_Weimar, February_ 15, 1830. As to the title, "Poetry and Truth," of my
autobiography, it is certainly somewhat paradoxical. I adopted it
because the public always cherishes doubt as to the truth of such
biographical attempts. My sincere effort was to express the genuine
truth which had prevailed throughout my life. Does not the most ordinary
chronicle necessarily embody something of the spirit of the time in
which it was written? Will not the fourteenth century hand down the
tradition of a comet more ominously than the nineteenth? Nay, in the
same town you will hear one version of an incident in the morning, and
another in the evening.

All that belongs to the narrator and the narrative I included under the
word _Dichtung_ (poetry), so that I could for my own purpose avail
myself of the truth of which I was conscious. In every history, even if
it be diplomatically written, we always see the nation, the party of the
writer, peering through. How different is the accent in which the French
describe English history from that of the English themselves!

Remember that with every breath we draw, an ethereal stream of Lethe
runs through our whole being, so that we have but a partial recollection
of our joys, and scarcely any of our sorrows. I have always known how to
value, and use, this gift of God.

_IV.--The Birth of "Iphigenia"_

_Weimar, March_ 31, 1831. I have received a delightful letter from
Mendelssohn, dated Rome, March 5, which gives the most transparent
picture of that rare young man. About him we need cherish no further
care. The fine swimming-jacket of his genius will carry him safely
through the waves and surf of the dreaded barbarism.

Now, you well remember that I have always passionately adopted the cause
of the minor third, and was angry that you theoretical cheap-jacks would
not allow it to be a _donum naturae_. Certainly a wire or piece of
cat-gut is not so precious that nature should exclusively confide to it
her harmonies. Man is worth more, and nature has given him the minor
third, to enable him to express with cordial delight to himself that
which he cannot name, and that for which he longs.

_Weimar, November_ 23, 1831. To begin with, let me tell you that I have
retreated into my cloister cell, where the sun, which is just now
rising, shines horizontally into my room, and does not leave me till he
sets, so that he is often uncomfortably importunate--so much so that for
a time I really hav