Such is our conviction or persuasion with regard to the poetry of Goethe.  Could we demonstrate this opinion to be true, could we even exhibit it with that degree of clearness and consistency which it has attained in our own thoughts, Goethe were, on our part, sufficiently recommended to the best attention of all thinking men.  But, unhappily, it is not a subject susceptible of demonstration:  the merits and characteristics of a Poet are not to be set forth by logic; but to be gathered by personal, and as in this case it must be, by deep and careful inspection of his works.  Nay Goethe’s world is everyway so different from ours; it costs us such effort, we have so much to remember, and so much to forget, before we can transfer ourselves in any measure into his peculiar point of vision, that a right study of him, for an Englishman, even of ingenuous, open, inquisitive mind, becomes unusually difficult; for a fixed, decided, contemptuous Englishman, next to impossible.  To a reader of the first class, helps may be given, explanations will remove many a difficulty; beauties that lay hidden may be made apparent; and directions, adapted to his actual position, will at length guide him into the proper tract for such an inquiry.  All this, however, must be a work of progression and detail.  To do our part in it, from time to time, must rank among the best duties of an English Foreign Review.  Meanwhile, our present endeavour limits itself within far narrower bounds.  We cannot aim to make Goethe known, but only to prove that he is worthy of being known; at most, to point out, as it were afar off, the path by which some knowledge of him may be obtained.  A slight glance at his general literary character and procedure, and one or two of his chief productions which throw light on these, must for the present suffice.  A French diplomatic personage, contemplating Goethe’s physiognomy, is said to have observed:  Voila un homme qui a eu beaucoup de chagrins. A truer version of the matter, Goethe himself seems to think, would have been:  Here is a man who has struggled toughly; who has es sich recht sauer werden lassen. Goethe’s life, whether as a writer and thinker, or as a living active man, has indeed been a life of effort, of earnest toilsome endeavour after all excellence.  Accordingly, his intellectual progress, his spiritual and moral history, as it may be gathered from his successive Works, furnishes, with us, no small portion of the pleasure and profit we derive from perusing them.  Participating deeply in all the influences of his age, he has from the first, at every new epoch, stood forth to elucidate the new circumstances of the time; to offer the instruction, the solace, which that time required.  His literary life divides itself into two portions widely different in character:  the products of the first, once so new and original, have long either directly or through the thousand thousand imitations of them, been familiar to us; with the products of the second, equally original,