his "zweite Schriftstellerepoche."--his
second epoch as a writer. They were needful to make him a master in the
art of life, needful to put him into possession of all his powers.
Men of genius are quick growers; but men of the highest genius, which
includes the wisdom of human life, are not speedily ripe. Goethe
had entered literature early; he had stormed the avenues. Now at
six-and-twenty he was a chief figure in German, even in European,
literature; and from twenty-six to thirty-seven he published, we may
say nothing. But though he ceased to astonish the world, he was well
employed in widening the basis of his existence; in organizing his
faculties; in conciliating passions, intellect, and will; in applying
his mind to the real world; in endeavoring to comprehend it aright; in
testing and training his powers by practical activity.

A time came when he felt that his will and skill were mature; that he
was no longer an apprentice in the art of living, but a master
craftsman. Tasks that had grown irksome and were felt to be a
distraction from higher duties, he now abandoned. Goethe fled for a time
to Italy, there to receive his degree in the high school of life, and to
start upon a course of more advanced studies. Thenceforward until his
closing days the record is one of almost uninterrupted labor in his
proper fields of literature, art, and science. "In Rome," he wrote, "I
have for the first time found myself, for the first time come into
harmony with myself, and grown happy and rational." He had found
himself, because his passions and his intellect now co-operated; his
pursuit of truth had all the ardor of a first love; his pursuit of
beauty was not a fantastic chase, but was subject to rational law; and
his effort after truth and his effort after beauty were alike supported
by an adult will.

His task, regarded as a whole, was to do over again the work of the
Renascence. But whereas the Renascence had been a large national or
European movement, advancing towards its ends partly through popular
passions and a new enthusiasm, the work which Goethe accomplished was
more an affair of intelligence, criticism, conscious self-direction. It
was less of a flood sweeping away old dikes and dams, and more of a dawn
quietly and gradually drawing back the borders of darkness and widening
the skirts of light. A completely developed human being, for the uses of
the world,--this was the ideal in which Goethe's thoughts centred, an