pensive joy in the contemplation of Nature, which leavened all his
subsequent life, and the influence of which is so perceptible in his
poetry, especially in his lyrics....

The first literary venture by which Goethe became widely known was "Goetz
von Berlichingen," a dramatic picture of the sixteenth century, in which
the principal figure is a predatory noble of that name. A dramatic
picture, but not in any true sense a play, it owed its popularity at the
time partly to the truth of its portraitures, partly to its choice of a
native subject and the truly German feeling which pervades it. It was a
new departure in German literature, and perplexed the critics as much as
it delighted the general public. It anticipated by a quarter of a
century what is technically called the Romantic School.

"Goetz von Berlichingen" was soon followed by the "Sorrows of
Werther,"--one of those books which, on their first appearance have
taken the world by storm, and of which Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
is the latest example. It is a curious circumstance that a great poet
should have won his first laurels by prose composition. Sir Walter Scott
eclipsed the splendor of his poems by the popularity of the Waverley
novels. Goethe eclipsed the world-wide popularity of his "Werther" by
the splendor of his poems.

Of one who was great in so many kinds, it may seem difficult to decide
in what department he most excelled. Without undertaking to measure and
compare what is incommensurable, I hold that Goethe's genius is
essentially lyrical. Whatever else may be claimed for him, he is, first
of all, and chiefly, a singer. Deepest in his nature, the most innate of
all his faculties, was the faculty of song, of rhythmical utterance. The
first to manifest itself in childhood, it was still active at the age of
fourscore. The lyrical portions of the second part of "Faust," some of
which were written a short time before his death, are as spirited, the
versification as easy, the rhythm as perfect, as the songs of his youth.

As a lyrist he is unsurpassed, I venture to say unequalled, if we take
into view the whole wide range of his performance in this kind,--from
the ballads, the best-known of his smaller poems, and those light
fugitive pieces, those bursts of song which came to him without effort,
and with such a rush that in order to arrest and preserve them he
seized, as he tells us, the first scrap of paper that came to hand and
wrote upon it di