, this personal meeting has not at all diminished the
idea, great as it was, which I had previously formed of Goethe; but I
doubt whether we shall ever come into any close communication with
each other. Much that still interests me has already had its epoch
with him. His whole nature is, from its very origin, otherwise
constructed than mine; his world is not my world; our modes of
conceiving things appear to be essentially different. From such a
combination, no secure, substantial intimacy can result. Time will
try.'

[Footnote 18: 1825.]

The aid of time was not, in fact, unnecessary. On the part of Goethe
there existed prepossessions no less hostile; and derived from sources
older and deeper than the present transitory meeting, to the
discontents of which they probably contributed. He himself has lately
stated them with his accustomed frankness and good humour, in a
paper, part of which some readers may peruse with an interest more
than merely biographical.

'On my return from Italy,' he says, 'where I had been endeavouring to
train myself to greater purity and precision in all departments of
art, not heeding what meanwhile was going on in Germany, I found here
some older and some more recent works of poetry, enjoying high esteem
and wide circulation, while unhappily their character to me was
utterly offensive. I shall only mention Heinse's _Ardinghello_ and
Schiller's _Robbers_. The first I hated for its having undertaken to
exhibit sensuality and mystical abstruseness, ennobled and supported
by creative art: the last, because in it, the very paradoxes moral and
dramatic, from which I was struggling to get liberated, had been laid
hold of by a powerful though an immature genius, and poured in a
boundless rushing flood over all our country.

'Neither of these gifted individuals did I blame for what he had
performed or purposed: it is the nature and the privilege of every
mortal to attempt working in his own peculiar way; he attempts it
first without culture, scarcely with the consciousness of what he is
about; and continues it with consciousness increasing as his culture
increases; whereby it happens that so many exquisite and so many
paltry things are to be found circulating in the world, and one
perplexity is seen to rise from the ashes of another.

'But the rumour which these strange productions had excited over
Germany, the approbation paid to them by every class of persons, from
the wild student to the