s of the existence of a
Homer identical with the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey? What
would not the Shakspeare clubs give for one more authentic anecdote of
the world's great dramatist?

Of Goethe we know more--I mean of his externals--than of any other
writer of equal note. This is due in part to his wide relations,
official and other, with his contemporaries; to his large correspondence
with people of note, of which the documents have been preserved by the
parties addressed; to the interest felt in him by curious observers
living in the day of his greatness. It is due in part also to the fact
that, unlike the greatest of his predecessors, he flourished in an
all-communicating, all-recording age; and partly it is due to
autobiographical notices, embracing important portions of his history.

Two seemingly opposite factors--limiting and qualifying the one the
other--determined the course and topics of his life. One was the aim
which he proposed to himself as the governing principle and purpose of
his being,--to perfect himself, to make the most of the nature which God
had given him; the other was a constitutional tendency to come out of
himself, to lose himself in objects, especially in natural objects, so
that in the study of nature--to which he devoted a large part of his
life--he seems not so much a scientific observer as a chosen confidant,
to whom the discerning Mother revealed her secrets.

In no greatest genius are all its talents self-derived. Countless
influences mould our intellect and mould our heart. One of these, and
often one of the most potent, is heredity. Consciously or unconsciously,
for good or for evil, physically and mentally, the father and mother are
in the child, as indeed all his ancestors are in every man.

Of Goethe's father we know only what the son himself has told us in his
memoirs. A man of austere presence, from whom Goethe, as he tells us,
inherited his bodily stature and his serious treatment of life,--

"Vom Vater hab ich die Statur,
Des Lebens ernstes fuehren."

By profession a lawyer, but without practice, living in grim seclusion
amid his books and collections; a man of solid acquirements and large
culture, who had travelled in Italy and first awakened in Wolfgang the
longing for that land; a man of ample means, inhabiting a stately
mansion. For the rest, a stiff, narrow-minded, fussy pedant, with small
toleration for any methods or aims but his own; who, while