CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS

ESSAYS.

GOETHE'S PORTRAIT.1

[1832.]

READER! thou here beholdest the Eidolon of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. So looks and lives, now in his eighty-third year, afar in the bright little friendly circle of Weimar, "the clearest, most universal man of his time." Strange enough is the cunning that resides in the ten fingers, especially what they bring to pass by pencil and pen! Him who never saw England, England now sees: from Fraser's "Gallery" he looks forth here, wondering, doubtless, how he came into such a "Lichtstrasse, lightstreet," or galaxy; yet with kind recognition of all neighbors, even as the moon looks kindly on lesser lights, and, were they but fish-oil cressets, or terrestrial Vauxhall stars (of clipped tin), forbids not their shining. - Nay, the very soul of the man thou canst likewise behold. Do but look well in those forty volumes of "musical wisdom,” which, under the title of Goethes Werke, Cotta of Tübingen, or Black and Young of Covent Garden, -once offer them a trifle of drink-money, will cheerfully hand thee: greater sight, or more profitable, thou wilt not meet with in this generation.

1 FRASER'S MAGAZINE, No. 26.-By Stieler of Munich: the copy in Fraser's Magazine proved a total failure and involuntary caricature, — resembling, as was said at the time, a wretched old-clothesman carrying behind his back a hat which he seemed to have stolen.