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Dined at Longfellow's, and afterwards went upstairs to see an interesting collection of East Indian curiosities. Passing through his dressing-room, I was struck with the likeness of his private rooms to those of a German student or professor; a Goethean aspect of simplicity and space everywhere, with books put in the nooks and corners and all over the walls. It is surely a most attractive house!"
He wrote as a Greek or Roman might write, because he felt his subject as a Greek or Roman might feel it. "Hermann und Dorothea," which Schiller pronounced the acme not only of Goethean but of all modern art, was written professedly as an attempt in the Homeric style, motived by Wolf's "Prolegomena" and Voss's "Luise."
That elaborate description of Mignon's funeral so carefully arranged by the Aesthetic "Uncle," has it not all the curious qualities of the Goethean vein its clairvoyant insight into the under-truth of Nature its cold-blooded pre-occupation with "Art" its gentle irony its mania for exact detail?
These things, however, do not determine the value or otherwise of his scientific labours. His work draws its significance not so much from the 'what', to use a Goethean expression, as from the 'how' of his observations, that is, from his way of investigating nature.
Like a literary connoisseur who rolls a Horatian ode or a Goethean lyric upon his tongue even thus he enjoyed these sombre stanzas. There was one: "I haste to my eternal home," in which the beyond was likened to a bridal chamber and to a "crystal sea of blessednesses."
Physics here speaks of 'free' heat becoming 'latent'. From the Goethean point of view we see heat passing through a metamorphosis. Whereas, previously, heat was perceptible to our sense of warmth, it now manifests as a gravity-denying property of matter. In order to obtain an idea of the liquid state of matter corresponding to reality, we must take into account yet another of its characteristics.
At this point in our discussion it is necessary to introduce another leading concept of Goethean nature-observation, which was for him as it will be for us of particular significance for carrying over the Goethean method of research from the organic into the inorganic realm of nature.
Let us be clear what it is that occurs when a plant exhibits any of the observed abnormalities. Expressed in a Goethean manner, these are the consequence of an insufficient direction of the organic processes in the plant body by the spiritual plant-type underlying it.
The product, after standing long enough, mantled over with the rich Goethean cream, from which a butter could be churned, if not precisely classic, quite as good as the ancients could have made out of the same material. But who has ever read the Achilleis, correct in all unessential particulars as it probably is?
He was convinced that for a Goethean kind of biology it must be possible to find, even for the process of pollination, an idea derived from nothing but the two principles of plant life: growth and formation.
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