Crabbe Robinson heard him say what an annoyance he felt it to appreciate everything equally and to be able to hate nothing. He flattered himself at that time that he had a real aversion. “I hate,” he said, “everything Oriental” (“Eigentlich hasse ich alles Orientalische”). He goes further in the “West-östlicher Divan,” where, in enumerating the qualities a poet ought to have, he lays it down as indispensable that he should hate many things (“Dann zuletzt ist unerlässlich dass der Dichter _manches hasse_”). True, no doubt that he found it difficult to hate. An infinite good nature was born in him, and, besides this, he grew up in a society in which all established opinions had been shaken, so that for a rational man it was really difficult to determine what deserved hatred or love. What is wholly untrue in that view of him, which was so fashionable forty years ago—“I sit apart holding no form of creed, but contemplating all”—is that this tolerance was the intentional result of cold pride or self-sufficiency. He does not seem to me to have been either proud or unsympathetic, and among the many things of which he might boast, certainly he would not have included a want of definite opinions—he, who was never tired of rebuking the Germans for their vagueness, and who admired young Englishmen expressly because they seemed to know their own minds, even when they had little mind to know. Distinctness, character, is what he admires, what through life he struggles for, what he and Schiller alike chide the Germans for wanting. But he cannot attain it by a short cut. Narrowness is impossible to him, not only because his mind is large, but because the German public in their good-natured tolerance have made themselves familiar with such vast variety of ideas. He cannot be a John Bull, however much he may admire John Bull, because he does not live in an island. To have distinct views he must make a resolute act of choice, since all ideas have been laid before him, all are familiar to the society in which he lives. This perplexity, this difficulty of choosing what was good out of such a heap of opinions, he often expresses: “The people to be sure are not accustomed to what is best, but then they are so terribly well-read!”[33] But it is just the struggle he makes for distinctness that is admirable in him. The breadth, the tolerance, he has in common with his German contemporaries; what he has to himself is the resolute determination to arrive at clearness.