A striking instance of the power of the present to interpret the spirit of the past was the performance of Goethe's Iphigenie at Harvard on the sixty-eighth anniversary of Goethe's death. Professor Kuno Franke, writing in the New York Evening Post speaks of Iphigenie as "the worthiest production of artistic genius to represent German ideals to a distinctly academic audience at the foremost of American universities." This it seems to us Iphigenie emphatically is _not_. In conscious imitation of Greek tragedy in the literary form and expression, as well as in the details of the story, it is Greek; in its psychological treatment, in the idea that personal salvation comes only through self-sacrifice, it is distinctively modern, but not German, in subject, expression or treatment. Although the choice of Iphigenie as a representative German play was not justified, certainly nothing could have better expressed the genius of the greatest of German poets. The greatness of Goethe!--that was the fact of all others demonstrated by the performance of Iphigenie. He has given us a play which realizes the ideals of the Greek poets and sculptors, a play instinct with the deepest reverence of the Greek religion, yet at the same time a play which expressed the deepest emotions of a great spiritual revolution in his own life; a play which may be considered as a presentation of the very spirit of that Christianity which findeth its soul in losing it. One of its leading critics says of Iphigenie--"its ideals are not those of Greece or of Germany, or of any nationality or time, but rather the realization of the highest and noblest aspirations of mankind in all lands and all tongues." A universal literature is but the child of a universal religion, of that yearning toward the good and beautiful and true which has been the guiding star of man since the world began. The struggle in his own soul; the mystic meaning of a pagan faith, that in passing has touched all succeeding ages with some measure of its radiant beauty; the poet's vision of the future spiritual triumph of the race; all these Goethe united in one artistic expression, and the result is one of the great poems of the world.