His literary works hitherto had been spasmodic and lawless effusions, the escapes of a gushing, turbulent youth.  In Rome he had learned the sacred significance of art.  The consciousness of his true vocation had been awakened in him; and to that, on the eve of his fortieth year, he thenceforth solemnly devoted the remainder of his life.  He obtained release from the more onerous of his official engagements, retaining only such functions as accorded with his proper calling as a man of letters and of science.  He renounced his daily intercourse with Frau von Stein, though still retaining and manifesting his unabated friendship for the woman to whom in former years he had devoted so large a portion of his time, and employed himself in giving forth those immortal words which have settled forever his place among the stars of first magnitude in the intellectual world.

Noticeable and often noted was the charm and (when arrived to maturity) the grand effect of his personal presence.  Physical beauty is not the stated accompaniment, nor even the presumable adjunct, of intellectual greatness.  In Goethe, as perhaps in no other, the two were combined.  A wondrous presence!—­on this point the voices are one and the witnesses many.  “Goethe was with us,” so writes Heinse to one of his friends; “a beautiful youth of twenty-five, full of genius and force from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot; a heart full of feeling, a spirit full of fire, who with eagle wings ruit immensus ore profundo.”  Jacobi writes:  “The more I think of it, the more impossible it seems to me to communicate to any one who has not seen Goethe any conception of this extraordinary creature of God.”  Lavater says:  “Unspeakably sweet, an indescribable appearance, the most terrible and lovable of men.”  Hufeland, the chief medical celebrity of Germany, describes his appearance in early manhood:  “Never shall I forget the impression which he made as ‘Orestes’ in Greek costume.  You thought you beheld an Apollo.  Never was seen in any man such union of physical and spiritual perfection and beauty as at that time in Goethe.”  More remarkable still is the testimony of Wieland, who had reason to be offended, having been before their acquaintance the subject of Goethe’s sharp satire.  But immediately at their first meeting, sitting at table “by the side,” he says, “of this glorious youth, I was radically cured of all my vexation....  Since this morning,” he wrote to Jacobi, “my soul is as full of Goethe as a dewdrop is of the morning sun.”  And to Zimmermann:  “He is in every respect the greatest, best, most splendid human being that ever God created.”  Goethe was then twenty-six.  Henry Crabbe Robinson, who saw him at the age of fifty-two, reports him one of the most “oppressively handsome” men he had ever seen, and speaks particularly as all who have described him speak, of his wonderfully brilliant eyes.  Those eyes, we are told, had lost nothing of their lustre, nor his head its natural covering, at the age of eighty.