ering and
troweling, and would not let men pass for his rubbish, turns out
to have built of mere coagulated froth, and vanishes with his
edifice, traceless, silently, or amid hootings illimitable;
while again that other still man, by the word of his mouth, by
the very look of his face, was scattering influences, as _seeds_
are scattered, "to be found flourishing as a banyan grove after a
thousand years." I beg your pardon for all this preaching, if it
be superfluous impute it to no miserable motive.

Your objections to Goethe are very natural, and even bring you
nearer me: nevertheless, I am by no means sure that it were not
your wisdom, at this moment, to set about learning the German
Language, with a view towards studying _him_ mainly! I do not
assert this; but the truth of it would not surprise me. Believe
me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than I; nay, I
often feel as if I were far too much so: but John Knox himself,
could he have seen the peaceable impregnable _fidelity_ of that
man's mind, and how to him also Duty was _infinite,_--Knox would
have passed on, wondering not reproaching. But I will tell you
in a word why I like Goethe: his is the only _healthy_ mind,
of any extent, that I have discovered in Europe for long
generations; it was he that first convincingly proclaimed to me
(convincingly, for I saw it _done_): Behold, even in this
scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but
hunger and cant, it is still possible that Man be a Man! For
which last Evangel, the confirmation and rehabilitation of all
other Evangels whatsoever, how can I be too grateful? On the
whole, I suspect you yet know only Goethe the Heathen (Ethnic);
but you will know Goethe the Christian by and by, and like that
one far better. Rich showed me a Compilation* in green cloth
boards that you had beckoned across the water: pray read the
fourth volume of that, and let a man of your clearness of feeling
say whether that was a Parasite or a Prophet.--And then as to
"misery" and the other dark ground on which you love to see
genius paint itself,--alas! consider whether misery is not _ill
health_ too; also whether good fortune is not worse to bear than
bad; and on the whole whether the glorious serene summer is not
greater than the wildest hurricane,--as Light, the Naturalists
say, is stronger a thousand times than Lightning. And so I
appeal to Philip sober;--and indeed have hardly said as much