Gottfried Keller has finely described, about the same period, in his _Green Henry_, the effect of such a revelation on a sensitive young man. A bookseller brings to the house the whole of Goethe’s works, fifty small volumes with red covers and gilded titles. The young Swiss Heinrich, Keller’s picture of himself, reads the volumes unceasingly for thirty days, when they are taken away because his mother cannot pay for them. But the thirty days have been a dream to the boy. He seems to see new and more brilliant stars in the heavens as he looks up. When the books are removed, it is as if a choir of bright angels have left the room. “I went out into the open air. The old town on the hill, the rocks and woods and river and sea and the lines of the mountains lay in the gentle light of the March sun, and as my eye fell on them I felt a pure and lasting joy that I had never known before. It was a generous love of all that lives, a love that respects the right and realises the import of each thing, and feels the connectedness and depth of the world. This love is higher than the artificial affection of the individual with selfish aim that ever leads to pettiness and caprice; it is higher even than the enjoyment and detachment that come of special and romantic affections; it alone can give us an unchanging and lasting glow. Everything now came before me in new and beautiful and remarkable forms. I began to see and to love, not only the outer form, but the inner content, the nature, and the history of things.” The poet compresses his experience into one episode. In real life it comes slowly, step by step. In fine, a third element was born in the young botanist and lover of beauty—Goethe’s view of life behind all else: that which Goethe himself called “objective.” The mystic might call it a return to God: but it was Goethe’s God. Three other books influenced Haeckel in his school-days, besides the works of Goethe. The first was Humboldt’s _Aspects of Nature_. This is another work that has had an effect on all the sensitive spirits of the nineteenth century. It is most unjustly depreciated by the young, _blasé_ generation of our time, which dislikes the older style. In the first two volumes of the _Cosmos_ we see the play of a great mind wherever we look for it.