gold, in their heavens, must strike against the
icy mountain-tops of common-sense, that the cold may condense them into
fruitful rain. Hence thunder, lightning, storm, and wild commotion in
the soul; but hence harvest also. The first great inward struggle is
this between heat and cold; and where the heats are tropical, the
collision is violent. Yet these contraries _must_ both work into the
great economies of life.

Cold--cold prudence and choice--appears first in its embodiment, Jarno,
who symbolizes its _secret_ beginnings in Wilhelm. But then and there
its beginnings are only symbolized. Soon, however, disappointment
bitterer than death, with sickness, remorse, horror, enters and chills
him to the core. Ah, and so these clouds of glory are only raw vapor and
mist, after all! The rainy season has set in. "Let's into the house,"
says Prudence; "let's box ourselves up nicely, and get some comfort,
since that is the whole of life." No, he will not do that; he will stand
out, and be drenched, and realize the full extent of his illusion.
Henceforth his one employment shall be to taunt his heart with its own
hopes, to put all the summer blossom and beauty of his former
imaginations beside this wintry death-in-life, and shame them by the
contrast.

This period in Wilhelm's life is wrought out in Goethe's picture with
extreme power.

But he recovers himself, slowly. And Goethe's great knowledge of human
nature is shown in this, that Wilhelm does not regain his ennobling
imaginations while holding fast to the cool suggestions of prudence. No,
he reverts to the former, forsaking the latter. The cold season has
passed over him, and seemingly left nothing behind. With health and joy,
his illusions, one by one, one and all, return. I find this true.
Oscillation between opposite poles,--how long it lasts! A powerful
experience comes, and all seems changed in one's being; it passes, and
nothing seems changed. "Is there for me," one might cry, "only this
aimless see-saw? To-day Don Quixote, to-morrow Sancho, next day Don
Quixote again,--is that to go on forever?" Happy is he, provided his
poverty be not his exemption, who has never wrung his hands in utter
despair of finding centrality, unity, at last,--a centre where the
divine passion and afflatus of the heart are reconciled with the
hard-eyed perceptions of common-sense.

But life is not a mere pendulum. Nature works to her ends. There is
oscillation, but also growth. And so