Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear – And struck his finger on the place, And said – Thou ailest here, and here.
On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die, Like spring flowers. Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves, with bitter tears, For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears, Count the hours.
Sanity – that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Time, so complain’d of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm’d hours.
But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.
The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses. In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair.
Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man taken by himself.
All the live murmur of a summer’s day.
Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city’s jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar! The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel what others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.
All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates.
The love of science, and the energy and honesty in the pursuit of science, in the best of the Aryan races do seem to correspond in a remarkable way to the love of conduct, and the energy and honesty in the pursuit of conduct, in the best of the Semitic.
What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath? Yes; but not this alone.
One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common – discontent.
If Paris that brief flight allow, My humble tomb explore! It bears: Eternity, be thou My refuge! and no more.
No, no! The energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg’d not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing – only he His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.
Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.
Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye Forever doth accompany mankind, Hath look’d on no religion scornfully That men did ever find.
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.