ry Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world,
a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest;--guiding
it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the
waste of Time. Fichte discriminates with sharp zeal the _true_ Literary
Man, what we here call the _Hero_ as Man of Letters, from multitudes of
false unheroic. Whoever lives not wholly in this Divine Idea, or living
partially in it, struggles not, as for the one good, to live wholly
in it,--he is, let him live where else he like, in what pomps and
prosperities he like, no Literary Man; he is, says Fichte, a "Bungler,
_Stumper_." Or at best, if he belong to the prosaic provinces, he may
be a "Hodman;" Fichte even calls him elsewhere a "Nonentity," and has
in short no mercy for him, no wish that _he_ should continue happy among
us! This is Fichte's notion of the Man of Letters. It means, in its own
form, precisely what we here mean.

In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred years, by
far the notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte's countryman, Goethe. To
that man too, in a strange way, there was given what we may call a life
in the Divine Idea of the World; vision of the inward divine mystery:
and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises imaged once more as
godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. Illuminated all, not
in fierce impure fire-splendor as of Mahomet, but in mild celestial
radiance;--really a Prophecy in these most unprophetic times; to my
mind, by far the greatest, though one of the quietest, among all the
great things that have come to pass in them. Our chosen specimen of the
Hero as Literary Man would be this Goethe. And it were a very pleasant
plan for me here to discourse of his heroism: for I consider him to be
a true Hero; heroic in what he said and did, and perhaps still more in
what he did not say and did not do; to me a noble spectacle: a great
heroic ancient man, speaking and keeping silence as an ancient Hero, in
the guise of a most modern, high-bred, high-cultivated Man of Letters!
We have had no such spectacle; no man capable of affording such, for the
last hundred and fifty years.

But at present, such is the general state of knowledge about Goethe, it
were worse than useless to attempt speaking of him in this case.
Speak as I might, Goethe, to the great majority of you, would remain
problematic, vague; no impression but a false one could be realized.
Him we must le