position not only of the acknowledged king and patriarch of German literature, but also, as some thought, of the wisest and most serene intellect of Europe, he died so late as 1832, in the eighty-third year of his age. All this, it will be observed, is very different from the life of the prosperous Warwickshire player, whose existence had illustrated the early part of the seventeenth century in England; and necessarily denoted, at the same time, a very different cast of mind and temper.

Accordingly, such descriptions as we have of Goethe from those who knew him best convey the idea of a character notably different from that of the English poet. Of Shakespeare personally we have but one uniform account--that he was a man of gentle presence and disposition, very good company, and of such boundless fluency and intellectual inventiveness in talk, that his hearers could not always stand it, but had sometimes to whistle him down in his flights. In Goethe's case we have two distinct pictures. In youth, as all accounts agree in stating, he was one of the most impetuous, bounding, ennui-dispelling natures that ever broke in upon a society of ordinary mortals assembled to kill time. "He came upon you," said one who knew him well at this period, "like a wolf in the night." The simile is a splendid one, and it agrees wonderfully with the more subdued representations of his early years given by Goethe himself in his Autobiography. Handsome as an Apollo and welcome everywhere, he bore all before him wherever he went; not only by his talent, but also by an exuberance of animal spirits which swept dulness itself along, took the breath of those who relied on sarcasm and their cool heads, inspired life and animation into the whole circle, and most especially delighted the ladies. This vivacity became even, at times, a reckless humour, prolific in all kinds of mad freaks and extravagances. Whether this impetuosity kept always within the bounds of mere innocent frolic is a question which we need not here raise. Traditions are certainly afloat of terrible domestic incidents connected with Goethe's youth, both in Frankfort and in Weimar; but to what extent these traditions are founded on fact is a matter

away

which we have never yet seen any attempt to decide upon evidence. More authentic for us, and equally significant, if we could be sure of our ability to appreciate them rightly, are the stories which Goethe himself tells of his various youthful attachments, and the various ways in which they were concluded. In Goethe's own narratives of these affairs, there is a confession of error, arising out of his disposition passionately to abandon himself to the feelings of the moment, without looking forward to the consequences; but whether this confession is to be converted by his critics into the harsher accusation of heartlessness and want of principle, is a thing not to be decided by any general rule as to the matter of inconstancy, but by accurate knowledge in each case of the whole circumstances of that case. One thing these love-romances of Goethe's early life make clear-namely, that for a being of such extreme sensibility as he was, he had a very strong element of self-control. When he gave up Rica or Lilli, it was with tears, and no end of sleepless nights; and yet he gave them up. Shakespeare, we believe (and there is an instance exactly in point in the story of his sonnets), had no such power of breaking clear from connexions which his judgment disapproved. Remorse and return, self-reproaches for his weakness at one moment, followed the next by weakness more abject than before-such, by his own confession, was the conduct, in one such case, of our more passive and gentle-hearted poet. Where Shakespeare was "past cure," and "frantic-mad with evermore unrest," Goethe but fell into "hypochondria,” which reason and resolution enabled him to overcome. Goethe at twenty-five gave up a young, beautiful and innocent girl, from the conviction that it was better to do so. Shakespeare at thirty-five was the abject slave of a dark-complexioned woman, who was faithless to him, and whom he cursed in his heart. The sensibilities in the German poet moved from the first, as we have already said, over a firmer basis of permanent character.

It is chiefly, however, the Goethe of later life that the world remembers and thinks of. The bounding impetuosity is then gone; or rather it is kept back and restrained, so as to form a

calm and steady fund of internal energy, capable sometimes of a flash and outbreak, but generally revealing itself only in labour and its fruits. What was formerly the beauty of an Apollo, graceful, light, and full of motion, is now the beauty of a Jupiter, composed, stately, serene. "What a sublime form!" says Eckermann, describing his first interview with him. "I forgot to speak for looking at him: I could not "look enough. His face is so powerful and brown! full of "wrinkles, and each wrinkle full of expression! And every"where there is such nobleness and firmness, such repose and "greatness! He spoke in a slow composed manner, such as you "would expect from an aged monarch." Such is Goethe, as he lasts now in the imagination of the world. Living among statues and books and pictures; daily doing something for his own culture and for that of the world; daily receiving guests and visitors, whom he entertained and instructed with his wise and deep, yet charming and simple converse; daily corresponding with friends and strangers, and giving advice or doing a good turn to some young talent or other-never was such a mind consecrated so perseveringly and exclusively to the service of Kunst and Literatur. One almost begins to wonder if it was altogether right that an old man should go on, morning after morning, and evening after evening, in such a fashion, talking about art and science and literature, as if they were the only interests in the world; taking his guests into corners to have quiet discussions with them on these subjects; and always finding something new and nice to be said about them. Possibly, indeed, this is the fault of those who have reported him, and who only took notes when the discourse turned on what they considered the proper Goethean themes. But that Goethe far outdid Shakespeare in this conscious dedication of himself to a life of the intellect, we hold to be as certain as the testimony of likelihood can make it. Shakespeare did enjoy his art; it was what, in his pensive hours, as he himself hints, he enjoyed most; and whatever of intellectual ecstasy literary production can bring, must surely have been his in those hours when he composed Hamlet and the Tempest. But Shakespeare's was precisely one of those

