The Life of Goethe, Volume 1

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Smith, Elder and Company, 1864 - 575 pages
 

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Page 462 - THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream. The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore ; — Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
Page 512 - He fought his doubts and gather'd strength, He would not make his judgment blind, He faced the spectres of the mind And laid them : thus he came at length To find a stronger faith his own...
Page 533 - Merciful heaven! What, man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows; Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break.
Page 464 - Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, Resolve me of all ambiguities, Perform what desperate enterprise I will? I'll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, And search all corners of the new-found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates...
Page 146 - Werter is but the cry of that dim, rooted pain, under which all thoughtful men of a certain age were languishing : it paints the misery, it passionately utters the complaint; and heart and voice, all over Europe, loudly and at once respond to it.
Page 550 - With a five-and-twenty years' experience since those happy days of which I write, and an acquaintance with an immense variety of human kind, I think I have never seen a society more simple, charitable, courteous, gentlemanlike than that of the dear little Saxon city, where the good Schiller and the great Goethe lived and lie buried.
Page 121 - Within its own creation, or in thine, Maternal Nature ! for who teems like thee, Thus on the banks of thy majestic Rhine? There Harold gazes on a work divine, A blending of all beauties; streams and dells, Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, cornfield, mountain, vine, And chiefless castles breathing stern farewells From gray but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells.
Page 549 - Of course I remember very well the perturbation of spirit with which, as a lad of nineteen, I received the long expected intimation that the Herr Geheimrath would see me on such a morning.
Page 303 - I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move.
Page 411 - Zur Nation euch zu bilden, ihr hoffet es, Deutsche, vergebens ; Bildet, ihr könnt es, dafür freier zu Menschen euch aus.

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