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procured myself a miserable evening and worse night, he vehemently reproved me for it. Why, said he, should I suffer the delightful impression of the features of my friend to be obliterated by the sight of a disfigured mask? I carefully avoided seeing Schiller, Herder, or the Duchess Amalia, in the coffin. I, for my part, desire to retain in my memory a picture of my departed friends more full of soul than the mere mask can furnish me.'

This subjection of the instinct of curiosity to the dictates of reason is not coldness. There is danger indeed of carrying it too far, and thus coddling the mind. Into this extreme neither Goethe nor his mother can be said to have fallen. At any rate, let the reader pronounce what judgment on it he thinks fit, it is right that he should at the outset distinctly understand it to be a characteristic of the poet. The self-mastery it implies forms the keystone of his character. In him the emotive was subjected to the intellectual man. He was 'king over himself.' He, as he tells us, found men eager enough to lord it over others, while indifferent whether they could rule themselves

• Das wollen alle Herren seyn,
Und keiner ist Herr von sich!'

He made it his study to subdue into harmonious unity the rebellious impulses which incessantly threatened the supremacy of reason. Here, on the threshold of his career, let attention be called to this cardinal characteristic his footsteps were not guided by a light tremulous in every gust, liable to fall to the ground amid the hurrying agitation of vulgar instincts, but a torch grasped by an iron Will, and lifted high above the currents of those lower gusts, shedding a continuous steady gleam across the troubled path. I do not say he never stumbled. At times the clamorous agitation of rebellious passions misled

him, for he was very human, often erring; but viewing his life as it disposes itself into the broad masses necessary for a characteristic appreciation, I say that in him, more than in almost any other man of his time, naked vigor of resolution, moving in alliance with steady clearness of intellect, produced a self-mastery of the very highest kind.*

This he owed partly to his father and partly to his mother. It was from the latter he derived those leading principles which determined the movement and orbit of his artistic nature: the joyous, healthy temperament, humor, vivid fancy, susceptibility, and the marvellous insight which gathered up the scattered and vanishing elements of experience into new and living combinations.

*All I have had to do I have done in kingly fashion,' he said: I let tongues wag as they pleased. What I saw to be the right thing that I did.'

CHAPTER II.

THE PRECOCIOUS CHILD.

JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE was born on the 28th August, 1749, as the clock sounded the hour of noon, in the busy town of Frankfurt-on-the-Maine. The busy town, as may be supposed, was quite heedless of what was then passing in the corner of that low, heavy-beamed room in the Grosse Hirsch Graben, where an infant, black and almost lifeless, was watched with agonizing anxiety — an anxiety dissolving into tears of joy, as the aged grandmother exclaimed to the pale mother: Räthin, er lebt! he lives!' But if the town was heedless, not so were the stars, as astrologers will certify; the stars knew who was gasping for life beside his trembling mother, and in solemn convocation they prefigured his future greatness. Goethe, with a grave smile, notes this conjunction of the stars; as Condivi, in his Vita di Michelagnolo, does of his hero, without a smile.

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Whatever the stars may have betokened, this August, 1749, was a momentous month to Germany, if only because it gave birth to the man whose influence has been greater than that of any man since Luther. A momentous month in very momentous times. It is the middle of the eighteenth century: a period when the movement carried out by Luther was passing from religion to politics, and freedom of thought was translating itself into liberty

of act. From theology the movement had communicated itself to philosophy, morals and politics. The agitation was still mainly in the higher classes, but it was gradually descending to the lower. A period of deep unrest, big with events which would distend the conceptions of all men, and bewilder some of the wisest. A few random glances at the notables' may serve to call up something like the historical presence of the epoch.

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In that month of August, Madame du Châtelet, the learned and pedantic Uranie of Voltaire, died in childbed, leaving him without a companion, and without a counseller to prevent his going to the court of Frederick the Great. In that year Rousseau was seen in the brilliant circle of Mad. d'Epinay, discussing with the Encyclopedists, declaiming eloquently on the sacredness of maternity, and going home to cast his new-born infant into the basket of the Foundling Hospital. In that year Samuel Johnson was toiling manfully over his English dictionary; Gibbon was at Westminster, trying with unsuccessful diligence to master the Greek and Latin rudiments; Goldsmith was delighting the Tony Lumpkins of his district, and the 'wandering bear-leaders of genteeler sort,' with his talents, and enjoying that careless idleness of fireside. and easy chair,' and that'tavern excitement of the game of cards, to which he looked back so wistfully from his first hard London struggles.' * In that year Buffon, whose scientific greatness Goethe was one of the first to perceive, and whose influence has been so profound, produced the first volume of his Histoire Naturelle. In that year Mirabeau and Alfieri were tyrants in their nurseries, and Marat was an innocent boy of five, toddling about in the Val de Travers, untroubled by phantoms of 'les aristocrats.'

* Forster's Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith, p. 29.

This was the period in which Goethe was born. Of the city Frankfurt- he has given us a loving picture. No city in Germany seems so well fitted for the birthplace of this cosmopolitan poet. It was rich in speaking memorials of the past, remnants of old German life, lingering echoes of the voices which sounded through the middle ages: memorials, such as the town within a town, the fortress within a fortress, the walled cloisters, the various symbolical ceremonies still preserved from feudal times, the Jews' quarter, so picturesque, so filthy, and so strikingly significant. But if Frankfurt was thus representative of the past, it was equally representative of the present. The travellers brought there by the Rhine-stream, and by the great northern roads, made it a representative of Europe, and an Emporium of Commerce. It was thus a centre for that distinctively modern idea — Industrialism - which began, and must complete, the destruction of Feudalism. This two-fold character Frankfurt retains to the present day the storks, perched upon the ancient gables of the past, look down upon the varied bustle of Fairs held by modern Commerce in the ancient streets.

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The feeling for antiquity, and especially for old German life, which his native city would thus picturesquely cultivate, was rivalled by a feeling for Italy and its splendors, which was cultivated under the paternal roof. His father had lived in Italy, and had retained an inextinguishable delight in all its beauties. His walls were hung with architectural drawings and views of Rome; and the poet was thus familiar from infancy with the Piazza del Popolo, St. Peter's, the Coliseum, and other centres of grand associations. Typical of his own nature and strivings is this conjunction of the Classic and the German the one lying nearest to him, in homely intimacy, the other lying outside, as a mere scene he was to contemplate. Goethe

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