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GREAT MEN'S BODIES
"Being remarkably well formed and athletic, he was enlisted when very young as private in a small body of halberdiers, all of gentle blood, known as the Bodyguard of James VI. His closest friend was Alexander Pope. Cowper says: 'He was wonderfully handsome.'"
JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE (1749–1832)
"Every thing that happens to us leaves some trace behind; everything contributes imperceptibly to make us what we are."—Goethe.
"He was not only the greatest poet of Germany; he was one of the greatest poets of all ages. Posterity must decide his exact precedence in that small and chosen company which contains the names of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. He was the apostle of self-culture."—Encyclopædia Britannica.
Precocious, handsome, lively, sensitive; before he was ten he wrote in several languages, meditated poems, and invented stories.
"The foremost poet of Germany; born at Frankfort-on-the-Main, August 28, 1749; of a wealthy and highly respectable family; his father proud and pedantic; his mother bright, quick-witted, decided, deeply sympathetic, and dreading her husband; very carefully and widely educated, largely by his father; defective in his religious impressions; knowing the Bible well, but intellectually only; profoundly impressed by the Seven Years' War; at sixteen entered the University of Leipzig; read law; wrote lyrical poems and critical dramas; at twenty-four published his drama 'Götz von Berlichingen'; at twenty-five his famous novel, Werther's Leiden, works of rare artistic truth and magical vividness of picture; not only writing them out of his own heart, but out of the heart of his time, which was the secret of the immense success of his works. No poet has ever reached Goethe in the magic of his representations. Every sentence in his dramas is charged with color. Everybody who reads Werther's Leiden reads something of himself. Napoleon read it over and over again. At twenty-six he went to live with Charles Augustus, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, at his Court, occupying many different positions in the ducal government which his great administrative talent and business tact enabled him to do well; made a severe study of botany, comparative anatomy, mineralogy, and optics; and great men gathered around the Court at Weimar323
