had given her his loyal affection and the name of wife.

"The Natural Daughter" in which Goethe's Hellenism tends perhaps in some respects to an ideality proper to sculpture alone, has been described as marble-smooth and marble-cold. The remark of Goedeke, that the coldness is more apparent than real, seems to me to be just. But however this may be, there is one work of Goethe's, the happiest offspring of his period of Hellenism, which no recent critic, unless it be the late M. Scherer, has described as cold-that most charming of epic-idylls, "Hermann and Dorothea." Here once again the French Revolution, with the invasion of Germany by the armies of the Republic, forms the background. The betrothed of Dorothea, her first love, had been drawn into the revolutionary maelstrom, and had perished in its mad vortex. She herself is a fugitive from her home, driven forth as an exile by the armies of freedom and fraternity. In the book of the poem. which bears the name of the "Muse of History," the magistrate tells in vivid words of the high hopes inspired by the ideas of 1789, and of the melancholy blight which had fallen upon these hopes

"Who will deny that high within him his heart was uplifted, And that his pulses throbbed with a freer and purer emotion, When he beheld the sun uprise in his freshness and glory; When of the Rights of Man he heard as the wide world's possession,

Heard of Freedom, Equality-glorious names and inspiring?"

But soon the sky was overcast, the rain descended, and the floods came. A vile crew strove for the

mastery, men too base to be authors of anything that is good

"Murderers one of another, and foul oppressors of new-found Neighbours and brethren, commanding their ravenous hordes o'er the frontier."

And so this once enthusiastic believer in the new gospel of the age has come almost to despair of human virtue.

But the author of the poem of "Hermann and Dorothea" does not despair. The poem is throughout ennobled by the presence of goodness, courage, hope, and love. Iphigenia, the priestess-daughter of Agamemnon, is an admirable figure; her spirit is one of pure and high devotion; yet I am not sure that I do not love better the daughter of the people, Dorothea, noble in her large simplicity, with her strong, sweet German heart, sound to the inmost core, as she tends the feeble mother and new-born infant, or holds her water-jug to Hermann's lips, or flushes with honest indignation at the imagined affront to her maiden dignity in the guest-chamber of the Golden Lion, or as she stands at last by the side of her betrothed making his life so full of worth. In the background we see the wild storm of the Revolution; but here all is blessedness and peace. To build up one happy home, Goethe would say, after all serves the earth better than to discourse infinitely of rights of man or to enforce the doctrine of fraternity at the point of the bayonet. May this better way be the German way! Such is the closing aspiration of the poem :

"Thus she spoke, and she placed the rings by the side of each other,
And the bridegroom spoke with a manly accent of feeling :
All the firmer amidst this universal disruption

Be Dorothea the tie! And thus we will hold and continue
True to each other, and still maintain the good that is given us ;
For the man who in wavering times has a mind ever wavering
Only increases the evil and spreads it wider and wider ;
But who firmly stands he moulds the world to his posture.
Not the German's work should it be, this fearful commotion
Onward to urge, or to reel in his courses this way and that way.
'Here we take our stand.' Such be our word and our action !"

And thus in the strength and love of the German home, Goethe sees the foundation and the root of German society.

In 1807, after the piece of Tilsit, the members of the ducal family, parted for a season by the events of the Napoleonic war, were reunited, and for the occasion was written one of the most admirable of Goethe's later poems, and one which is as wise in thought as it is beautiful in expression-the Vorspiel of that year. Germany at this date might almost be described as lying in ruins. But Goethe did not indulge in weak lamentations. He had faith that Germany might be built up anew; not by doctrinaire abstractions; not by beginning with the human race and descending from it to patriotism, civic virtue, domestic loyalty, and individual self-culture: not thus, but by the reverse process: by a gradual ascension from the individual and the family to the city and to the state, and in the end perhaps to universal humanity; by each man and each woman doing the duty that was nearest to him, and gradually widening, if possible, the sphere of this beneficent activity. It

was a modest but a sound programme.
Goethe, despise little things.

"For in little things as in the greatest
Nature ever works, the human spirit
Works, and each alike is a reflection

Do not, says

Of that primal Light from highest heaven
Which invisible all the world illumeth."

Who then is the true patriot? He, answers Goethe, who begins with ordering his own house, who builds up himself first, in order that by-and-by, with other worthy assistants, he may help to build up the commonweal.

"Er ist Patriot, und seine Tugend

Dringt hervor und bildet Ihresgleichen,

Schliesst sich an die Reihen Gleichgesinnter.
Jeder fühlt es, Jeder hat's erfahren ;

Was dem Einen frommt, das frommet Allen."

Such is Goethe's unpretentious, but not useless lesson in political wisdom.

GOETHE

III-GOETHE IN ITALY.

His visit to Italy may be regarded as a capital event in Goethe's intellectual life. Several aids towards the fuller understanding of this memorable passage in the story of his life have appeared in recent years. In the Hempel edition of Goethe's works the "Italiänische Reise" is edited by Düntzer with that writer's exemplary diligence and erudition. He has included among his illustrations of the text many important letters belonging to that period written by Goethe to his secretary Seidel, to the Grand Duke, to Friedrich von Stein, and others. An excellent monograph, narrative and critical, entitled “Goethe en Italie,” has been written by a French author, M. Théophile Cart. Ingenious essays on two projected works belonging to the Italian period, the "Nausikaa” and the “Iphigenie in Delphi,” are included in the posthumous collection of studies, "Aufsätze über Goethe," by that admirable critic and historian of literature, whose untimely loss we deplore, Wilhelm Scherer. The second volume of the publications of the Goethe Gesellschaft presents us with the first fruits of the examination of the Goethe archives in diaries and letters from Italy to Frau von Stein and Herder, from which, a quarter of a century after An Address delivered by the writer as President of the English Goethe Society, on June 28, 1888, in the Westminster Town Hall.