But this man was entirely at home and happy in his century
and the world. None was so fit to live, or more heartily enjoyed the
game. In this aim of culture, which is the genius of his works, is
their power. The idea of absolute, eternal truth, without reference
to my own enlargement by it, is higher. The surrender to the torrent,
of poetic inspiration is higher; but compared with any motives on which
books are written in England and America, this is very truth, and has
the power to inspire which belongs to truth. Thus has he brought back
to a book some of its ancient might and dignity.
Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and country, when original
talent was oppressed under the load of books, and mechanical
auxiliaries, and the distracting variety of claims, taught men how to
dispose of this mountainous miscellany, and make it subservient. I
join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives of the impatience
and reaction of nature against the morgue of conventions,--two stern
realists, who, with their scholars, have severally set the axe at the
root of the tree of cant and seeming, for this time, and for all time.
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