angles. In this way I make myself happy and comfortable.' Who does not recognize the son in those accents ? The kindliest of men inherited his loving, happy nature, from the heartiest of women.

He also inherited from her his dislike of unnecessary agitation and emotion, and that deliberate avoidance of all things capable of disturbing her peace of mind, which, in him, has been construed as coldness. Her sunny nature shrank from storms. She stipulated with her servants that they were not to trouble her with afflicting news, except upon some positive necessity for the communication. In 1805, when her son was dangerously ill at Weimar, no one ventured to speak to her on the subject. Not until he had completely recovered did she voluntarily enter on it. I knew it all,' she remarked, but said nothing. Now we can talk about him without my feeling a stab every time his name is mentioned.'

In this voluntary insulation from disastrous intelligence, there is something so antagonistic to the notorious craving for excitement felt by the Teutonic races, something so unlike the morbid love of intellectual drams - the fierce alcohol of emotion - with which we intoxicate ourselves, that it is no wonder if Goethe has on this account been accused of insensibility. Yet, in truth, a very superficial knowledge of his nature suffices to show that it was not from coldness he avoided indulgence in the luxury of woe.' It was no want of sympathy, but excess of sensibility. His delicate nerves shrank from the wear and tear of excitement. That which to coarser natures would have been a stimulus, to him was a disturbance. It is, doubtless, the instinct of our emotional nature to seek such stimulants; but his reason was strong enough to keep this instinct under control. Falk relates that when Goethe heard he had looked upon Wieland in death, and thereby

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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.

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.