heroes conceive love.  Goethe’s altar is spread with the choicest flowers, the most exquisite perfumes, the first-fruits of nature; but the Priest is wanting.  In his work of second creation—­for it cannot be denied that such it was—­he has gone through the vast circle of living and visible things; but stopped short before the seventh day.  God withdrew from him before that time; and the creatures the poet has evoked wander within the circle, dumb and prayerless; awaiting until the man shall come to give them a name, and appoint them to a destination.

No, Goethe is not the poet of Pantheism; he is a polytheist in his method as an artist; the pagan poet of modern times.  His world is, above all things, the world of forms:  a multiplied Olympus.  The Mosaic heaven and the Christian are veiled to him.  Like the pagans, he parcels out Nature into fragments, and makes of each a divinity; like them, he worships the sensuous rather than the ideal; he looks, touches, and listens far more than he feels.  And what care and labor are bestowed upon the plastic portion of his art! what importance is given—­I will not say to the objects themselves—­but to the external representation of objects!  Has he not somewhere said that “the beautiful is the result of happy position?"[Footnote:  In the Kunst und Alterthum, I think.]

Under this definition is concealed an entire system of poetic materialism, substituted for the worship of the ideal; involving a whole series of consequences, the logical result of which was to lead Goethe to indifference, that moral suicide of some of the noblest energies of genius.  The absolute concentration of every faculty of observation on each of the objects to be represented, without relation to the ensemble; the entire avoidance of every influence likely to modify the view taken of that object, became in his hands one of the most effective means of art.  The poet, in his eyes, was neither the rushing stream a hundred times broken on its course, that it may carry fertility to the surrounding country; nor the brilliant flame, consuming itself in the light it sheds around while ascending to heaven; but rather the placid lake, reflecting alike the tranquil landscape and the thunder-cloud; its own surface the while unruffled even by the lightest breeze.  A serene and passive calm with the absolute clearness and distinctness of successive impressions, in each of which he was for the time wholly absorbed, are the peculiar characteristics of Goethe.  “I allow the objects I desire to comprehend, to act tranquilly upon me,” said he; “I then observe the impression I have received from them, and I endeavor to render it faithfully.”  Goethe has here portrayed his every feature to perfection.  He was in life such as Madame Von Arnim proposed to represent him after death; a venerable old man, with a serene, almost radiant countenance; clothed in an antique robe, holding a lyre resting on his knees, and listening to the harmonies drawn from it either by the hand of a genius, or the breath of the winds.  The last chords wafted his soul to the East; to the land of inactive contemplation.  It was time:  Europe had become too agitated for him.