glimpse of insight into the complexities of passion. Eridon, the jealous lover, torments his mistress in a style at once capricious and natural; with admirable truth she deplores his jealousy and excuses it:

"Zwar oft betrübt er mich, doch rührt ihn auch mein Schmerz.
Wirft er mir etwas vor, fängt er mich an zu plagen,
So darf ich nur ein Wort, ein gutes Wort nur sagen,
Gleich ist er umgekehrt, die wilde Zanksucht flieht,
Er weint sogar mit mir, wenn er mich weinen sieht.1

It is admirably said that the very absence of any cause. for grief prompts him to create a grief:

"Da er kein Elend hat, will er sich Elend machen."

Amine is also touched with a delicate pencil. Her lovingness, forgivingness, and endurance are true to life. Here is a couplet breathing the very tenderness of love:

"Der Liebe leichtes Band machst du zum schweren Joch.

Du qüalst mich als Tyrann; und ich? ich lieb dich noch !” 2

One more line and I have done: Eglé is persuading Eridon that Amine's love of dancing is no trespass on her love for him; since, after having enjoyed her dance, her first thought is to seek him:

"Und durch das Suchen selbst wirst du ihr immer lieber." 8

In such touches as these lurks the future poet; still more so in the very choice of the subject. Here, as ever, he does not cheat himself with pouring feigned

1"'Tis true he vexes me, and yet my sorrow pains him.
Yet let him but reproach - begin to tease me,

Then need I but a word, a single kind word utter,

Away flies all his anger in a moment,

And he will weep with me, because he sees me weep."

2"The fairy link of Love thou mak'st a galling yoke.

Thou treat'st me as a slave; and I? I love thee still !" 8" And in the very search her heart grows fonder of thee."

sorrows into feigning verse: he embalms his own experience. He does not trouble himself with drawing characters and events from the shelves of the library: his soul is the fountain of his inspiration. His own life was uniformly the text from which he preached. He sang what he had felt, and because he had felt it; not because others had sung before him. He was the echo of no man's joys and sorrows, he was the lyrist of his own. This is the reason why his poems have an endless charm: they are as indestructible as passion itself. They reach our hearts because they issue from his. Every bullet hits the mark, according to the huntsman's superstition, if it have first been dipped in the marksman's blood.

He has told us, emphatically, that all his works are but fragments of the grand confession of his life. Of him we may say what Horace so well says of Lucilius, that he trusted his secrets to books as to faithful friends:

"Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim

Credebat libris; neque, si male cesserat, unquam
Decurrens alio, neque si bene: quo fit, ut omnis
Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella

Vita senis."1

How clearly he saw the nullity of every other procedure is shown in various passages of his letters and conversations. Riemer has preserved one worth selecting: "There will soon be a poetry without poetry, a real ποίησις, where the subject-matter is ἐν ποιήσει, in the making: a manufactured poetry." 2 He dates from

1 Horace : lib. II. 1.

2" Briefe von und an Goethe." Herausgeg. von Riemer. 1846. What follows is untranslatable, from the play on words: "Die Dichtee heissen dann so, wie schon Moritz spasste, a spissando, densando, vom Dichtmachen, weil sie Alles zusammendrängen, und kommen mir vor wie eine Art Wurstmacher, die in den Darm des Hexameters oder Trimeters ihre Wort und Sylbenfülle stopfen."

Leipsic the origin of his own practice, which he says was a tendency he never could deviate from all his life: "namely, the tendency to transform into an image, a poem, everything which delighted or troubled me, or otherwise occupied me, and to come to some distinct understanding with myself upon it, to set my inward being at rest." The reason he gives for this tendency is very questionable. He attributes it to the isolation in which he lived with respect to matters of taste, forcing him to look within for poetical subjects. But had not the tendency of his genius lain in that direction, no such circumstances could have directed it.

