And unfortunately warm-blooded and soft-skinned excellent men are just the ones least remarkable for steadiness and moderation in bearing the poetical sorrows which authors send them. I cannot, therefore, possibly leave this third part, which will too easily affect people, wholly without a preface in the way of counterpoise, unless I am willing to be myself the cause of innocent persons weeping over the best scenes of this part, and suffering from sympathy. Such too sensitive persons, to whom Nature has denied æsthetic apathy to cases of great distress in tragedies and romances, should,--unless they are fat, for sorrow is good for fatness as a fasting-cure and _lapis infernalis_,[50]--these should make themselves cold, and arm themselves against the tragic poet with philosophy; they should console themselves during the reading of a great affliction and say: "How long does such a printed misery last? How soon a book and a life are over! To-morrow thou wilt think very differently. The unhappy condition into which I am here brought by Shakespeare exists, in truth, only in my own imagination, and my sorrow over it is indeed, according to the stoic, only illusion. One must not, says Epictetus in his handbook, bewail that which lies not in our will, and the sad scene of Klopstock here is, in fact, an external thing, which thou canst not alter. Wilt thou let thyself be shamed by a North American, by a saltwork-man of Halle, by the rabble, by the Cretin from Gex,[51] who bore that whole scene from Goethe's Tasso quietly and composedly, without the moistening of an eye?"