in thus recognizing, bring out of them the
melodious completeness of a human soul.

One inquiry remains. What of inspirational impulse does Goethe bring to
his work? He depicts growth; what leads him to do so? Is it nothing but
cold curiosity? and does he leave the reader in a like mood? Or is he
commanded by some imperial inward necessity? and does he awaken in the
reader a like noble necessity, not indeed to write, but to _live_?

The inspiration which he feels and communicates is art infinite,
unspeakable reverence for Personality, for the completed, spiritual
reality of man. Literally unspeakable, it is the silent spirit in which
he writes, sovereign in him and in his work,--the soul of every
sentence, and professed in none. You find it scarcely otherwise than in
his manner of treating his material. But there you _may_ find it: the
silent, majestic homage that he pays to every _real_ grace and spiritual
accomplishment of man or woman. Any smallest trait of this is delineated
with a heed that makes no account of time or pains, with a venerating
fidelity and religious care that _unutterably_ imply its preciousness.
Indeed, it is one point of his art to bestow elaborate, reverential
attention upon some minor grace of manhood or womanhood, that one may
say, "If this be of such price, how priceless is the whole!" He resorts
habitually to this inferential suggestion,--puzzling hasty readers, who
think him frivolously exalting little things, rather than hinting beyond
all power of direct speech at the worth of the greater. In landscape
paintings a bush in the foreground may occupy more space than a whole
range of mountains in the distance: perhaps the bush is there to show
the scale of the drawing, and intimate the greatness, rather than
littleness, of the mountains.

The undertone of every page, should we mask its force in hortatives,
would be,--"Buy manhood; buy verity and completeness of being; buy
spiritual endowment and accomplishment; buy insight and clearness of
heart and wholeness of spirit; pay ease, estimation, estate,--never
consider what you pay: for though pleasure is not despicable, though
wealth, leisure, and social regard are good, yet there is no tint of
inherent grace, no grain nor atom of man's spiritual substance, but it
outweighs kingdoms, outweighs all that is external to itself."

But hortatives and assertions represent feebly, and without truth of
tone, the subtile, sovereign persuasion of the bo