The retirement promised him after the completion of his educational duties was given him at once, and since he received a more than promised alleviation of his domestic circumstances, he led, for nearly forty years, a life of complete conformity to his disposition and to his wishes.

The influence of Wieland on the public was uninterrupted and permanent.  He educated his generation up to himself, giving to the taste and to the judgment of his contemporaries a decided trend, so that his merits have already been sufficiently recognized, appraised, and even portrayed.  In many a work on German literature he is discussed as honorably as judiciously; I need only recall the laudations which Kuettner, Eschenburg, Manso, and Eichhorn have bestowed upon him.

And whence came the profound influence which he exercised on the Germans?  It was a result of the excellence and of the openness of his nature.  In him man and author had completely interpenetrated; he wrote poetry as a living soul, and lived the poet’s life.  In verse and prose he never hid what was at the instant in his mind and what each time he felt, so that judging he wrote and writing he judged.  From the fertility of his mind sprang the fertility of his pen.

I do not employ the term “pen” as a rhetorical phrase; here it is valid in the strictest sense, and if a pious reverence pays homage to many an author by seeking to gain possession of the quill with which he formed his works, the quill of which Wieland availed himself, would surely be worthy of this distinction above many another.  For the fact that he wrote everything with his own hand and most beautifully, and, at the same time, with freedom and with thoughtfulness; that he ever had before him what he had written, carefully examining, changing, improving, indefatigably fashioning and refashioning, never weary even of repeatedly transcribing voluminous works—­this gave to his productions the delicacy, the gracefulness, the clearness, the natural elegance which can be bestowed on a work already completed, not by effort, but by unruffled, inspired attention.

This careful preparation of his writings had its origin in a happy conviction which apparently came to him toward the end of his residence in Switzerland, when impatience at production had in some measure subsided, and when the desire to present a perfected result to the public had become more decidedly and more obviously active.

Since, then, in him the man and the poet were a single individuality, we shall also portray the latter when we speak of the former.  Irritability and versatility, the accompaniments of poetical and of rhetorical talents, dominated him to a high degree, but an acquired rather than an innate moderation kept them in equilibrium.  Our friend was capable of enthusiasm in highest measure, and in youth he surrendered himself wholly to it, the more actively and assiduously since, in his case, for several years that happy period was prolonged when within himself the youth feels the worth and the dignity of the most excellent, be it attainable or not.