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.

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

was more Greek than German, but he never freed himself from German influence.

Thus much on Time and Place, the two great environments of life. Before quitting such generalities for the details of biography, it may be well to call attention to one hitherto unnoticed, viz. the moderate elevation of his social status. Placed midway between the two perilous extremes of affluence and want, his whole career received a modifying impulse from this position. He never knew adversity. This alone must necessarily have deprived him of one powerful chord which vibrates through the life of genius. Adversity, the sternest of teachers, had nothing to teach him. He never knew the gaunt companionship of Want, whispering its terrible suggestions. He never knew the necessity to conquer for himself breathing-room in the world and thus all the feelings of bitterness, opposition, and defiance which accompany and perplex the struggle of life, were to him almost unknown, and taught him nothing of the aggressive and practical energy which these feelings develope in impetuous natures. How much of his serenity, how much of his dislike to politics may owe its origin to this?

wonderful Is it not

That he was the loveliest baby ever seen,' exciting admiration wherever nurse or mother carried him, and exhibiting, in swaddling clothes, the most intelligence,' we need no biographer to tell us. said of every baby? But that he really was a wonderful child we have undeniable evidence, and of a kind less questionable than the statement of mothers and relatives. Specimens of his precocity will be given presently; meanwhile, from his mother, we will hear an anecdote or two.

At three years old he could seldom be brought to play with little children, and only on the condition of their being pretty. One day, in a neighbor's house, he suddenly

began to cry and exclaim, 'That black child must go away! I can't bear him!' And he howled till he was carried home, where he was slowly pacified; the whole cause of his grief being the ugliness of the child. A philosopher of a certain school might devote twenty pages of symbolical profundity to show how an innate love of the Beautiful determined this conduct in the child; but perhaps the reader would prefer silence to such philosophy.

A quick, merry little girl grew up by the boy's side. Four other children also came, but soon vanished. Cornelia was the only companion who survived, and for her his affection dated from her cradle. He brought his toys to her, wanted to feed her and attend on her, and was very

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jealous of all who approached her. When she was taken from the cradle, over which he watched, his anger was scarcely to be quieted. He was altogether much more easily moved to anger than to tears.' To the last his love for Cornelia was passionate.

His mother spoiled him somewhat. One Sunday morning, while the family is at church, Master Wolfgang finds himself in the kitchen, which looks upon the street. Boylike, he begins to fling the crockery into the street, delighted at the smashing music which it makes, and stimulated by the approbation of the brothers Ochsenstein, who chuckle at him from over the way. The plates and dishes are flying in this way, as his mother returns: she sees the mischief with a_housewifely horror melting into girlish sympathy as she hears how heartily the little fellow laughs at his escapade, and how the neighbors laugh at him.

This genial, indulgent mother employed her faculty for story-telling to his and her own delight. Air, fire, earth and water I represented under the forms of princesses; and to all natural phenomena I gave a meaning, in which

I almost believed more fervently than my little hearers. As we thought of paths which led from star to star, and that we should one day inhabit the stars, and thought of the great spirits we should meet there, I was as eager for the hours of story-telling as the children themselves; I was quite curious about the future course of my own improvisation, and any invitation which interrupted these evenings was disagreeable. There I sat, and there Wolfgang held me with his large black eyes; and when the fate of one of his favorites was not according to his fancy, I saw the angry veins swell on his temples, I saw him repress his tears. He often burst in with, "But, mother, the princess won't marry the nasty tailor, even if he does kill the giant." And when I made a pause for the night, promising to continue it on the morrow, I was certain that he would in the meanwhile think it out for himself, and so he often stimulated my imagination. When I turned the story according to his plan, and told him that he had found out the dénouement, then was he all fire and flame, and one could see his little heart beating underneath his dress! His grandmother, who made a great pet of him, was the confidant of all his ideas as to how the story would turn out, and as she repeated these to me, and I turned the story according to these hints, there was a little diplomatic secrecy between us which we never disclosed. I had the pleasure of continuing my story to the delight and astonishment of my hearers, and Wolfgang saw with glowing eyes the fulfilment of his own conceptions, and listened with enthusiastic applause.' What a charming glimpse of mother and son !

The grandmother here spoken of lived in the same house, and when lessons were finished, away the children hurried to her room, to play. The dear old lady, proud as a grandmother, 'spoiled' them of course, and gave

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them many an eatable, which they would get only in her room. But of all her gifts nothing was comparable to the puppet-show with which she surprised them on the Christmas eve of 1753, and which Goethe says created a new world in the house.' The reader of Wilhelm Meister will remember with what solemn importance the significance of such a puppet-show is treated, and may guess how it would exercise the boy's imagination.

There was also the grandfather Textor, whose house the children gladly visited, and whose grave personality produced an impression on the boy, all the deeper because a certain mysterious awe surrounded the monosyllabic dream-interpreting old gentleman. His portrait presents him in a perruque à huit étages, with the heavy golden chain round his neck, suspending a medal given him by the Empress Maria Theresa; but Goethe remembered him more vividly in his dressing gown and slippers moving amid the flowers of his garden, weeding, training, watering; or seated at the dinner table where on Sundays he received his guests.

The mother's admirable method of cultivating the inventive activity of the boy, finds its pendant in the father's method of cultivating his receptive faculties. He speaks with less approbation than it deserved of his father's idea of education; probably because late in life he felt keenly the deficiencies of systematic training. But the principle upon which the father proceeded was an excellent one, namely, that of exercising the intellect rather than the memory. An anecdote was dictated, generally something from every day life, or, perhaps, a trait from the life of Frederick the Great; sometimes he selected a topic for himself. On such subjects he wrote dialogues and moral reflections in Latin and German. Many have been preserved; and the reader will find one in the Appendix,