And so we find him willing during ten years at Weimar to undertake work which might appear to be fatal to the development of his genius. To reform army administration, make good roads, work the[Pg 6387] mines with energetic intelligence, restore the finances to order,—was this fit employment for one born to be a poet? Except a few lyrics and the prose 'Iphigenie,' these years produced no literary work of importance; yet Goethe himself speaks of them as his "zweite Schriftstellerepoche."—his second epoch as a writer. They were needful to make him a master in the art of life, needful to put him into possession of all his powers. Men of genius are quick growers; but men of the highest genius, which includes the wisdom of human life, are not speedily ripe. Goethe had entered literature early; he had stormed the avenues. Now at six-and-twenty he was a chief figure in German, even in European, literature; and from twenty-six to thirty-seven he published, we may say nothing. But though he ceased to astonish the world, he was well employed in widening the basis of his existence; in organizing his faculties; in conciliating passions, intellect, and will; in applying his mind to the real world; in endeavoring to comprehend it aright; in testing and training his powers by practical activity. A time came when he felt that his will and skill were mature; that he was no longer an apprentice in the art of living, but a master craftsman. Tasks that had grown irksome and were felt to be a distraction from higher duties, he now abandoned. Goethe fled for a time to Italy, there to receive his degree in the high school of life, and to start upon a course of more advanced studies. Thenceforward until his closing days the record is one of almost uninterrupted labor in his proper fields of literature, art, and science. "In Rome," he wrote, "I have for the first time found myself, for the first time come into harmony with myself, and grown happy and rational." He had found himself, because his passions and his intellect now co-operated; his pursuit of truth had all the ardor of a first love; his pursuit of beauty was not a fantastic chase, but was subject to rational law; and his effort after truth and his effort after beauty were alike supported by an adult will.