Two circumstances, meanwhile, we have remarked, which to us throw light on the nature of his original faculty for Poetry, and go far to convince us of the Mastery he has attained in that art:  these we may here state briefly, for the judgment of such as already know his writings, or the help of such as are beginning to know them.  The first is his singularly emblematic intellect; his perpetual never-failing tendency to transform into shape, into life, the opinion, the feeling that may dwell in him; which, in its widest sense, we reckon to be essentially the grand problem of the Poet.  We do not mean mere metaphor and rhetorical trope:  these are but the exterior concern, often but the scaffolding of the edifice, which is to be built up (within our thoughts) by means of them.  In allusions, in similitudes, though no one known to us is happier, many are more copious than Goethe.  But we find this faculty of his in the very essence of his intellect; and trace it alike in the quiet cunning epigram, the allegory, the quaint device, reminding us of some Quarles or Bunyan; and in the Fausts, the Tassos, the Mignons, which in their pure and genuine personality, may almost remind us of the Ariels and Hamlets of Shakespeare.  Everything has form, everything has visual existence; the poet’s imagination bodies forth the forms of things unseen, his pen turns them to shape.  This, as a natural endowment, exists in Goethe, we conceive, to a very high degree.

The other characteristic of his mind, which proves to us his acquired mastery in art, as this shows us the extent of his original capacity for it, is his wonderful variety, nay universality; his entire freedom from the Mannerism.  We read Goethe for years, before we come to see wherein the distinguishing peculiarity of his understanding, of his disposition, even of his way of writing, consists.  It seems quite a simple style that of his; remarkable chiefly for its calmness, its perspicuity, in short its commonness; and yet it is the most uncommon of all styles:  we feel as if every one might imitate it, and yet it is inimitable.  As hard is it to discover in his writings,—­though there also, as in every man’s writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded,—­what sort of spiritual construction he has, what are his temper, his affections, his individual specialties.  For all lives freely within him:  Philina and Clanchen, Mephistopheles and Mignon, are alike indifferent, or alike dear to him; he is of no sect or caste:  he seems not this man or that man, but a man.  We reckon this to be the characteristic of a Master in Art of any sort; and true especially of all great Poets.  How true is it of Shakespeare and Homer!  Who knows, or can figure what the Man Shakespeare was, by the first, by the twentieth perusal of his works?  He is a Voice coming to us from the Land of Melody:  his old brick dwelling-place, in the mere earthly