what would London be?--if we didn't have a touch, a smack, a
sprinkling of that ingredient!

He was a shameless sentimentalist. Why not? It is better to cry than
to comb one's hair all day with an ivory comb.

He was a monstrous melodramatist. Why not? To be born is a
melodrama. To play "hide-and-seek" with Death is a melodrama.
And some have found melodramatic satisfaction in letting
themselves be caught. All the World's a Puppet-Show, and if the Big
Showman jerks his wires so extravagantly, why should not the Little
Showman do the same?

GOETHE

As the enigmatic wisdom of Goethe been exhausted--after these
years--and after the sudden transits across our sky of more flashing
meteors? Ah! I deem not yet. Still he holds the entrance to the
mysterious Gate, over the portals of which is written, not "Lasciate
ogni speranza!" but "Think of Living!" A thunder-rifted heart he
bears, but victory, not defeat, looks forth from his wide, outward-gazing
eyes! One hand holds the skull, engraved with all the secret
symbols of man's ascent out of the bosom of Nature; engraved,
yes!--by all the cunningest tools of Science and her unwearied research;
but the other, raised aloft, noble and welcoming, carries the laurel
crown of the triumph of Imagination!

So, between Truth and Poetry--"im ganzen guten, schonen,"--stands
our Lord of Life!

Exhausted, the wisdom of Goethe? Ah, no!--hardly fathomed yet, in
its uppermost levels! If it were really possible to put into words the
whole complex world of impressions and visions, of secrets and
methods, which that name suggests, one would be a wiser disciple
than Eckermann. Fragment by fragment, morsel by morsel, the great
Figure limns itself against the shadow of the years.

Is it too presumptuous a task to seek to evoke--taking first one
impression of him and then another, first one reaction and then
another--what this mysterious Name has come to mean for us? One
hears the word "cosmic" whispered. It is whispered too often in
these days. But "cosmic," with its Whitmanesque, modern
connotation, does not exactly fit Goethe. Goethe did not often
abandon himself in Dionysian fury to the ultimate Elements. When
he did--in his earlier youth--before the hardening process of his
Italian Journey had sealed his protection from such romantic lapses--it
was not quite in the strained, desperate, modern manner. One feels
certain, thinking of what he was, at Frankfurt, at Leipsig, at
Strassbur