“——­ ’s great talents and world-embracing learning might have done much for his country.  But his want of character has deprived the world of such great results, and himself of the esteem of the country.

“We want a man like Lessing.  For how was he great, except in character—­in firmness?  There are many men as clever and as cultivated, but where is such character?

“Many are full of esprit and knowledge, but they are also full of vanity; and that they may shine as wits before the short-sighted multitude, they have no shame or delicacy—­nothing is sacred to them.

“Madame de Genlis was therefore perfectly right when she declaimed against the freedoms and profanities of Voltaire.  Clever as they all may be, the world has derived no profit from them; they afford a foundation for nothing.  Nay, they have been of the greatest injury, since they have confused men and robbed them of their needful support.

“After all, what do we know, and how far can we go with all our wit?

“Man is born not to solve the problems of the universe, but to find out where the problem begins, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible.

“His faculties are not sufficient to measure the actions of the universe; and an attempt to explain the outer world by reason is, with his narrow point of view, but a vain endeavor.  The reason of man and the reason of the Deity are two very different things.

“If we grant freedom to man, there is an end to the omniscience of God; for if the Divinity knows how I shall act, I must act so perforce.  I give this merely as a sign how little we know, and to show that it is not good to meddle with divine mysteries.

“Moreover, we should only utter higher maxims so far as they can benefit the world.  The rest we should keep within ourselves, and they will diffuse over our actions a lustre like the mild radiance of a hidden sun.”

Sunday, December 25.—­“I have of late made an observation, which I will impart to you.

“Everything we do has a result.  But that which is right and prudent does not always lead to good, nor the contrary to what is bad; frequently the reverse takes place.  Some time since, I made a mistake in one of these transactions with booksellers, and was sorry that I had done so.  But now circumstances have so altered, that, if I had not made that very mistake, I should have made a greater one.  Such instances occur frequently in life, and hence we see men of the world, who know this, going to work with great freedom and boldness.”

I was struck by this remark, which was new to me.

I then turned the conversation to some of his works, and we came to the elegy Alexis and Dora.

“In this poem,” said Goethe, “people have blamed the strong, passionate conclusion, and would have liked the elegy to end gently and peacefully, without that outbreak of jealousy; but I could not see that they were right.  Jealousy is so manifestly an ingredient of the affair, that the poem would be incomplete if it were not introduced at all.  I myself knew a young man who, in the midst of his impassioned love for an easily-won maiden, cried out, ’But would she not act to another as she has acted to me?’”