dia on Thursday; his mother is making a
brave fight of it, poor soul! I met them all at my aunt Siddons's
last night; she was remarkably well, and "charming," as she styles
herself when that is the case. Good-by. Always affectionately
yours,

FANNY.

I suppose it is one of the peculiarities of the real poetical
temperament to receive, as it were, a double impression of its own
phenomena--one through the senses, affections, and passions, and one
through the imagination--and to have a perpetual tendency to make
intellectual capital of the experiences of its own sensuous,
sentimental, and passionate nature. In the above letter, written so many
years ago, I have used the term _experimentalizing_ with his own nature
as the process of a poet's mind; but though self-consciousness and
self-observation are almost inseparable from the poetical organization,
Goethe is the only instance I know of what could, with any propriety, be
termed self-experimentalizing--he who wrung the heart and turned the
head of the whole reading Europe of his day by his own love passages
with Madame Kestner transcribed into "The Sorrows of Werther."

Self-illustration is perhaps a better term for the result of that
passionate egotism which is so strong an element in the nature of most
poets, and the secret of so much of their power. _Ils s'interessent
tellement a ce qui les regarde_, that they interest us profoundly in it
too, and by the law of our common nature, and the sympathy that pervades
it, their great difference from their kind serves but to enforce their
greater likeness to it.

Goethe's nature, however, was not at all a predominantly passionate one;
so much the contrary, indeed, that one hardly escapes the impression all
through his own record of his life that he _felt_ through his
overmastering intellect rather than his heart; and that he analyzed too
well the processes of his own feelings ever to have been carried by them
beyond the permission of his will, or out of sight of that aesthetic
self-culture, that development, which really seems to have been his
prevailing passion. A strong histrionic vein mixes, too, with his more
imaginative mental qualities, and perpetually reveals itself in his
assumption of fictitious characters, in his desire for producing
"situations" in his daily life, and in his conscious "effects" upon
those whom he sought to impress.