ary even
of repeatedly transcribing voluminous works--this gave to his
productions the delicacy, the gracefulness, the clearness, the natural
elegance which can be bestowed on a work already completed, not by
effort, but by unruffled, inspired attention.

This careful preparation of his writings had its origin in a happy
conviction which apparently came to him toward the end of his residence
in Switzerland, when impatience at production had in some measure
subsided, and when the desire to present a perfected result to the
public had become more decidedly and more obviously active.

Since, then, in him the man and the poet were a single individuality, we
shall also portray the latter when we speak of the former. Irritability
and versatility, the accompaniments of poetical and of rhetorical
talents, dominated him to a high degree, but an acquired rather than an
innate moderation kept them in equilibrium. Our friend was capable of
enthusiasm in highest measure, and in youth he surrendered himself
wholly to it, the more actively and assiduously since, in his case, for
several years that happy period was prolonged when within himself the
youth feels the worth and the dignity of the most excellent, be it
attainable or not.

In that pure and happy field of the golden age, in that paradise of
innocence, he dwelt longer than others. The house where he was born, in
which a cultivated clergyman ruled as father; the ancient,
linden-embowered monastery of Bergen on the Elbe, where a pious
teacher kept up his patriarchal activity; Tuebingen, still monastic
in its essential form; those simple Swiss dwellings about which
the brooks murmured, which the lakes laved, and which the cliffs
surrounded--everywhere he found another Delphi, everywhere the groves in
which as a mature and cultivated youth he continued to revel even yet.
There he was powerfully attracted by the monuments of the manly
innocence of the Greeks which have been left us. Cyrus, Araspes,
Panthea, and forms of equal loftiness revived in him; he felt the spirit
of Plato weaving within him; he felt that he needed that spirit to
reproduce those pictures for himself and for others--so much the more
since he desired not so keenly to evoke poetic phantoms as, rather, to
create a moral influence for actual beings.

Yet the very fact that he had the good fortune to dwell so protractedly
in these loftier realms, and that he could long regard as the most
perfect verity all tha