Wordsworth; in the third canto of “Childe Harold,” and in much of Shelley; but there is none in the most admirable compositions of Goethe; wherein life, though admirably comprehended and reproduced in each of its successive manifestations, is never understood as a whole.  Goethe is the poet of details, not of unity; of analysis, not of synthesis.  None so able to investigate details; to set off and embellish minute and apparently trifling points; none throw so beautiful a light on separate parts; but the connecting link escapes him.  His works resemble a magnificent encyclopaedia, unclassified.  He has felt everything but he has never felt the whole.  Happy in detecting a ray of the beautiful upon the humblest blade of grass gemmed with dew; happy in seizing the poetic elements of an incident the most prosaic in appearance—­he was incapable of tracing all to a common source, and recomposing the grand ascending scale in which, to quote a beautiful expression of Herder’s “every creature is a numerator of the grand denominator, Nature.”  How, indeed, should he comprehend these things, he who had no place in his works or in his poet’s heart for humanity, by the light of which conception only can the true worth of sublunary things be determined?  “Religion and politics,” [Footnote:  Goethe and his Contemporaries.] said he, “are a troubled element for art.  I have always kept myself aloof from them as much as possible.”  Questions of life and death for the millions were agitated around him; Germany re-echoed to the war songs of Korner; Fichte, at the close of one of his lectures, seized his musket, and joined the volunteers who were hastening (alas! what have not the Kings made of that magnificent outburst of nationality!) to fight the battles of their fatherland.  The ancient soil of Germany thrilled beneath their tread; he, an artist, looked on unmoved; his heart knew no responsive throb to the emotion that shook his country; his genius, utterly passive, drew apart from the current that swept away entire races.  He witnessed the French Revolution in all its terrible grandeur, and saw the old world crumble beneath its strokes; and while all the best and purest spirits of Germany, who had mistaken the death-agony of the old world for the birth-throes of a new, were wringing their hands at the spectacle of dissolution, he saw in it only the subject of a farce.  He beheld the glory and the fall of Napoleon; he witnessed the reaction of down-trodden nationalities—­sublime prologue of the grand epopee of the peoples destined sooner or later to be unfolded--and remained a cold spectator.  He had neither learned to esteem men, to better them, nor even to suffer with them.  If we except the beautiful type of Berlichingen, a poetic inspiration of his youth, man, as the creature of thought and action; the artificer of the future, so nobly sketched by Schiller in his dramas, has no representative in his works.  He has carried something—­of this nonchalance even into the manner in which his