Kerner (Justinus Andreas, 1786-1862) had a delicate lyrical vein of pathos, almost quaint enough sometimes to be humorous in effect. The following piece, translated by the sure hand of our American Bryant, is a fair specimen: In yonder mill I rested, And sat me down to look As in a dream before me, The tree through all its fibres These solemn words I heard: "O thou who wanderest hither, A timely guest thou art! For thee this cruel engine Is passing through my heart. When soon, in earth's still bosom, This wood shall form the chamber Whose walls shall close thee in." Four planks-I saw and shuddered - Then, as I tried to answer, At once the wheel was still. The same translating touch, that of Bryant, attracts us to one other lyrical piece, with which we bring our "Interlude of Poets" to its close. This is from Niclas Müller (1809-1875). It is entitled, The Paradise of Tears: Beside the River of Tears, with branches low, On rolls the stream with a perpetual sigh; Then comes a child, whose face is like the sun, Where fall the tears of love, the rose appears, And where the ground is bright with friendship's tears, Spring, glittering with the cheerful drops like dew. The souls of mourners, all whose tears are dried, There every heart rejoins its kindred heart; Our "Interlude of Poets" is done. It was a concord of voices commingling to usher and herald the great singer Goethe. IX. GOETH E. 1749-1832. IF Luther was the morning, Goethe was the meridian, sun of German literature. Schiller, it might almost be said, rising later and setting earlier, rode rival by Goethe's side through the dazzling zenith arcs of the sky. But these two orbs, both so large and so splendid, were not mutually equal, either in largeness or in splendor. Schiller was the less luminary; and of him it is praise enough to say that, shining so near to Goethe, he did not lose, did not pale, his lustre in the blaze of the superior ray. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, in Frankfort-onthe-Main, almost exactly in the middle of the eighteenth century. His parentage was excellent on both sides. His father was a tailor's son who had raised himself to some civic distinction, and his mother was daughter to the chief magistrate of Frankfort. The father was more than twice as old as the mother when they married; she indeed was a blooming young creature of only seventeen years of age. Wolfgang was the first-born of the pair. The mother was but eighteen years older than the son. There thus came to be a time when the two could share between them a fellowship approaching in kind that natural between those nearly equal in age. This, the temperament of the mother-happy, equable, serene, perennially young-made additionally easy. Such a mother was an immeasurable blessing to Goethe. The father was a very different being. Stern, stiff, opinionated, a precisian, a pedant, he was well fitted to balance the equipment of the mother with qualities needful for the training of the boy to become the symmetrical, all-accomplished Goethe whom we know. Remarkable among the traits of the elder Goethe's character as disciplinarian to his son was his way of insisting that whatever Wolfgang began he should go on with till he carried it to completion. From my father I derive my frame and the steady guidance of my life, and from my dear little mother my happy disposition and my love of story-telling. So Goethe says and sings in one of his poems. The early years of Goethe did not pass without yielding to the precocious boy much premature experience of life. This, in such form and degree as he thought it comportable with his dignity to indulge, he has himself shadowed forth to the public, directly in his autobiography, and indirectly in his autobiographical "novel," the Wilhelm Meister. He contracted soil to the innocence of youth-soil which, alas, the practice of manhood and of old age rather inveterated than removed. But the father, meantime, did not remit his intellectual demands on his boy; and his boy was still able to respond, for he was magnificently endowed from nature to bear, without obvious loss, heavy overdrafts on the precious reserves of health and strength and youth. Goethe entered upon man's estate ideally well furnished to run the long career that lay before him of successful and lauded achievement. It is even, by contrast with the general lot of the race, almost depressing to contemplate the worldly prosperity that arched, like one day-long cloudless heaven, over the whole life of this man. But, stay!-when is it well to be envious? When can you be sure that you are envious wisely? Goethe, the well-attempered, the prosperous, the fortunate, of whom, when he spoke, listeners said, as those said of King Herod, "It is the voice of a god and not of a man," he, Goethe, who smiled and smiled, as if inaccessible to pain, like the easy Olympian divinities of Epicurus-this Goethe, what did he say? He said to Eckermann: I have ever been esteemed one of Fortune's chiefest favorites; nor can I complain of the course my life has taken. Yet, truly, there has been nothing but toil and care; and, in my seventy-fifth year, I may say that I have never had four weeks of genuine pleasure. Let us deal gently, while we deal justly, with a happy man of this world, who, at seventy-five years of age, has to bear of himself a testimony like that. Young Goethe went at sixteen years of age to Leipsic, to continue an education nobly commenced at home. At Leipsic, he devoted himself perhaps more to the seeing and the enjoying of life than to the prosecution of study. He had thus early formed his life-long habit of turning to literary account his own experiences, and his observations of himself and of the world; and his three years at Leipsic gave him both the matter and the leisure for writing, besides a score or so of erotic effusions, two plays-one of which, The Fellow-Culprits, the great man himself retained to old age a sentiment of respectful fondness for, which the critics and the general public have hardly shared with the illustrious author. Recalled from Leipsic, young Goethe, after an eighteen months' interval of unwilling sojourn at home, was entered, at twenty-one years of age, a student in the University of Strasburg. This change in situation was of the greatest importance to Goethe. At Strasburg, as has already in a preceding chapter appeared, he met in Herder his own intellectual destiny. Goethe never lost the impulse and direction then given his genius from Herder's overmastering hand. His stay in Strasburg was for scarcely more than eighteen months; but they were eighteen months to Goethe of the most pregnant experience. It was while a student at Strasburg that this brilliant, gay, and handsome youth, prepared beforehand for it by repeated experiments in lovemaking and love-breaking, took on himself to act, in real life, almost with conscious self-indulgence, half play, half earnest, the part of Thornhill in Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. The circumstances of this case are historic, they likewise belong to literature, and to Goethe's own part in literature; all this, for Goethe has recounted them at length in his autobiography. We may thus, at the present point, and that in the very act of proceeding with our sketch begun of Goethe's life, enter immediately upon our presentation of Goethe's literary works. Goethe's autobiography, published under the title of Truth and Fiction relating to My Life (so the German expression is usually translated, but Poetry and Truth out of My Life, would be more literal), is generally considered, and justly, one of its author's most important productions. It was written in the full mellow ripeness of Goethe's unwithering age, and it constitutes as noteworthy a self-portrayal as exists anywhere in literature. Goethe himself, it must be remembered, is of at least as much consequence in the world of intellect as is the total sum of all the man's writings, apart from the man. The key to Goethe's literary product is Goethe himself. Never was the personality of a man of letters more inseparable than is Goethe's from the books that he wrote. Hence the capital importance, in order to gaining a clear and true idea of Goethe the author, of |