his inward being.

He finds this, poor boy, in the stage. There no reality will exist but
such as is _made_ for his purposes. There his fine imaginations may have
it all their own way. There, in heroic costume and by gas-light, his
sole business shall be to express sublime sentiments in the most
effective manner, while all the surroundings are strictly accessory. How
fine to discover an heroic situation dumbly begging him to appear and be
its speaking lay-figure!

_Making_ play, instead of ennobling work till through that the soul can
play,--that is child's play. Finding spiritual deliverance in a _there_,
in a "got-up" situation,--that is romanticism. And it is the
representative error of nobly imagining youth.

But lay-figure heroics are not heroism; and the made-up situation proves
more straitening than that situation which God has made for all, namely,
the real world. The stage is found to be wooden as its own boards. It
gives Wilhelm for companions a crew of spiritual incapables, who have
excellent appetites at others' cost, who higgle, bicker, sneak away from
duty, are good for nothing, and pretend everything; while, but for his
escape, it would make his own life a mere cul-de-sac with a slough at
the end.

Yet he is boy-wise as well as boy-foolish. His imaginations fertilize,
though they mislead him. His impulse to live _over_ the world, rather
than under it, is the vital impulse of the human soul.

But long before imagination has proceeded to the results named, another
grand fructifying force has come to its aid, namely, Love. "The
ever-womanly leadeth us on." Love,--it is, we may say, a chemical change
in the man, like the conversion of starch into sugar, or grape-juice
into wine. Full of sweetness and sweet intoxication, it belongs to the
profoundest economies of Nature; and he who with his whole soul and body
has once loved is another being henceforth. Acid or even putrid
fermentations may set in; but what he was before he cannot be again.
Goethe, therefore, follows Nature in placing this next to imagination as
a producer of growth,--next in Nature and in Goethe's pages, because its
alliance with imagination is so immediate and intimate. He who does not
idealize does not love.

But here also is peril. Love, while filling Wilhelm's being with those
precious heats which are the blind substance of all chivalry and
nobility, clothes the stage with the added enchantment of Mariana's
presence, and so bewitc