My cousin Harry sails for India on Thursday; his mother is making a brave fight of it, poor soul!  I met them all at my aunt Siddons’s last night; she was remarkably well, and “charming,” as she styles herself when that is the case.  Good-by.  Always affectionately yours,

FANNY.

I suppose it is one of the peculiarities of the real poetical temperament to receive, as it were, a double impression of its own phenomena—­one through the senses, affections, and passions, and one through the imagination—­and to have a perpetual tendency to make intellectual capital of the experiences of its own sensuous, sentimental, and passionate nature.  In the above letter, written so many years ago, I have used the term experimentalizing with his own nature as the process of a poet’s mind; but though self-consciousness and self-observation are almost inseparable from the poetical organization, Goethe is the only instance I know of what could, with any propriety, be termed self-experimentalizing—­he who wrung the heart and turned the head of the whole reading Europe of his day by his own love passages with Madame Kestner transcribed into “The Sorrows of Werther.”

Self-illustration is perhaps a better term for the result of that passionate egotism which is so strong an element in the nature of most poets, and the secret of so much of their power. Ils s’interessent tellement a ce qui les regarde, that they interest us profoundly in it too, and by the law of our common nature, and the sympathy that pervades it, their great difference from their kind serves but to enforce their greater likeness to it.

Goethe’s nature, however, was not at all a predominantly passionate one; so much the contrary, indeed, that one hardly escapes the impression all through his own record of his life that he felt through his overmastering intellect rather than his heart; and that he analyzed too well the processes of his own feelings ever to have been carried by them beyond the permission of his will, or out of sight of that aesthetic self-culture, that development, which really seems to have been his prevailing passion.  A strong histrionic vein mixes, too, with his more imaginative mental qualities, and perpetually reveals itself in his assumption of fictitious characters, in his desire for producing “situations” in his daily life, and in his conscious “effects” upon those whom he sought to impress.

His genius sometimes reminds me of Ariel—­the subtle spirit who, observing from aloof, as it were (that is, from the infinite distance of his own unmoral, demoniacal nature), the follies and sins and sorrows of humanity, understands them all and sympathizes with none of them; and describes, with equal indifference, the drunken, brutish delight in his music expressed by the coarse Neapolitan buffoons and the savage gorilla, Caliban, and the abject self-reproach and bitter, poignant remorse exhibited by Antonio and his fellow conspirators; telling Prospero that if he saw them he would pity them, and adding, in his passionless perception of their anguish, “I should, sir, were I human.”