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NOTES.
1. Dedication.
The Dedication was certainly not written earlier than the year 1797, when Goethe, encouraged by Schiller’s hearty interest in the work, determined to complete the “Fragment” of the First Part of Faust, published in 1790. Twenty-four years had therefore elapsed since the first scenes of the work were written: the poet was forty-eight years old, and the conceptions which had haunted him in his twenty-first year seemed already to belong to a dim and remote Past. The shadowy forms of the drama, which he again attempts to seize and hold, bring with them the phantoms of the friends to whom his earliest songs were sung. Of these friends, his sister Cornelia, Merck, Lenz, Basedow, and Gotter were dead; Klopstock, Lavater, and the Stolbergs were estranged; and Jacobi, Klinger, Kestner, and others were separated from him by the circumstances of their lives. Gotter died in March, 1797, and, as it is evident from Goethe’s letters to Schiller that he worked upon Faust only in the months of May and June, in that year, the Dedication was probably then written.
Nothing of Goethe has been more frequently translated than these four stanzas,—and nothing, I may add, is more difficult to the translator.
