of kindness, with good judgment and at the right moment.

Surely the simple soberness of Gœthe should please at least those who style themselves, preëminently, people of common sense.

The following remarks are by the celebrated Rahel von Ense, whose discernment as to his works was highly prized by Gœthe.

 "Don Quixote and Wilhelm Meister! 

"Embrace one another, Cervantes and Gœthe!

"Both, using their own clear eyes, vindicated human nature. They saw the champions through their errors and follies, looking down into the deepest soul, seeing there the true form. Respectable people call the Don as well as Meister a fool, wandering hither and thither, transacting no business of real life, bringing nothing to pass, scarce even knowing what he ought to think on any subject, very unfit for the hero of a romance. Yet has our sage known how to paint the good and honest mind in perpetual toil and conflict with the world, as it is embodied; never sharing one moment the impure confusion; always striving to find fault with and improve itself, always so innocent as to see others far better than they are, and generally preferring them to itself, learning from all, indulging all except the manifestly base; the more you understand, the more you respect and love this character. Cervantes has painted the knight, Gœthe the culture of the entire man,—both their own time."

But those who demand from him a life-long continuance of the early ardor of Faust, who wish to see, throughout his works, not only such manifold beauty and subtle wisdom, but the clear assurance of divinity, the pure white light of Macaria, wish that he had not so variously unfolded his nature, and concentred it more. They would see him slaying the serpent with the divine wrath of Apollo, rather than taming it to his service, like Æsculapius. They wish that he had never gone to Weimar, had never become a universal connoisseur and dilettante in science, and courtier as "graceful as a born nobleman," but had endured the burden of life with the suffering crowd, and deepened his nature in loneliness and privation, till Faust had conquered, rather than cheated the devil, and the music of heavenly faith superseded the grave and mild eloquence of human wisdom.

The expansive genius which moved so gracefully in its self imposed fetters, is constantly surprising us by its content with a choice low, in so far as 

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