marbles and common pebbles, of glass, jasper, and lapis-lazuli; but, seen in the proper perspective, exhibits only the Titanic struggle of Man, surrounded with shapes of Beauty and Darkness, towards a victorious immortality.
It would have been better, undoubtedly, if the completion of the work had not been so long delayed, and Goethe had thereby been able to give us, with more limited stores of knowledge, a greater poetic unity. It is hardly the feebleness of the octogenarian which we perceive. The acquisitions of the foregoing thirty years seemed to have gradually formed a crust over the lambent poetical element in his nature; but the native force of the latter is nowhere so wonderfully revealed as here, since it is still able to crack and shiver the erudite surface of his mind, and to flame out clearly and joyously. Wherever it thus displays itself, it is still the same pure, illuminating, solving and blending power, as in his earlier years.
The reader to whom this book is a new land must of necessity be furnished with a compass and an outline chart before he enters it. He may, otherwise, lose his way in its tropical jungles, before reaching that “peak in Darien,” from which Keats, like Balboa, beheld a new side of the world. While the Notes contain as much interpretation of the details of the plan as seems to be possible at present, I consider that a brief previous statement of the argument is absolutely required.
