nthusiasm. As a guide to the best reading extant up to 1832 I know
nothing better. Eckermann is inferior as a biographer to Boswell, and
his book is neither so interesting nor amusing; but Goethe was far
greater than Johnson, and his talk is cosmopolitan and broad, while
Johnson's is apt to be insular and narrow. "One should not study
contemporaries and competitors," Goethe said, "but the great men of
antiquity, whose works have for centuries received equal homage and
consideration.... Let us study Moliere, let us study Shakespeare, but
above all things, the old Greeks and always the Greeks."[31] Here is an
opinion I like to dwell upon: "He who will work aright must never rail,
must not trouble himself at all about what is ill done, but only to do
well himself. For the great point is, not to pull down, but to build up
and in this humanity finds pure joy."[32] It is well worth our while to
listen to a man so great as to be free from envy and jealousy, but this
was a lesson Carlyle could not learn from his revered master. It is
undoubtedly his broad mind in connection with his wide knowledge which
induced Sainte-Beuve to write that Goethe is "the greatest of modern
critics and of critics of all time."[33]

All of the conversations did not run upon literature and writers.
Although Goethe never visited either Paris or London, and resided for a
good part of his life in the little city of Weimar, he kept abreast of
the world's progress through books, newspapers, and conversations with
visiting strangers. No statesman or man of business could have had a
wider outlook than Goethe, when on February 21, 1827, he thus spoke: "I
should wish to see England in possession of a canal through the Isthmus
of Suez.... And it may be foreseen that the United States, with its
decided predilection to the West will, in thirty or forty years, have
occupied and peopled the large tract of land beyond the Rocky Mountains.
It may furthermore be foreseen that along the whole coast of the Pacific
Ocean where nature has already formed the most capacious and secure
harbors, important commercial towns will gradually arise, for the
furtherance of a great intercourse between China and the East Indies and
the United States. In such a case, it would not only be desirable, but
almost necessary, that a more rapid communication should be maintained
between the eastern and western shores of North America, both by
merchant ships and men-of-war than has hitherto b