Goethe (1749-1832) takes rank with Shakespeare. Intellectually--he was an ardent scientist and deep thinker as well as a great poet--he surpassed Shakespeare and, perhaps on that account, is inferior to him in the strictly poetic faculty of exquisite imagery. No other poet could have conceived the vast design of _Faust_, at which he worked for seventy years, and at least the opening soliloquy of Faust will always be read. His earlier or romantic style is beautifully seen in his story, _The Sorrows of Young Werther_, and the long novel (or pair of novels) of his later years, _Wilhelm Meister_, is a masterpiece. With his encyclopedic knowledge and his profound intellect Goethe gives the whole epic of humanity, as known in his day, in his work. In mid-life he came under the influence of the Greek and Roman classics, and the result may be read in his stately and beautiful long poems _Tasso_, _Iphigenia_, _Hermann and Dorothea_, etc. But he was masterly in all that he touched, sonnet or tragedy, story or art-criticism or scientific essay. Schiller (1759-1805), his younger friend and contemporary, is in the stricter sense a poet and dramatist, not a thinker, though he studied philosophy and wrote a famous history of the Thirty Years War. His chief plays (_Wallenstein_, _Maria Stuart_, _Don Carlos_, etc.,) are classics, and his lyrics are superb. Goethe befriended and influenced him, and they composed together some brilliant satirical verses or epigrams on contemporary shams. Like Goethe he began to write in the Romantic vein, but his later and finer work shows the chaste influence of the Greek and Roman classics. Notable amongst the predecessors or early contemporaries of Goethe was Lessing (1729-80), whose works on art (_Laocoon, etc._), comedies, tragedies, and essays gave him a very high rank. Klopstock, Wieland and others, took a great part in the revival of letters in Germany, but I must be content with only a few of the great names. The works of the long and impressive line of German philosophers from Kant to Schopenhauer, cannot be treated here. They are classics of philosophy, but Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was one of the most brilliant writers of his time. He was the best German lyric writer after Goethe (see his _Book of Songs_), wrote superb books of travel, and had a fund of delicate irony and caustic wit that makes his prose always a delight. Greater still--the greatest German writer after Goethe--was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose volcanic and often beautiful prose-poetry is of a unique order. His best work is _Thus Spake Zarathustra_, a malicious choice of the austere Persian moralist Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), as the mouthpiece of his own fiery indictment of conventional moral ideas.