those who have already spent some time there, and must be gone the next week. The loss is painful, but we connect ourselves with the second genera tion of visitors, with whom we spend some time and become dearly intimate; but these also depart, and we are left alone with a third set, who arrive just as we are preparing for our departure, in whom we feel little or no interest.

"The world has always regarded me as a pecuhar favorite of fortune, nor will I complain of my cxistence taken as a whole; yet, in truth, it has been little else than weariness and labor; and I may say that in my five-and-seventy years I have not enjoyed four weeks of peace and comfort-it was the eternal rolling of the stone. The claims upon my time and capabilities, from within and from without, were too many. My only happiness lay in my poetic talents; yet even in this how have I been, through outward things, disturbed, limited, and hindered! Had I kept myself more apart from public business, and could I have lived more in solitude, I had been happier as a man, and as a poet I had effected much more. Thus, after the publication of my 'Götz' and my 'Werther,' a (ertain sensible friend said to me in warning, ♦ When a man has once done something to delight he world, the world will thenceforward take care that he shall not do it a second time.' A widespread name, a high position in society, are doubtless good things, but, with all my reputation and my rank, I could not often do more nor better than

give way to the opinions of others; and this were in truth but a sorry jest, if I had not therewith so far the advantage, that I learned (erfahre) how others thought: aber sie nicht wie ich."

How solemn sounds all this from the lips of a man, who in years, in fame, in wisdom, in prosperity, exceeded so far his fellow-men!

Pointing out to Ekermann some beautiful antique gems, and comparing them with the manner in which the same subjects and ideas had been treated by modern artists, he makes the oft-repeated observation, how far in these later times we fall short of the classical models; even with the highest feeling for the pure inimitable grace, the unaffected nature of these relics, even with a conception of how it was all produced, we cannot repeat the results we admire. 66 Meyer," he added, "used often to say, 'If only it were not so difficult to think;' but the worst is, that all the thinking in the world will not help us to think we must go direct to nature, so that beautiful ideas shall present themselves before us like God-sends, (freye kinder Gottes,) and call out to us, "Here we are!"*

Tiedge, in 1800, wrote a poem on the immortality of the soul, entitled "Urania," and Goethe alludes amusingly to the sensation it produced for a time. The "Urania" lay on every table-"Urania" and immortality were the subject of every conver

He says the same thing otherwise, and better, in another place- Alles Gescheite ist schon einmal gedacht worden; man muss nur versuchen es noch einmal zu denken."

sation, and stupid, conceited women discussed round their tea-tables the sublimest speculations on a future life; all which seems to have excited his impatience and his derision. How truly he says somewhere, that the same things are constantly repeated in the world; that there never was any thing, any fact, that had only once existed! How well I recollect when the publication of "Satan," and the "Omnipresence of the Deity," and some other poems of the same stamp, were all the rage in England, and sent our evangelical ladies, some up into the clouds, within precincts where seraphs fear to tread, and some down— never mind where, it was Tiedge's "Urania" over again. Of course, I speak here only of the presumption and frivolity, amounting to profaneness and audacity, or worse, which I have witnessed in some women whose heated imaginations outran their reason, as different from the staid, the sober humility of real piety, as the raving Pythoness of old was unlike the meek Mary, "who sat at Jesus's feet and heard his words."

Goethe says, in the same passage "that he would not himself give up for aught in the world the belief in futurity; and he thinks with Lorenzo de' Medici, that he who lives not in the hope of a future life may be counted as already dead; but he exclaims against treating with vulgar and audacious familiarity the divine, the incoraprehensible truths, which prophets and apostles touched upon with awe and I think with him.

Goethe has (has?—I think of him as oeing now!) I should say, that out of a collection of more than seventy portfolios of engravings and original drawings, it was his general custom to have one or two laid on the table after dinner, and to turn them over in presence of his guests and the ladies of his family, discoursing most eloquently on the different subjects, or pleased to appeal to the natural sense and taste of those around him. It was a divine lecture on art.

There are in one of these portfolios some most exquisite etchings and drawings by Roos, the famous animal painter, all representing sheep or goats in every possible attitude, wonderful for their truth. "When I look at them," says Goethe, speaking in the fulness of his admiration, "I feel a certain strange uneasiness. The narrow, stupid, silly, dreamy, yawny nature of these creatures attracts me into a kind of beastly sympathy with them; I look at them till I am half afraid of becoming a sheep myself, and could almost fancy that the artist had been one; he had no vocation to paint the fiercer quadrupeds, he confined himself to the ruminating animals, and in that he did well; his sympathy with the nature of these creatures was born with him-it was innate."

What would Goethe have thought of some of Edwin Landseer's pictures his wild deer-his dogs!—the "Highland Nurse," for instance, where the colley is watching by the sleeping infant? Did Roos, or Snyders, or Rubens himself, ever give us

the morale of animal life in the fine spirit of Edwin Landseer?

After some other things, Goethe goes on to say that he thinks a knowledge of the universe must be ir.nate with some poets. (It seems to have been so with Shakspeare.) He says he wrote “Götz von Berlichingen" when he was a young inexperienced man of two-and-twenty. "Ten years later,” he adds, "I stood astonished at the truth of my own delineation; I had never beheld or experienced the like, therefore the knowledge of these multifarious aspects of human nature I must have pos sessed through a kind of anticipation.”

Yes; the "kind of anticipation," through which Joanna Baillie conceived and wrote her noble tragedies. Where did she, whose life has been pure and "retired as noontide dew,” find the dark, stern, terrible elements, out of which she framed the delineations of character and passion in De Montfort, Ethwald, Basil, Constantine ?-where, but in her own prophetic heart and genius?-in that intuitive, almost unconscious revelation of the universal nature, which makes the poet, and not experience or knowledge. Joanna Baillie, whose most tender and refined, and womanly and christian spirit never, I believe, admitted an ungentle thought of any living being, created De Montfort, and gave us the physiology of Hatred; and might well, like Goethe, stand astonished at the truth of ner own delineation.