life and thought of the epochs of Sophocles or Shakespeare; but, besides that it may be a means of preparation for such epochs, it does really constitute, if many share in it, a quickening and sustaining atmosphere of great value.  Such an atmosphere the many-sided learning and the long and widely combined critical effort of Germany formed for Goethe, when he lived and worked.  There was no national glow of life and thought there as in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth.  That was the poet’s weakness.  But there was a sort of equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans.  That was his strength.  In the England of the first quarter of this century there was neither a national glow of life and thought, such as we had in the age of Elizabeth, nor yet a culture and a force of learning and criticism such as were to be found in Germany.  Therefore the creative power of poetry wanted, for success in the highest sense, materials and a basis; a thorough interpretation of the world was necessarily denied to it.

At first sight it seems strange that out of the immense stir of the French Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of genius equal to that which came out of the stir of the great productive time of Greece, or out of that of the Renascence, with its powerful episode the Reformation.  But the truth is that the stir of the French Revolution took a character which essentially distinguished it from such movements as these.  These were, in the main, disinterestedly intellectual and spiritual movements; movements in which the human spirit looked for its satisfaction in itself and in the increased play of its own activity.  The French Revolution took a political, practical character.  The movement, which went on in France under the old regime, from 1700 to 1789, was far more really akin than that of the Revolution itself to the movement of the Renascence; the France of Voltaire and Rousseau told far more powerfully upon the mind of Europe than the France of the Revolution.  Goethe reproached this last expressly with having “thrown quiet culture back.”  Nay, and the true key to how much in our Byron, even in our Wordsworth, is this!—­that they had their source in a great movement of feeling, not in a great movement of mind.  The French Revolution, however,—­that object of so much blind love and so much blind hatred,—­found undoubtedly its motive-power in the intelligence of men, and not in their practical sense; this is what distinguishes it from the English Revolution of Charles the First’s time.  This is what makes it a more spiritual event than our Revolution, an event of much more powerful and world-wide interest, though practically less successful; it appeals to an order of ideas which are universal, certain, permanent. 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational? 1642 asked of a thing, Is it legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it according to conscience?  This is the English fashion, a fashion to be treated, within