Weimar, November 23, 1831.  To begin with, let me tell you that I have retreated into my cloister cell, where the sun, which is just now rising, shines horizontally into my room, and does not leave me till he sets, so that he is often uncomfortably importunate—­so much so that for a time I really have to shut him out.

Further, I have to mention that a new edition of the “Iphigenia in Aulis” of Euripides has once more turned my attention to that incomparable Greek poet.  Of course, his great and unique talent excited my admiration as of old, but what has now mainly attracted me is the element, as boundless as it is potent, in which he moves.

Among the Greek localities and their mass of primeval, mythological legends, he sails and swims, like a cannon-ball on a quick-silver sea, and cannot sink, even if he wished.  Everything is ready to his hand—­subject matter, contents, circumstances, relations.  He has only to set to work in order to bring forward his subjects and characters in the simplest way, or to render the most complicated limitations even more complex, and then finally and symmetrically, to our complete satisfaction, either to unravel or cut the knot.

I shall not quit him all this winter.  We have translations enough which will warrant our presumption in looking into the original.  When the sun shines into my warm room, and I am aided by the stores of knowledge acquired in days long gone by, I shall, at any rate, fare better than I should, at this moment, among the newly discovered ruins of Messene and Megalopolis.

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Poetry and Truth from My Own Life

As “Werther” and “Wilhelm Meister” belong to the earlier and to the middle periods of Goethe’s literary activity, so the following selections fall naturally into the last division of his life.  The death of Schiller in 1805 had given a blow to his affections which even his warm relationship with other friends could not replace, and hereafter he begins to concentrate more and more upon himself to the completion of those works which he had had in mind and preparation through so many years, the greatest of which was to be the “Faust.”  In “Poetry and Truth from My Own Life,” which appeared in 1811-14, he was actuated by the desire of supplying some kind of a key to the collected edition of his works that had been published in 1808; and whatever faults, or errors, it may contain as a history, as a piece of writing it is finely characteristic of the ease and simplicity of his later style.

I.—­Birth and Childhood

On August 28, 1749, at midday, I came into the world at Frankfort-on-Maine.  Our house was situated in a street called the Stag-Ditch.  Formerly the street had been a ditch, in which stags were kept.  On the second floor of the dwelling was a room called the garden-room, because there they had endeavoured to supply the want of a garden by means of a few plants placed before a window.  As I grew older, it was there that I made my somewhat sentimental retreat, for from thence might be viewed a beautiful and fertile plain.