modern poets, amid the storms of an European struggle, could find no inspiration but in Romanticism, or in Orientalism. This is the more noticeable because Goethe has been angrily reproached for his flight into the East; although surely the aged poet might find an excuse if the young poets were applauded?

The "West-östliche Divan" is divided into twelve Books: the Singer, Hafis, Love, Contemplation, Sadness, Proverbs, Timour, Suleika, Wine-house, Parables, Persians, and Paradise; very various in contents, and of various excellence. Truly may be applied to Goethe the epigraph he applies to Hafis: "Let us call the World the Bride, and the Spirit will be the Bridegroom; he who has known Hafis had seen this marriage."

How much of his own experience he has clothed in these Eastern forms we cannot know; some of the poems have been identified with their occasions, and some of their allusions have been deciphered in one case, in the "Buch Suleika," he has placed the name of Hatem where the rhyme plainly tells us to read Goethe:

"Du beschämst, wie Morgenröthe
Jener Gipfel ernste Wand,

Und noch einmal fühlet Hatem
Frühlingshauch und Sommerbrand."

The grace with which many of these poems are lightly touched, the admirable wisdom which smiles so serenely under them, the calm, hot, noonday stillness, interchanging with the careless gaiety of the wine-house. mirth, cannot be indicated by translation; nor will

I attempt it. For the sake of the German reader, however, here is one brief specimen :

"Trunken müssen wir alle seyn !
Jugend ist Trunkenheit ohne Wein;
Trinkt sich das Alter wieder zu Jugend
So ist es wundervolle Tugend.
Für Sorgen sorgt das liebe Leben

Und Sorgenbrecher sind die Reben."

To these poems is added a volume of Historical Notes, which show indeed a conscientious study of the East, but which also show how immeasurably inferior his prose was to his poetry. Age is visible in very page.

And what must be said of the claim set up by Hermann Grimm, respecting the share which he declares Frau Willemer to have, not only in inspiring some of these lyrics, but actually in the composition of them? In the Appendix the reader may see what was thought of this extraordinary claim by the late Emmanuel Deutsch, whose early loss we deplore, and to whose indignant article in the Pall Mall Gazette, Oct. 4, 1869, I need only add two remarks: First, that this claim to the authorship of poems is only a repetition of the absurd claim previously set up by Bettina, which has been sufficiently exposed; and that, if it be allowed on such evidence, to transfer the glory of accomplished works to any one who has the courage to claim them as their own, no reputation can be safe, since every writer has friends, and the public is singularly ready to believe that a great work "was written by somebody else." Secondly, in the absence of very positive evidence, we must be guided by the probabilities, and what probability is there that a woman never known to have written poems in her own name, such as the world could accept as masterpieces never known indeed as even a feeble poet should for once in her life have written, for the greatest of modern poets,

poems which all Germany has accepted as his? While there is every evidence that Goethe could have written, and did write, the poems published under his name, there is no evidence whatever that Frau von Willemer could have written the poems she claims to have given him.

I had resolved to take no notice whatever of this preposterous claim, but finding that Gödeke, in his recent biography of the poet, accepts it as established, I could not leave it unrefuted, knowing, as I well know, the facility with which such stories are circulated.

In the early chapters of his Autobiography Goethe had presented a picture of Frankfort, which was very gratifying to the people of that city; and when, in the year 1814, he passed through the city, he was received with an ovation which recalls the last visit of Voltaire to Paris. "Tasso" was performed at the theatre with great pomp. No sooner did he make his appearance in the box which had been prepared for him, and which was hung with flowers and laurel crowns, than Haydn's Symphony struck up, and the whole house rose with a burst of enthusiastic cheering. The Symphony continued, and the shouts rose tumultuously above it. At length the curtain rolled up, and gradually a solemn stillness settled through the house. A prologue greeted the great poet, and was the signal for more shouting. After "Tasso" came an epilogue, during which the laurel crowns were taken from the busts of Ariosto and Tasso, and handed to Goethe. And when all was over, the corridors and staircases of the theatre were crowded with admirers, through whom he passed, smiling his thanks.

CHAPTER VI.

THE ACTIVITY OF AGE.

IN the year 1816 he began to publish an Art Journal, Kunst und Alterthum, which continued till 1828, a curious monument of the old man's studies and activity. It is curious, moreover, as indicating a change in the direction of his ideas. We have seen what his relation was to the Romantic School, and how the tendencies of his nature and education led him to oppose to the characteristics of that School the characteristics of Greek Art. The Propyläen represents the Greek tendency: Kunst und Alterthum represents a certain leaning toward the Romantic. Gothic Art, the old German and Netherland painters, no longer seemed to him objectionable; but the discovery of the Elgin marbles once more awakened his enthusiasm for that perfection of form which was the ideal of Greek Art;1 and I have heard Rauch, the sculptor, humourously narrate Goethe's whimsical outbreaks when the young sculptor Rietschl seemed in danger of perverting his talent by executing designs in the spirit of the Romantic School.

Strong, however, as the opposition was which he felt to the vagaries of the so-called Christian Art, he had too much of the Faust spirit to keep entirely aloof from the Romanticists. In his old age the tendency to substitute Reflection for Inspiration naturally assumed greater force; and his love of mystification was now 1 See his letter to Haydon, in the "Life of Haydon," vol. ii.

p. 295.

wearing a serious aspect, duping himself perhaps as much as it duped others. The German nation had persisted in discovering profound meanings in passages which he had written without any recondite meaning at all; finding himself a prophet when he meant only to be a poet, he gradually fell into the snare, and tried to be a prophet now he could no longer be so great a poet as before. Every incident was to be typical. Every phrase was of importance. Whether the lion should roar at a particular time (in the "Novelle "), or whether he should be silent, were subjects of long deliberation. The "Wanderjahre" was one great arsenal of symbols, the Second Part of "Faust" another. He delighted in seeing the philosophic critics outdoing each other in far-fetched ingenuity, "explaining" his "Faust" and "Meister;" and very astutely he refused to come to their aid. He saw libraries filled with discussions as to what he had intended; but no one ever seduced him into an explanation which would have silenced these discussions. Instead of doing so, he seemed disposed to furnish the world with more riddles. In a word, he mystified the public; but he did so in a grave, unconscious way, with a certain belief in his own mystification.

In the year 1816, Saxe-Weimar was made a grand duchy; and he received the Falcon Order, together with an increase of salary, which now became three thousand thalers, with extra allowance for his equipage. Two other events made this year memorable. Lotte Werther's Lotte now a widow in her sixtieth year, and mother of twelve children, pays him a visit at Weimar. They had not met since her marriage, and what a meeting this must have been for both! how strange a mingling of feelings recurrent to a pleasantly agitated past, and of feelings perplexed by the surprise at finding each other so much changed!

The second and far more serious event of the year