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One of Coleridge's friends once objected to prejudicing the minds of the young by selecting the things they should be taught. The philosopher-poet invited him to take a look at his garden, and took him to where a luxuriant growth of ugly and infragrant weeds spread themselves over beds and walks alike. "You don't call that a garden!" said his friend.
This was believed profoundly, almost universally, in the days before the flood the flood of knowledge let loose upon mankind, beginning with the days of the Renascimento and continuing down to our own. But the philosopher-poet of the nineteenth century sees nothing of it in the altar and system set up in this Western world.
I shall venture, however, to elaborate the subject from the present view-point, even though the principles of Marcus Aurelius are as applicable now as they were in the days of the Roman Empire. One of its suggestions was paralleled by the philosopher-poet when he wrote: "Latius regnes avidum domando Spiritum, quam si Libyam remotis Gadibus iungas et uterque Poenus Serviat uni."
The keen insight and exceptional intellect of the philosopher-poet Goethe recognized in him "the greatest talent of our century." His marvellous poetic genius was universally acknowledged in his own day; and more than that, so human was it that it attracted the sympathies of all civilized nations, and, as Lamartine said, "made English literature known throughout Europe."
That Intelligence which pursues its own ends in this All, which sees from first to last the chain of causes which mould human action, measures not its purposes by man’s halting sensations. Such an Intelligence is fitly described by the philosopher-poet as one,
The English humourist did not, it is true, engage in the pastime in the serious, not to say scientific, spirit of the German philosopher-poet; it was not deliberately made by the former as by the latter to contribute to his artistic development; but it is nevertheless hardly open to doubt that Sterne's philandering propensities did exercise an influence upon his literary character and work in more ways than one.
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