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Updated: May 25, 2025
'We should take care, said Goethe, apropos of Byron, to Eckermann, 'not to be always looking for culture in the decidedly pure and moral. Everything that is great promotes cultivation as soon as we are aware of it. Italy is less the land of what is venerable in antiquity, than of beauty, by divine right young eternally in spite of age.
If the Seven Lamps of Architecture resemble their predecessor, Modern Painters, they will be no lamps at all, but a new constellation seven bright stars, for whose rising the reading world ought to be anxiously agaze. I am beginning to read Eckermann's Goethe it promised to be a most interesting work. Honest, simple, single-minded Eckermann!
And once more, when we pass from the seventeenth century of Corneille and Dryden to the nineteenth century when the novel has asserted its rivalry with the drama, we find the wise Goethe declaring to Eckermann the doctrine which is now winning acceptance everywhere.
Goethe collecting fossils and crystals and specimens of rock-strata; Goethe visiting Botanical Gardens and pondering on the Metamorphosis of Plants; Goethe climbing Strassburg Cathedral-Spire; Goethe meeting the Phantom of Himself as he returned from the arms of Frederika; Goethe "experiencing the sensation" of crossing the "Firing-Line"; Goethe "announcing" to Eckermann that that worthy man had better avoid undertaking any "great" literary work; Goethe sending Frau von Stein sausages from his breakfast-table; Goethe consoling himself in the Storm by observing his birth-star Lucifer, and thinking of the Lake of Galilee, are pictures of noble and humorous memory which reconcile one to the Comedy of Living!
At home and abroad, in Italy and Sicily, at Ilmenau and Carlsbad, as in his study at Weimar, with eye or pen or speech, he was always at work. A man of rigid habits; no lolling or lounging. "He showed me," says Eckermann, "an elegant easy-chair which he had bought to-day at auction. 'But, said he, 'I shall never or rarely use it; all indolent habits are against my nature.
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