minds whose strength is a revelation to themselves during the moment of its exercise, rather than a chronic ascertained possession; and from this circumstance, as well as from the attested fact of his carelessness as to the fate of his compositions, we can very well conceive that literature and culture and all that formed but a small part of the general system of things in Shakespeare's daily thoughts, and that he would have been absolutely ashamed of himself if, when anything else, from the state of the weather to the quality of the wine, was within the circle of possible allusion, he had said a word about his own plays. If he had not Sir Walter Scott's positive conviction that every man ought to be either a laird or a lawyer, casting in authorship as a mere addition, if it were to be practised at all-he at least led so full and keen a life, and was drawn forth on so many sides by nature, society, and the unseen, that Literature, out of the actual moments in which he was engaged in it, must have seemed to him a mere bagatelle, a mere fantastic echo of not a tithe of life. In his home in London, or his retirement at Stratford, he wrote on and on, because he could not help doing so, and because it was his business and his solace; but no play seemed to him worth a day of the contemporary actions of men, no description worth a single glance at the Thames or at the deer feeding in the forest, no sonnet worth the tear it was made to embalm. Literature was by no means to him, as it was to Goethe, the main interest of life; nor was he a man so far master of himself as ever to be able to behave as if it were so, and to accept, as Goethe did, all that occurred as so much culture. Yet Shakespeare would have understood Goethe; and would have regarded him, almost with envy, as one of those men who, as being "lords and owners of their faces," and not mere "stewards," know how to husband Nature's gifts

best.

"They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovéd, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit Heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence."-Sonnet 94.

If Goethe attained this character, however, it was not because, as it is the fashion to say, he was by nature cold, heartless, and impassive, but because, uniting will and wisdom to his wealth of sensibilities, he had disciplined himself into what he was. A heartless man does not diffuse geniality and kindliness around him, as Goethe did; and a statue is not seized, as Goethe once was, with hemorrhage in the night, the result of suppressed grief.

That which made Goethe what he was-namely, his philosophy of life-is to be gathered, in the form of hints, from his various writings and conversations. We present a few important passages here, in what seems their philosophic connexion, as well as the order most suitable for bringing out Goethe's mode of thought in contrast with that of Shakespeare. Goethe's Thoughts of Death." We had gone round the thicket, and had turned by Tiefurt into the Weimar road, where we had a view of the setting Goethe was for a while lost in thought; he then said to me, in the words of one of the ancients,

sun.

Untergehend sogar ist's immer dieselbige Sonne.'

(Still it continues the self-same sun, even while it is sinking.)

'At the age of seventy-five,' continued he, with much cheerfulness, 'one must, of course, think sometimes of death. But this thought never gives me the least uneasiness, for I am fully convinced that our spirit is a being of a nature quite indestructible, and that its activity continues from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun, which seems to set only to our earthly eyes, but which, in reality, never sets, but shines on unceasingly.""-Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe, vol. i. p. 161.

Goethe's maxim with respect to Metaphysics.-" Man is born not to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out where the problem begins, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible.”—Ibid. vol. i. p. 272.

Goethe's theory of the intention of the Supernatural with regard to the Visible."After all, what does it all come to? God did not retire to rest after the well-known six days of creation; but, on the contrary, is constantly active as on the first. It would have been for Him a poor occupation to compose this heavy world out of simple elements, and to keep it rolling in the sunbeams from year to year, if He had not had the plan of founding a nursery for a world of spirits upon this material basis. So He is now constantly active in higher natures to attract the lower ones."-Ibid. vol. ii. p. 426.

Goethe's doctrine of Immortality.-" Kant has unquestionably done the best service, by drawing the limits beyond which human intellect is not able to penetrate, and leaving at rest the insoluble problems. What a deal have people philosophized about immortality! and how far have they got? I doubt not of our immortality, for nature cannot dispense with the entelecheia. But we are not all, in like manner, immortal; and he who would manifest himself in future as a great entelecheia must be one now. . . . To me the eternal existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work on incessantly till my death, nature is bound to give me another form of existence when the present one can no longer sustain my spirit.”—Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 193, 194, and p. 122.