But if the “many-sided Göethe”--wanting, as he certainly did, one important side of humanity, namely, the moral side--could not appreciate the genius of Richter fully, there was one who did--that, as we have already intimated, was Herder. This great man, as his intelligent wife has left on record, “valued Richter’s genius--his rich, overflowing, poetic Spirit--far above the soulless productions of the times, that contended for the poetic form only. He named them brooks without water; and often said that Richter stood, as opposed to them, on a high elevation; and that he would exchange all artistical forms for his living virtue, his feeling heart, his perennial creative genius. He brings new fresh life, truth, virtue, reality, into the declining and misunderstood vocation of the poet.” Such was Herder’s estimate of Paul; and herein precisely lies his true grandeur. A perfect Titan as an author, in the common relations of social and domestic life he is a god. Aiming at the highest things, he lives happy among the smallest. Soaring habitually among the loftiest ideas, he is “sympathising and attentive to the smallest little things, and to all the _actual_ of life.” This is the testimony of his wife--not every wife of a literary man, great or small, in these times, can give such a testimony. It has been a fashion with men of a certain fashion of genius to fall in love furiously, and to be ecstatically moved in the licentious roving of the eyes; but to shrink from the joining of hands, to hate marriage, and to damn the fireside. But Richter was of a different--of a more healthy, and a more happy humour. Did St Paul ever bear a nobler testimony to the “honourable” condition of marriage than the following?-- “That the brightest and purest fountain of love to mankind takes nothing from love to the individual, I learn from my Caroline. Every day it becomes more expansive. Rare as beautiful is her adoration of the spiritual of poetry and nature; wonderful her disinterestedness and complete abnegation of self. There is nothing that she would not do for me, or others. World-long cares are to her nothing, as her industry and love of duty are infinite. As she loves me, she loves all my clothes, and would make them all herself. “As yet we have had nothing, or only very little, to irritate. I cannot say that I am satisfied, but I am certainly _blest_. Ah, see her! What are words! Marriage has made me love her more romantically, deeper, _infinitely more_ than before!” Richter, therefore, was a domestic man in the highest sense of the word. Would you know what domestic happiness means? Take the following--’tis from a daughter:--