my mind came the feeling of a strange rebirth of things. I felt that life is an eternally new and mystic resurrection, immeasurably more wonderful and profound than all the crude ideas of resurrection that have yet prevailed. A mind such as we love to picture to ourselves in our ideal of the future historian must seek the eternal and constant features in all change, even in two epochs that are so distinct and in the men who have lived in them. It is our incorrigible schoolmaster disposition that divides things. In the real world there must be one straight line of development. To-day the highest is sought in the melody of immortal verse: to-morrow a Zoological Institute rises on the spot where the poet had stood. It is said that the boy did not come under the influence of Goethe without some difficulty. His mother did not like Goethe; she preferred Schiller. Goethe was too great for every true soul to follow him in his arduous path. Weimar itself had more than once been disposed to desert him. How much more the general public in its conventional fetters! How many fell away from him when he published the _Roman Elegies_, and again when he brought out the _Elective Affinities_. In Haeckel’s youth people remembered Börne’s narrow and hostile strictures. Goethe began to penetrate into the German family as a classic in spite of the general feeling. But the German family was still far below him. He had gradually to lift it up from its Philistine level. At times it rebelled against him, as every stubborn level does against a peak. It was his aunt Bertha that first put Goethe’s works into the boy’s hands. He received them as a delightful piece of moral contraband.