{34} The following is from Lewes’s “Life of Goethe,” just published. The words in double inverted commas are those of Goethe himself: ‘“I had a large collection of weapons, and among them a very handsome dagger. This I placed by my bedside every night, and before extinguishing my candle I made various attempts to pierce the sharp point a couple of inches into my breast; but not being able to do it I laughed myself out of the notion,” &c. He played with suicidal thoughts, because he was restless, _and suicide was a fashionable speculation of the day_,’ &c. . . . In October, 1772 the report reaches him that his Wetzlau friend, Goué, has shot himself. “Write to me at once about Goué,” he says to Kestner, “_I honour such an act_, _and pity mankind_,” &c.—Vol. I. p. 197. There is more to this abominable purpose in the sequel. Such was Goethe, a man sprung from the people, not the offspring of an effete noblesse, and at a time of life when the very thought of self-destruction is most alien to all the instincts of nature,—‘a canker in youth,’—and with no taint of constitutional melancholy in his system. Goethe’s genius was a sea of glass, capable of reflecting the rays cast upon it from without with unusual brilliancy; but, unlike our Shakspeare, devoid of independent power of originating _new_ thought. Thus he _reflected_ all his days the prevailing fashion of his time, and thus he but _re-enacts_ the sentimentalism of the hour in his suicidal lucubrations. {35} The policy of Pericles may be considered in relation to the causes that aggrandize a people. His notion seems to have been that to awaken great deeds in a nation you must supply it with great and noble thoughts. Hence his magnificent public buildings, his lavish cultivation of the arts, and even the attention he paid to the amusements of the people, to make them subservient to refinement and purity of taste. But æsthetics alone do not make a great people.—See Thuc. II., 38, 39. {37a} Luke xii. 51. {37b} Sinai and Palestine, p. 369.