Great, however, as were Goethe’s achievements in the criticism of art and in science, they are of almost slight importance in comparison with his work as an imaginative writer. As a writer of romance, as a dramatist, as a lyrical poet, he towers high above all other men of letters whom Germany has produced. In the literature of his country he takes the rank which in that of Greece belongs to Homer, in that of Italy to Dante, in that of England to Shakespeare. Almost every element of human life is touched in his creations, yet he has told us that his writings are to be regarded as parts of one great “confession.” However remote they may seem to be from his own experience, they are directly or indirectly rooted in the facts of his personal history. To this is due one of the most distinctive qualities of his work both in verse and in prose--the extraordinary vitality of his ideas; the vividness with which all that he depicts is made to pass before us, as if it were a part of the outward and visible world. He cannot, however, be truly described as a realist, if by a realist is meant one who seeks to do no more than represent exactly what he himself has seen or felt. In taking reality as the basis of ideal structures, Goethe severed from it associations which were only of temporary or accidental interest. He brought it into new relations, touched it with the transforming power of the imagination, and gave to individual facts universal significance. Hence the greatest of his works are as fresh to-day as when he wrote them; and they could lose their living power only if human nature itself were radically changed. As a critic of literature, he had the sanity of judgment and the intuitive insight which mark all poets of the highest genius. He has never, perhaps, been surpassed in his power of detecting the signs of a genuinely creative capacity; and this power, remarkable even in his youth, did not desert him in old age. He was constantly on the outlook for new intellectual forces, and, when they appeared, seldom failed to divine the direction in which they were moving, and the nature of the results they were likely to accomplish. Byron, Scott, Manzoni, Victor Hugo, Carlyle--all were hailed by Goethe as, in different ways, potent representatives of the later periods of the era to which he himself belonged. It did not occur to him to think of them as rivals. He thought only of his good fortune in having lived to see them carry on the movement of European literature.