year as Sir Walter
Scott; was the son of an imperial chancellor, a formal man and his
pedagogue in boyhood, and of Elizabeth Textor, daughter of the chief
magistrate of the city, a woman of bright intelligence, who was only
eighteen at the time of his birth. Spiritually and bodily he was the most
perfectly formed, symetrically proportioned, justly balanced, and
completely cultivated man perhaps that ever lived, whose priceless value
to the world lies in this, that in his philosophy and life there is found
the union in one of what to smaller people appears entirely and
absolutely antagonistic, of utmost scientific scepticism and highest
spiritual faith and worth. "He was filled full with the scepticism,
bitterness, hollowness, and thousandfold contradictions of his time, till
his heart was like to break; yet he subdued all this, rose victorious
over this, and manifoldly, by word and act, showed others that came after
how to do the like." Carlyle, who is never done recalling his worth,
confesses an indebtedness to him--which he found it beyond his power to
express: "It was he," he writes to Emerson, "that first proclaimed to me
(convincingly, for I saw it _done_): 'behold, even in this scandalous
Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it
is still possible that Man be Man.'" "He was," says he, "king of himself
and his world;... his faculties and feelings were not fettered or
prostrated under the iron sway of Passion, but led and guided in kindly
union under the mild sway of Reason; as the fierce primeval elements of
chaos were stilled at the coming of Light, and bound together, under its
soft vesture, into a glorious and beneficent Creation." His life lies
latent in his successive works, above all in "Goetz," in "Werter," in
"Faust," and in "Meister"; but as these have not been duly read it has
not yet been duly written, though an attempt is being made to do so in
the said connection. Of the last of the four works named, Carlyle, who
has done more than any one else yet to bring Goethe near us, once said,
"There are some ten pages of that book that, if ambition had been my
object, I would rather have written than all the literature of my time."
"One counsel," says Carlyle, "he has to give, the secret of his whole
poetic alchemy, 'Think of living! Thy life is no idle dream, but a solemn
reality. It is thy own, it is all thou hast to front eternity with.'"
"Never thought on thinking," he has said,