, it was inevitable that Goethe
should have enemies. They have done what they could to blacken his name;
and to this day the shadow they have cast upon it in part remains. But
of this be sure, that no selfish, loveless egoist could have had and
retained such friends. The man whom the saintly Fraulein von Klettenberg
chose for her friend, whom clear-sighted, stern-judging Herder declared
that he loved as he did his own soul; the man whose thoughtful kindness
is celebrated by Herder's incomparable wife, whom Karl August and the
Duchess Luise cherished as a brother; the man whom children everywhere
welcomed as their ready playfellow and sure ally, of whom pious Jung
Stilling lamented that admirers of Goethe's genius knew so little of the
goodness of his heart,--can this have been a bad man, heartless, cold?

II. THE WRITER.

I have said that to Goethe, above all writers, belongs the distinction
of having excelled, not experimented merely,--that, others have also
done,--but excelled in many distinct kinds. To the lyrist he added the
dramatist, to the dramatist the novelist, to the novelist the mystic
seer, and to all these the naturalist and scientific discoverer. The
history of literature exhibits no other instance in which a great poet
has supplemented his proper orbit with so wide an epicyle.

In poetry, as in science, the ground of his activity was a passionate
love of Nature, which dates from his boyhood. At the age of fifteen,
recovering from a sickness caused by disappointment in a boyish affair
of the heart, he betook himself with his sketch-book to the woods. "In
the farthest depth of the forest," he says, "I sought out a solemn spot,
where ancient oaks and beeches formed a shady retreat. A slight
declivity of the soil made the merit of the ancient boles more
conspicuous. This space was inclosed by a thicket of bushes, between
which peeped moss-covered rocks, mighty and venerable, affording a rapid
fall to an affluent brook."

The sketches made of these objects at that early age could have had no
artistic value, although the methodical father was careful to mount and
preserve them. But what the pencil, had it been the pencil of the
greatest master, could never glean from scenes like these, what art
could never grasp, what words can never formulate, the heart of the boy
then imbibed, assimilated, resolved in his innermost being. There awoke
in him then those mysterious feelings, those unutterable yearnings, that