young
leader of the Romantic revival in Germany resigned his leadership; he
seemed to his contemporaries to have lost the fire and impulse of his
youth; his work was found cold and formal. A great change had indeed
taken place within him; but his ardor had only grown steadier and
stronger, extending now to every part of his complex nature. The change
was a transition from what is merely inward and personal to what is
outward and general. Goethe cared less than formerly to fling out his
private passions, and cared more to comprehend the world and human life
and to interpret these through art. He did not go into bondage under the
authority of the ancients; but he found their methods right, and he
endeavored to work as they had worked. For a time the reaction carried
him too far: in seeking for what is general, he sometimes passed on to
what is abstract, and so was forced into the error of offering symbols
to represent these abstractions, instead of bodying forth his ideas in
imaginative creations. But in the noble drama of 'Iphigenie,' in the
epic-idyll of 'Hermann und Dorothea,' and in many of the ballads written
during his period of close companionship with Schiller, we have examples
of art at once modern in sentiment and classical in method.

Goethe's faith in the methods of classical art never passed away, but
his narrow exclusiveness yielded. He became, with certain guiding
principles which served as a control, a great eclectic, appropriating to
his own uses whatever he perceived to be excellent. As in 'Hermann und
Dorothea' he unites the influences of Greek art with true German
feeling, so in his collection of short lyrics, the 'West-Oestlicher
Divan' (West-Eastern Divan), he brings together the genius of the Orient
and that of the Western world, and sheds over both the spiritual
illumination of the wisdom of his elder years. Gradually his creative
powers waned, but he was still interested in all--except perhaps
politics--that can concern the mind; he was still the greatest of
critics, entering with his intelligence into everything and
understanding everything, as nearly universal in his sympathies as a
human mind can be. The Goethe of these elder years is seen to most
advantage in the 'Conversations with Eckermann.'

The most invulnerable of Goethe's writings are his lyrical poems;
against the best of these, criticism can allege nothing. They need no
interpreter. But the reader who studies them in chronological o