Goethe, then, must be set down as the poet of the Actual, not
of the Ideal; the poet of limitation, not of possibility; of this
world, and not of religion and hope; in short, if I may say so, the
poet of prose, and not of poetry. He accepts the base doctrine of
Fate, and gleans what straggling joys may yet remain out of its ban.
He is like a banker or a weaver with a passion for the country, he
steals out of the hot streets before sunrise, or after sunset, or on
a rare holiday, to get a draught of sweet air, and a gaze at the
magnificence of summer, but dares not break from his slavery and lead
a man's life in a man's relation to nature. In that which should be
his own place, he feels like a truant, and is scourged back presently
to his task and his cell. Poetry is with Goethe thus external, the
gilding of the chain, the mitigation of his fate; but the muse never
essays those thunder-tones, which cause to vibrate the sun and the
moon, which dissipate by dreadful melody all this iron network of
circumstance, and abolish the old heavens and the old earth before
the free-will or Godhead of man.
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