om the beginning of the century, have spread among men who are akin
through the Christian faith, and have even permeated humanity as a
whole.

He could not labor long at Erfurt without becoming known to the Duchess
Regent of Weimar, at whose court Count von Dalberg, so active in every
form of good work, did not fail to introduce him. An adequate education
of her princely sons was the chief object of a tender mother, herself
highly cultured, and thus he was called thither to employ his literary
talents and his moral endowments for the best interests of the princely
house, for our weal, and for the weal of all.

The retirement promised him after the completion of his educational
duties was given him at once, and since he received a more than promised
alleviation of his domestic circumstances, he led, for nearly forty
years, a life of complete conformity to his disposition and to his
wishes.

The influence of Wieland on the public was uninterrupted and permanent.
He educated his generation up to himself, giving to the taste and to the
judgment of his contemporaries a decided trend, so that his merits have
already been sufficiently recognized, appraised, and even portrayed. In
many a work on German literature he is discussed as honorably as
judiciously; I need only recall the laudations which Kuettner,
Eschenburg, Manso, and Eichhorn have bestowed upon him.

And whence came the profound influence which he exercised on the
Germans? It was a result of the excellence and of the openness of his
nature. In him man and author had completely interpenetrated; he wrote
poetry as a living soul, and lived the poet's life. In verse and prose
he never hid what was at the instant in his mind and what each time he
felt, so that judging he wrote and writing he judged. From the fertility
of his mind sprang the fertility of his pen.

I do not employ the term "pen" as a rhetorical phrase; here it is valid
in the strictest sense, and if a pious reverence pays homage to many an
author by seeking to gain possession of the quill with which he formed
his works, the quill of which Wieland availed himself, would surely be
worthy of this distinction above many another. For the fact that he
wrote everything with his own hand and most beautifully, and, at the
same time, with freedom and with thoughtfulness; that he ever had
before him what he had written, carefully examining, changing,
improving, indefatigably fashioning and refashioning, never we