ooklyn Commercial High School.

A journey is an excellent remedy for a perplexed state of mind. This
time the goal of my journey was to be Germany. The German geniuses had,
indeed, almost all departed from this life, but there was still one
living, Goethe, and the idea of speaking with him or even of merely
seeing him made me happy in anticipation. I never was, as was the
fashion at that time, a blind worshipper of Goethe, any more than I was
of any other one poet. True poetry seemed to me to lie where they met on
common ground; their individual characteristics lent them, on the one
hand, the charm of individuality, while, on the other hand, they shared
the general propensity of mankind to err. Goethe, in particular, had,
since the death of Schiller, turned his attention from poetry to
science. By distributing his talents over too many fields, he
deteriorated in each; his latest poetic productions were tepid or cool,
and when, for the sake of pose, he turned to the classical, his poetry
became affected. The impassiveness which he imparted to that period
contributed perhaps more than anything else to the decadence of poetry,
inasmuch as it opened the door to the subsequent coarseness of Young
Germany, of popular poetry, and of the Middle-high German trash. The
public was only too glad to have once again something substantial to
feed upon. Nevertheless, Goethe is one of the greatest poets of all
time, and the father of our poetry. Klopstock gave the first impulse,
Lessing blazed the trail, Goethe followed it. Perhaps Schiller means
more to the German nation, for a people needs strong, sweeping
impressions; Goethe, however, appears to be the greater poet. He fills
an entire page in the development of the human mind, while Schiller
stands midway between Racine and Shakespeare. Little as I sympathized
with Goethe's most recent activity, and little as I could expect him to
consider the author of _The Ancestress_ and _The Golden Fleece_ worthy
of any consideration, in view of the dispassionate quietism which he
affected at the time, I nevertheless felt that the mere sight of him
would be sufficient to inspire me with new courage. _Dormit puer, non
mortuus est_. (The boy sleeps, he is not dead.)

* * * * *

At last I arrived in Weimar and took quarters in "The Elephant," a
hostelry at that time famous throughout Germany and the ante-room, as it
were, to the living Valhalla of Weimar. From ther