The Germans are, certainly, strange people. By their deep thoughts and ideas, which they seek in everything and fix upon everything, they make life much more burdensome than is necessary. Only have the courage to give yourself up to your impressions, allow yourself to be delighted, moved, elevated, nay, instructed and inspired for something great; but do not imagine all is vanity, if it is not abstract thought and idea. Then they come and ask what idea I meant to embody in my _Faust_. As if I knew myself and could inform them. _From heaven, through the world, to hell_, would indeed be something; but this is no idea, only a course of action. And further, that the devil loses the wager, and that a man, continually struggling from difficult errors towards something better, should be redeemed, is an effective, and to many, a good enlightening thought; but it is no idea which lies at the foundation of the whole and of every individual scene. It would have been a fine thing, indeed, if I had strung so rich, varied, and highly diversified a life as I have brought to view in _Faust_ upon the slender string of one pervading idea. It was, on the whole, not in my line, as a poet, to strive to embody anything _abstract_. I received in my mind _impressions_, and those of a sensuous, animated, charming, varied, hundredfold kind, just as a lively imagination presented them; and I had, as a poet, nothing more to do than artistically to round off and elaborate such views and impressions, and by means of a lively representation so to bring them forward that others might receive the same impression in hearing or reading my representation of them. If I however wished, as a poet, to represent any idea, I did it in short poems, where a decided unity could prevail, as, for instance, in the _Metamorphosis of Animals_, that of _Plants_, the poem _Legacy_, and many others. The only production of greater extent, in which I am conscious of having labored to set forth a pervading idea, is probably my _Elective Affinities_. This novel has thus become comprehensible to the intellect; but I will not say that it is therefore better. I am rather of the opinion that the more incommensurable, and the more incomprehensible to the intellect, a poetic production is, so much the better it is. _Schiller_ Yes, everything else about him was proud and majestic, only the eyes were soft. And his talent was like his outward form. He seized boldly on a great subject, and turned it this way and that, and handled it this way and that. But he saw his object, as it were, only from the outside; a quiet development from within was not his province. His talent was desultory. Thus he was never decided--could never have done. He often changed a part just before a rehearsal.