He was no agitator, no revolutionist; he had no faith in violent measures.  Human welfare, he judged, is not to be advanced in that way; is less dependent on forms of polity than on the life within.  But if the test of patriotism is the service rendered to one’s country, who more patriotic than he?  Lucky for us and the world that he persisted to serve her in his own way, and not as the agitators claimed that he should.  It was clear to him then, and must be clear to us now, that he could not have been what they demanded, and at the same time have given to his country and the world what he did.

As a courtier and favorite of Fortune, it was inevitable that Goethe should have enemies.  They have done what they could to blacken his name; and to this day the shadow they have cast upon it in part remains.  But of this be sure, that no selfish, loveless egoist could have had and retained such friends.  The man whom the saintly Fraulein von Klettenberg chose for her friend, whom clear-sighted, stern-judging Herder declared that he loved as he did his own soul; the man whose thoughtful kindness is celebrated by Herder’s incomparable wife, whom Karl August and the Duchess Luise cherished as a brother; the man whom children everywhere welcomed as their ready playfellow and sure ally, of whom pious Jung Stilling lamented that admirers of Goethe’s genius knew so little of the goodness of his heart,—­can this have been a bad man, heartless, cold?

II.  THE WRITER.

I have said that to Goethe, above all writers, belongs the distinction of having excelled, not experimented merely,—­that, others have also done,—­but excelled in many distinct kinds.  To the lyrist he added the dramatist, to the dramatist the novelist, to the novelist the mystic seer, and to all these the naturalist and scientific discoverer.  The history of literature exhibits no other instance in which a great poet has supplemented his proper orbit with so wide an epicyle.

In poetry, as in science, the ground of his activity was a passionate love of Nature, which dates from his boyhood.  At the age of fifteen, recovering from a sickness caused by disappointment in a boyish affair of the heart, he betook himself with his sketch-book to the woods.  “In the farthest depth of the forest,” he says, “I sought out a solemn spot, where ancient oaks and beeches formed a shady retreat.  A slight declivity of the soil made the merit of the ancient boles more conspicuous.  This space was inclosed by a thicket of bushes, between which peeped moss-covered rocks, mighty and venerable, affording a rapid fall to an affluent brook.”

The sketches made of these objects at that early age could have had no artistic value, although the methodical father was careful to mount and preserve them.  But what the pencil, had it been the pencil of the greatest master, could never glean from scenes like these, what art could never grasp, what words can never formulate, the heart of the boy then imbibed, assimilated, resolved in his innermost being.  There awoke in him then those mysterious feelings, those unutterable yearnings, that pensive joy in the contemplation of Nature, which leavened all his subsequent life, and the influence of which is so perceptible in his poetry, especially in his lyrics....