(SCHURE.)
The lines are full of that pantheism which not only brings subject
and object, Mind and Nature, into symbolic relationship, but works
them into one tissue. Taken alone with _The Fisher_ and _To the
Moon_, it would suffice to give him the first place as a poet of
Nature.
He was not only the greatest poet, but the greatest and most
universal thinker of modern times. With him feeling and knowledge
worked together, the one reaching its climax in the lyrics of his
younger days, the other gradually moderating the fervour of passion,
and, with the more objective outlook of age, laying greater stress
upon science. His feeling for Nature, which followed an unbroken
course, like his mental development generally, stands alone as a type
of perfectly modern feeling, and yet no one, despite the many
intervening centuries, stood so near both to Homer and to
Shakespeare, and in philosophy to Spinoza.
But because with Goethe poetry and philosophy were one, his pantheism
is full of life and poetic vision, whilst that of the wise man of
Amsterdam is severely mathematical and abstract. And the postulate of
this pantheism was sympathy, harmony between Nature and the inner
life. He felt himself a part of the power which upholds and
encompasses the world. Nature became his God, love of her his
religion. In his youth, in the period of _Werther, Ganymede_, and the
first part of _Faust_, this pantheism was a nameless, unquenchable
aspiration towards the divine--for wings to reach, like the rays of
light, to unmeasured heights; as he said in the Swiss mountains,
'Into the limitless spaces of the air, to soar over abysses, and let
him down upon inaccessible rocks.
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