e to shut him out.

Further, I have to mention that a new edition of the "Iphigenia in
Aulis" of Euripides has once more turned my attention to that
incomparable Greek poet. Of course, his great and unique talent excited
my admiration as of old, but what has now mainly attracted me is the
element, as boundless as it is potent, in which he moves.

Among the Greek localities and their mass of primeval, mythological
legends, he sails and swims, like a cannon-ball on a quick-silver sea,
and cannot sink, even if he wished. Everything is ready to his
hand--subject matter, contents, circumstances, relations. He has only to
set to work in order to bring forward his subjects and characters in the
simplest way, or to render the most complicated limitations even more
complex, and then finally and symmetrically, to our complete
satisfaction, either to unravel or cut the knot.

I shall not quit him all this winter. We have translations enough which
will warrant our presumption in looking into the original. When the sun
shines into my warm room, and I am aided by the stores of knowledge
acquired in days long gone by, I shall, at any rate, fare better than I
should, at this moment, among the newly discovered ruins of Messene and
Megalopolis.

* * * * *

Poetry and Truth from My Own Life

As "Werther" and "Wilhelm Meister" belong to the earlier and
to the middle periods of Goethe's literary activity, so the
following selections fall naturally into the last division of
his life. The death of Schiller in 1805 had given a blow to
his affections which even his warm relationship with other
friends could not replace, and hereafter he begins to
concentrate more and more upon himself to the completion of
those works which he had had in mind and preparation through
so many years, the greatest of which was to be the "Faust." In
"Poetry and Truth from My Own Life," which appeared in
1811-14, he was actuated by the desire of supplying some kind
of a key to the collected edition of his works that had been
published in 1808; and whatever faults, or errors, it may
contain as a history, as a piece of writing it is finely
characteristic of the ease and simplicity of his later style.

_I.--Birth and Childhood_

On August 28, 1749, at midday, I came into the world at
Frankfort-on-Maine. Our house was situated in a street called