Young, curious, and excitable as he was, nothing is more natural than that he should somewhat shock the respectabilities by his pranks and extravagances. His constant companion was Behrisch, one of the most interesting figures among these Leipsic friends. With strongly marked features and a certain dry causticity of manner, always well dressed, and always preserving a most staid demeanour, Behrisch, then about thirty years of age, had an ineradicable love of fun and mystification. He could treat trifles with an air of immense importance. He would invent narratives about the perversity and absurdity of others, in order to convulse his hearers with the unction of his philippics against such absurdity. He was fond of dissipation, into which he carried an air of supreme gravity. He rather affected the French style of politesse, and spoke the language well; and, above all, he had some shrewd good sense, as a buttress for all his follies. Behrisch introduced him to some damsels who " were better than their reputation," and took him into scenes more useful to the future poet than advantageous to the repute of the young student. He also laughed him out of all respect for gods, goddesses, and other mythological inanities which still pressed their heavy dulness on his verse; would not let him commit the imprudence of

rushing into print, but calmed the author's longing, by beautifully copying his verses into a volume, adorning them with vignettes. Behrisch was, so to speak, the precursor of Merck; his influence not so great, but somewhat of the same kind. The friends were displeased to see young Goethe falling thus away from good society into such a disreputable course; but just as Lessing before him had neglected the elegant Leipsic-world for actors and authors of more wit than money, and preferred Mylius, with his shoes down at heel, to all that the best-dressed society could offer; so did young Goethe neglect salon and lecture-hall for the many-coloured scene of life in less elegant circles. Enlightened by the result, we foresee that the poet will receive little injury from these sources: he is gaining experience; and experience even of the worst sides of human nature will be sublimated into noble uses, as carrion by the wise farmer is turned into excellent manure. In this great drama of life every theatre has its greenroom; and unless the poet know how it is behind the scenes he will never understand how actors speak and move.

Goethe had often been "behind the scenes," looking at the skeleton which stands in almost every house. His adventure with Gretchen, and its consequences, early opened his eyes to the strange gulfs which lie under the crust of society. "Religion, morals, law, rank, habits," he says, "rule over the surface of social life. Streets of magnificent houses are kept clean; every one outwardly conducts himself with propriety; but the disorder within is often only the more desolate; and a polished exterior covers many a wall which totters, and falls with a crash during the night, all the more terrible because it falls during a calm. How many families had I not more or less distinctly known in which bankruptcy, divorce, seduction, murder, and robbery had wrought destruction! Young as I was, I

had often, in such cases, lent my succour; for as my frankness awakened confidence, and my discretion was known, and as my activity did not shun any sacrifice —indeed, rather preferred the most perilous occasions -I had frequently to mediate, console, and try to avert the storm; in the course of which I could not help learning many sad and humiliating facts."

It was natural that such sad experience should at first lead him to view the whole social fabric with contempt. To relieve himself, he- being then greatly captivated with Molière's works-sketched the plans of several dramas; but their plots were so uniformly unpleasant, and the catastrophes so tragic, that he did not work out these plans. "The Fellow Sinners" (Die Mitschuldigen) was sketched, though not completed till the next year during his convalescence at home. The piece now printed among his works is no doubt greatly altered from the original; and since what we have is the piece rearranged for the Weimar stage in 1776, and no copy of the original is extant, we are entirely at a loss in forming a judgment of the amount of dramatic maturity and literary facility it may have exhibited as the production of a youth of eighteen. It can only be relied on as indicating the direction of his mind. The choice of the subject and the characters we must assign to this period, however little of the original treatment may remain. Few, in England at least, ever read it; yet such as we have it now, it is worth a rapid glance, is lively, and strong with effective situations and two happily sketched characters — Söller, the scampish husband, and his father-in-law, the inquisitive landlord. The plot is briefly this: Söller's wife before she became his wife-loved a certain Alcest; and her husband's conduct is not such as to make her forget her former lover, who, at the opening of the play, is residing in her father's hotel. Alcest prevails upon her to grant him an interview in