ust as it happened, in the very middle
of a fine emotion, and all through his jovial speech. What an irruption
it was!--as if by a tilt of the planet the climate had changed suddenly,
and palm-trees, oranges, the sugarcane, the grotesque dragon-tree, and
all the woods of rich and curious grain, stood in the temperate and
meagre soil.

Schiller met Jean Paul in the spring of 1796. In writing to Goethe about
their interviews, he says,--"I have told you nothing yet about Hesperus.
I found him on the whole such as I expected, just as odd as if he had
fallen from the moon, full of good-will, and very eager to see things
that are outside of him, but he lacks the organ by which one sees";
and in a letter of a later date he doubts whether Richter will ever
sympathize with their way of handling the great subjects of Man and
Nature.

The reader can find the first interviews which Richter had with Goethe
and Schiller in Lewes's "Life of Goethe," Vol. II. p. 269. Of Goethe,
Richter said, "By heaven! we shall love each other!" and of Schiller,
"He is full of acumen, but without love." The German public, which loves
Richter, has reversed his first impression. And indeed Richter himself,
though he could not get along with Schiller, learned that Goethe's
loving capacity, which he thought he saw break out with fire while
Goethe read a poem to him, was only the passion of an artistic nature
which impregnates its own products.

Richter's love was very different. It was a sympathy with men and women
of all conditions, fed secretly the while that his shaggy genius was
struggling with poverty and apparently unfavorable circumstances. He was
always a child, yearning to feel the arms of some affection around him,
very susceptible to the moods of other people, yet testing them by a
humorous sincerity. All the books which he devoured in his desultory
rage for knowledge turned into nourishment for an imagination that
was destined chiefly to interpret a very lofty moral sense and a very
democratic feeling. And whenever his humor caught an edge in the
easterly moments of his mind, it was never sharpened against humanity,
and made nothing tender bleed. Now and then we know he has a caustic
thing or two to say about women; but it is lunar-caustic for a wart.

Goethe did not like this indiscriminate and democratic temper. The
sly remarks of Richter upon the Transparencies and Well-born
and Excellencies of his time, with their faded taste and drear