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What might be the final views of the elder parties it is difficult to say; but Goethe assures us that they used his services only in writing an occasional epithalamium, the pecuniary acknowledgment for which was spent jovially in a general banquet. The magistrates, however, interfered, and endeavored to extort a confession from Goethe.

In the theme that conjures up before us "Faust in ritterlicher Hofkleidung des Mittelalters," you have expressed your own seigneurial pride and daintiness. Goethe must have tapped with his tragedy, his characters, some vein long choked in you. In each of the three movements, the Faust, the Marguerite and the Mephisto, you make your best music. There is real drama in the first.

A German savant observes that Schiller was not, like Goethe, a virtuoso in love. And so it certainly looks, albeit the difference might perhaps appear a little less conspicuous if he had lived to a ripe old age and dressed up his recollections of youth in an autobiographical romance.

In the first one that fell into my hands I find the influence of opera manifest in recitatives and airs put into the mouth of Mephistopheles, and comic songs sung by Kasperle, the Punch of the German marionette fraternity. The love tale which furnished forth the entire opera book of MM. Carre and Barbier is, as I have said, wholly the invention of Goethe.

This contrasts most ludicrously in many cases with the simple, almost childlike, honesty which is typical of all early Teutonic literature. Had a Charles Lamb, a Leigh Hunt, or an Edgar Allan Poe recast these tales, how different would have been their treatment! Before the time of Schiller and Goethe French models prevailed in German literature.

"Still, as I have said, if we only had important personages, formed by great studies and situations in life, it might still go well with us, at least as far as our young lyric poets are concerned." Monday, January 10. Goethe, consistently with his great interest for the English, has desired me to introduce to him the young Englishmen who are here at present.

Except in that short and transitory phasis of his life, during which he made the mistake of becoming a clergyman, his mind was ever progressive: and the advance he always seemed to have made when I saw him after an interval, made me apply to him what Goethe said of Schiller, "er hatte eine furchtliche Fortschreitung."

All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to point out is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the passionate penetrating accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of Titanism, as the English. Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of Ossian very powerfully, and he quotes a long passage from him in his Werther.

In Helena, I could not make use of any man as the representative of the modern poetic era except him, who is undoubtedly the greatest genius of our century." Contrast Macbeth, and Beppo, where you are in a nefarious empirical world." On Eckermann's doubting "whether there is a gain for pure culture in Byron's work," Goethe conclusively replies, "There I must contradict you.

But, you ask, can mere boredom make a man act so cruelly as this man acted? Well, there may have been another cause, and a more interesting one. I have mentioned that Goethe and Tischbein visited our Ambassador in Naples. His Excellency was at that time a widower, but his establishment was already graced by his future wife, Miss Emma Harte, whose beauty is so well known to us all.