted in the poet's works. They are love songs, and contain a love-philosophy more like what is to be found in Catullus, Horace, and Wieland, than what one would expect from a boy, did we not remember how the braggadocio of youth delights in expressing roué sentiments, as if to give itself airs of profound experience. This youth sings with gusto of inconstancy:

Da fühl ich die Freuden der Wechselden Lust.

He gaily declares that if one mistress leaves you another