but to have struck out such a path is worth more than reaching the end of any other; and you, like Achilles in the Iliad, made your choice between Phthia and immortality.  Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and had you from infancy been placed in the midst of choice natural surroundings and of an idealizing Art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps even have been rendered entirely superfluous.  Had such been the case, you would, on your first perception of things, have taken up the form of the Necessary, and the grand style would have been developed in you with your first experience.  But being born a German, and your Grecian spirit having been cast in this Northern mold, you had no other choice but either to become a Northern artist; or, by the help of the power of thought, to supply your imagination with what reality withheld from it, and thus, as it were, to produce a Greek from within by a reasoning process.  At that period of life when the soul, surrounded by defective forms, constructs its own inward nature out of outward circumstances, you had already assumed a wild Northern nature, and your victorious genius, rising above its materials, then discovered this want from within, and became convinced of it from without through its acquaintance with Greek nature.  You had then, in accordance with the better model which your developing mind created for itself, to correct your old and less perfect nature, and this could be effected only by following leading ideas.  However, this logical direction which a reflecting mind is forced to pursue, is not very compatible with the esthetic state of mind by which alone a reflecting mind becomes creative.  You, therefore, had one task more:  for inasmuch as your mind had passed over from intuition to abstraction, so you had now to go back and retranslate ideas into intuitions, and to change thoughts into feelings; for it is only through the latter that genius can be productive.

It is somewhat in this manner that I imagine the course pursued by your mind, and whether I am right or not you will yourself know best.  However, what you yourself can scarcely be aware of (as genius ever remains the greatest mystery to itself) is the beautiful harmony between your philosophical instinct and the purest results of your speculative reason.  Upon a first view it does indeed seem as if there could not be any greater opposites than the speculative mind which proceeds from unity, and the intuitive mind which proceeds from variety.  If, however, the former seeks experience with a pure and truthful spirit, and the latter seeks law with self-active and free power of thought, then the two cannot fail to meet each other half way.  It is true that the intuitive mind has only to deal with individuals, the speculative mind only with species.  But if the intuitive mind is that of a genius and seeks the nature of the Necessary in experience, then individuals will be produced, it is true, but they will possess the character of the species; and again, if the speculative mind is that of a genius, and does not lose sight of experience when rising above it, then it will indeed produce species only, but with the possibility of individual life and with a well-founded relation to actual objects.