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What a Hyper-Brobdignagian business! Untamed Thought, great, giantlike, enormous; to be tamed in due time into the compact greatness, not giantlike, but godlike and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakspeares, the Goethes! Spiritually as well as bodily these men are our progenitors. I like, too, that representation they have of the tree Igdrasil. All Life is figured by them as a Tree.
Science, regarded from this lofty point of view, will gradually assume epic proportions, and other and more powerful Schillers and Goethes will arise to illustrate its achievements. The history of German literature may be divided into three periods. The second period, extending from 1517 to 1700, includes the literature of the age of the Reformation, and of the Thirty Years' War.
Paul's would be for Canadian Beavers, acquainted only with the architecture of fish-dams, and with no trowel but their tail. Literature, the strange entity so called, that indeed is here. If Literature continue to be the haven of expatriated spiritualisms, and have its Johnsons, Goethes and true Archbishops of the World, to show for itself as heretofore, there may be hope in Literature.
This applies completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once Mrs. Carlyle had her way.
The young Goethes, as it happened, slept not in separate beds only, but in separate rooms; and not unfrequently the poor children, under the stinging terrors of their lonely situation, stole away from their "forms," to speak in the hunter's phrase, and sought to rejoin each other.
Of the true sovereign souls of that Literature, the Goethes, Richters, Schillers, Lessings, he had as good as no knowledge; and of Goethe in particular an obstinate misconception, with proper abhorrence appended, which did not abate for several years, nor quite abolish itself till a very late period. Till, in a word, he got Goethe's works fairly read and studied for himself!
The Goethes were able to forward his views amongst German artists; whilst, on the other hand, they were pleased to have thus an opportunity of directing his patronage towards some of their own needy connections. In this exchange of good offices, the two parties were for some time able to maintain a fair appearance of reciprocal good-will.
And, when both memory and philosophy combine together in one person, then indeed we have the highest sort of intellectual efficiency. Your Walter Scotts, your Leibnitzes, your Gladstones, and your Goethes, all your folio copies of mankind, belong to this type. Efficiency on a colossal scale would indeed seem to require it.
Goethe and her children cheerfully acquitted themselves that same night; and Monsieur le Comte was so well pleased with the sound opinions of the little Goethes, that he sent them in return a collection of sweetmeats and fruits. All promised to go well; intentions, after all, are not acts; and there certainly is not, nor ever was, any treason in taking a morning's walk.
The most thorough worker on record, he found nothing easy that was great, and he would do nothing little. In his determination to pluck out the heart of the mystery, be it of himself, as in Sartor; of Germany, as in his Goethes and Richters; the state of England, as in Chartism and Past and Present; of Cromwell or of Friedrich, he faced all obstacles and overthrew them.
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