loomier and more depressing passages of the
imaginative life? It would be prudent perhaps to omit the mention of
Byron, because some may attribute his sadness to his immorality; and if
I spoke of Shelley, they might answer that he was "sad because he was
impious;" but the truth is, that quite independently of conduct, and
even of belief, it was scarcely possible for natures so highly
imaginative as these two, and so ethereally intellectual as one of the
two, to escape those clouds of gloom which darken the intellectual life.
Wordsworth was not immoral, Wordsworth was not unorthodox, yet he could
be as sad in his own sober way as Byron in the bitterness of his
desolation, or Shelley in his tenderest wailing. The three men who seem
to have been the least subject to the sadness of intellectual workers
were Alexander Humboldt, Cuvier, and Goethe. Alexander Humboldt, so far
as is known to us, lived always in a clear and cheerful daylight; his
appetite for learning was both strong and regular; he embraced the
intellectual life in his earliest manhood, and lived in it with an
unhesitating singleness of purpose, to the limits of extreme old age.
Cuvier was to the last a model student, of a temper at once most
unflinching and most kind, happy in all his studies, happier still in
his unequalled facility of mental self-direction. Goethe, as all know,
lived a life of unflagging interest in each of the three great branches
of intellectual labor. During the whole of his long life he was
interested in literature, in which he was a master; he was interested in
science, in which he was a discoverer, and in art, of which he was an
ardent though not practically successful student. His intellectual
activity ceased only on rare occasions of painful illness or
overwhelming affliction; he does not seem to have asked himself ever
whether knowledge was worth its cost; he was always ready to pay the
appointed price of toil. He had no infirmity of intellectual doubt; the
powerful impulses from within assured him that knowledge was good for
him, and he went to it urged by an unerring instinct, as a young salmon
bred in the slime of a river seeks strength in the infinite sea. And
yet, being a poet and a man of strong passions, Goethe did not
altogether escape the green-sickness which afflicts the imaginative
temperament, or he could never have written "Werther;" but he cured
himself very soon, and the author of "Werther" had no indulgence for
Werthe