Weimar, December 25, 1829.  Lately by accident I fell in with “The Vicar of Wakefield” and felt constrained to read it again from beginning to end, impelled not a little by the lively consciousness of all that I have owed to the author for the last seventy years.  It would not be possible to estimate the influence of Goldsmith and Sterne, exercised on me just at the chief point of my development.  This high, benevolent irony, this gentleness to all opposition, this equanimity under every change, and whatever else all the kindred virtues may be called—­such things were a most admirable training for me, and surely these are the sentiments which, in the end, lead us back from all the mistaken paths of life.  By the way, it is strange that Yorick should incline rather to that which has no form, while Goldsmith is all form, as I myself aspired to be when the worthy Germans had convinced themselves that the peculiarity of true humour is to have no form.

Weimar, February 15, 1830.  As to the title, “Poetry and Truth,” of my autobiography, it is certainly somewhat paradoxical.  I adopted it because the public always cherishes doubt as to the truth of such biographical attempts.  My sincere effort was to express the genuine truth which had prevailed throughout my life.  Does not the most ordinary chronicle necessarily embody something of the spirit of the time in which it was written?  Will not the fourteenth century hand down the tradition of a comet more ominously than the nineteenth?  Nay, in the same town you will hear one version of an incident in the morning, and another in the evening.

All that belongs to the narrator and the narrative I included under the word Dichtung (poetry), so that I could for my own purpose avail myself of the truth of which I was conscious.  In every history, even if it be diplomatically written, we always see the nation, the party of the writer, peering through.  How different is the accent in which the French describe English history from that of the English themselves!

Remember that with every breath we draw, an ethereal stream of Lethe runs through our whole being, so that we have but a partial recollection of our joys, and scarcely any of our sorrows.  I have always known how to value, and use, this gift of God.

IV.—­The Birth of “Iphigenia"

Weimar, March 31, 1831.  I have received a delightful letter from Mendelssohn, dated Rome, March 5, which gives the most transparent picture of that rare young man.  About him we need cherish no further care.  The fine swimming-jacket of his genius will carry him safely through the waves and surf of the dreaded barbarism.

Now, you well remember that I have always passionately adopted the cause of the minor third, and was angry that you theoretical cheap-jacks would not allow it to be a donum naturae.  Certainly a wire or piece of cat-gut is not so precious that nature should exclusively confide to it her harmonies.  Man is worth more, and nature has given him the minor third, to enable him to express with cordial delight to himself that which he cannot name, and that for which he longs.