accorded with his ardent and wide-sweeping spirit. Had he remained at Frankfurt he would have been ignorant of the world. But here the panorama of life was unrolled before him, and his experience was every way enlarged. Did not Leonardo da Vinci spend much of his time. charming the court of Milan with his poetry and luteplaying? did he not also spend time in mechanical and hydrostatical labors for the state? No reproach is lifted against his august name; no one cries out against his being false to his genius; no one rebukes him for having painted so little at one period. The 'Last Supper' speaks for him. Will not Tasso, Iphigenia, Hermann und Dorothea, Faust, Meister, and the long list of Goethe's works, speak for him?

I have dwelt mainly on the dissipation of his time, because the notion that a court life affected his genius by corrupting his mind' is preposterous. No reader of this biography, it is to be hoped, will fail to see the true relations in which he stood to the Duke; how free they were from anything like servility, or suppression of genuine impulse. Indeed, one of the complaints against him, according to the unexceptionable authority of Riemer, was that made by the subalterns, of his not being sufficiently attentive to court etiquette.' To say, as Niebuhr says, that the court was a Delilah to which he sacrificed his locks,' is profoundly to misunderstand his genius, profoundly to misread his life. Had his genius been of that stormy class which produces great Reformers and great Martyrs had it been his mission to agitate mankind by words which, reverberating to their inmost recesses, called them to lay down their lives in the service of an Idea had it been his tendency to meditate upon the far-off destinies of man, and sway men by the coercion of grand representative abstractions then, indeed, we might say

his place was aloof from the motley throng, and not in sailing down the swiftly-flowing stream to sounds of mirth and music on the banks. But he was not a Reformer, not a Martyr. He was a Poet, whose religion was Beauty, whose worship was of Nature, whose aim was Culture. His mission was to paint Life, and for that it was requisite he should see Life, to know

(

• The haunt and the main region of his song.'

Happier circumstances might indeed have surrounded him, and given him a greater sphere. It would have been very different, as he often felt, if there had been a Nation to appeal to, instead of a heterogeneous mass of small peoples, willing enough to talk of Fatherland, but in nowise prepared to become a Nation. There are many other ifs in which much virtue could be found; but inasmuch as he could not create circumstances, we must follow his example, and be content with what the gods provided. I do not, I confess, see what other sphere was open to him in which his genius could have been more sacred; but I do see that he built out of circumstance a noble Temple in which the altar-flame burnt with a steady light. To hypothetical biographers he left the task of settling what Goethe might have been; enough for us to catch some glimpse of what he was.

'Poetry,' Carlyle profoundly says, 'is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious.' It is the flower into which a life expands, but it is not the life itself, with all daily needs, daily struggles, daily prosaisms. The true poet manfully accepts the condition in which destiny has placed him, and therein tries to make his existence. harmonious; the sham poet, like a weak workman fretful with his tools, is loud in assurances of what he might be, were it his lot to live in other circumstances. Goethe was

led by the current of events to a little court, where he was arrested by friendship, love, leisure, and opportunities of a freer, nobler life than Frankfurt Law Courts offered him. After much deliberation he chose his career: these pages will show how in it he contrived to be true to his genius.

It is scarcely worth while to notice trash about his 'servility' and 'court slavery.' He was not required to be servile; and his nature was as proud as any prince's. ' They call me a prince's servant,' he said to Eckermann, ' and a prince's slave; as if there were any meaning in such words! Whom do I serve? A tyrant - a despot? Do I serve one who lives for his own pleasures at the people's cost? Such princes and such times are, thank God! far enough from us. For more than half a century I have been connected in the closest relations with the Grand Duke, and for half a century have striven and toiled with him; but I should not be speaking truth were I to say that I could name a single day on which the Duke had not his thoughts busied with something to be devised and effected for the good of the country; something calculated to better the condition of each individual in it. As for himself, personally, what has his princely state given him but a burden and a task? Is his dwelling, or his dress, or his table more sumptuously provided than that of any private man in easy circumstances? Go into our maritime cities, and you will find the larder and cellar of every considerable merchant better filled than his. If, then, I am a prince's slave, it is at least my consolation that I am but the slave of one who is himself a slave of the general good.'

And to close this subject, read the following passage from Merck's letter to Nicolai-(the Merck who is said by Falk to have spoken so bitterly of the waste of Goethe's

life at Weimar): I have lately paid Goethe a visit at the Wartburg, and we have lived together for ten days like children. I am delighted to have seen with my own eyes what his situation is. The Duke is the best of all, and has a character firm as iron: I would do, for love of him, just what Goethe does. . . . I tell you sincerely that the Duke is most worthy of respect, and one of the cleverest men that I have ever seen, and consider that he is a Prince, and only twenty years of age!' The long and friendly correspondence Merck kept up with the Duke is the best pledge that the foregoing judgment was sincere.

CHAPTER IV.

THE FRAU VON STEIN.

FROM Out the many flirtations that amused him, there rises one which grew into predominant importance, swallowing up all the others, and leaping from lambent flame into eager and passionate fire. It was no transitory flash, but a fire which burnt for ten years, and thereby is distinguished from all previous attachments. It is a silver thread woven among the many-colored threads which formed the tapestry of his life. I will here detach it, to consider it by itself.

6

The Baroness von Stein, Hofdame,' and wife of the Master of the Horse, was, both by family and position, a considerable person. To us she is interesting, as having sprung from a Scotch family, named Irving, and as being the sister-in-law to that Baron Imhoff, who sold his first wife to Warren Hastings. She was the mother of seven children, and had reached that age which, in fascinating women, is of perilous fascination the age of three-andthirty. We can understand something of her power if we look at her portrait, and imagine those delicate, coquettish features animated with the lures of sensibility, gayety, and experience of the world. She sang well, played well, sketched well, talked well, appreciated poetry, and handled sentiment with the delicate tact of a woman of the