Moliere suffer? What Rousseau
and Voltaire? Byron was driven from England by evil tongues, and would
have fled to the end of the world, if an early death had not delivered
him from the Philistines and their hatred.

"And if it were only the narrow-minded masses that persecuted noble men!
But no! one gifted man and one genius persecutes another; Platen
scandalizes Heine, and Heine Platen, and each seeks to make the other
hateful; while the world is wide enough for all to live and to let live;
and every one has an enemy in his own talent, who gives him quite enough
to do.

"To write military songs, and sit in a room! That forsooth was my duty!
To have written them in the bivouac, when the horses at the enemy's
outposts are heard neighing at night, would have been well enough;
however, that was not my life and not my business, but that of Theodore
Koerner. His war-songs suit him perfectly. But to me, who am not of a
warlike nature, and who have no warlike sense, war-songs would have been
a mask which would have fitted my face very badly.

"I have never affected anything in my poetry. I have never uttered
anything which I have not experienced, and which has not urged me to
production. I have composed love-songs only when I have loved. How could
I write songs of hatred without hating! And, between ourselves, I did
not hate the French, although I thanked God that we were free from them.
How could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate
a nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth, and to which I
owe so great a part of my own cultivation?

"Altogether," continued Goethe, "national hatred is something peculiar.
You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the
lowest degree of culture. But there is a degree where it vanishes
altogether, and where one stands to a certain extent above nations, and
feels the weal or woe of a neighboring people, as if it had happened to
one's own. This degree of culture was conformable to my nature, and I
had become strengthened in it long before I had reached my sixtieth
year."

* * * * *

1832.

_Sunday_, March 11.--The conversation turned upon the great men who had
lived before Christ, among the Chinese, the Indians, the Persians, and
the Greeks; and it was remarked, that the divine power had been as
operative in them as in some of the great Jews of the Old Testament. We
then came to the question how