but that the same motives had been already used by the
Germans, without any knowledge that they had been treated in Servia. He
mentioned some poems of his own, and I mentioned some poems by Goethe,
which had occurred to me during the reading.

"The world," said Goethe, "remains always the same; situations are
repeated; one people lives, loves, and feels like another; why should
not one poet write like another? The situations of life are alike; why,
then, should those of poems be unlike?"

"This very similarity in life and sensation," said Riemer, "makes us all
able to appreciate the poetry of other nations. If this were not the
case, we should never know what foreign poems were about."

"I am, therefore," said I, "always surprised at the learned, who seem to
suppose that poetizing proceeds not from life to the poem, but from the
book to the poem. They are always saying, 'He got this here; he got that
there.' If, for instance, they find passages in Shakespeare which are
also to be found in the ancients, they say he must have taken them from
the ancients. Thus there is a situation in Shakespeare, where, on the
sight of a beautiful girl, the parents are congratulated who call her
daughter, and the youth who will lead her home as his bride. And
because the same thing occurs in Homer, Shakespeare, forsooth, has
taken it from Homer. How odd! As if one had to go so far for such
things, and did not have them before one's eyes, feel them and utter
them every day." "Ah, yes," said Goethe, "it is very ridiculous."

"Lord Byron, too," said I, "is no wiser, when he takes _Faust_ to
pieces, and thinks you found one thing here, the other there."

"The greater part of those fine things cited by Lord Byron," said
Goethe, "I have never even read, much less did I think of them, when
I was writing _Faust_. But Lord Byron is great only as a poet; as
soon as he reflects, he is a child. He knows not how to help himself
against the stupid attacks of the same kind made upon him by his own
countrymen. He ought to have expressed himself more strongly against
them. 'What is there is mine,' he should have said, 'and whether I got
it from a book or from life, is of no consequence; the only point is,
whether I have made a right use of it.' Walter Scott used a scene from
my _Egmont_, and he had a right to do so; and because he did it
well, he deserves praise. He has also copied the character of my Mignon
in one of his romances; but whether with e