In the poems of Shakspeare, is disclosed a mind, wherein capaciousness and subtlety, vigor and grace, clearness and depth, versatility and justness, combine and co-operate with such shifting ease and impressive effect, that ordinary human faculties are vainly tasked to embrace its perfectness and its immensity. Contemplating it, the keenest intelligence exhausts itself in analysis, and the most refined admiration ends in wonder. Inferior only to this consummation of human capabilities is the mind of Goethe, akin to Shakspeare's in the breadth and variety and subtlety of its powers. In comprehensiveness of grasp and ideal harmony in conceiving a poetic whole, the German approaches the mighty Englishman, and displays also in the delineation, or, more properly, the creation of characters, that instinctive insight and startling revelation of the human heart, which in Shakspeare almost at times make us think he were privy to the mystery of its structure. The same calmness and serene self-possession--a sign of supreme mental power--are characteristic of both. Like Shakspeare, Goethe never intrudes his personal individuality to mar the proportions of a work of art. To pour out the wealth of a mind, which ranges over every province of human thought and action, Goethe adopts all the various forms in which poetry, according to its mood and object, moulds itself. In his epigrams, elegies, songs and ballads, he embodies the highest excellences of the _lyrical_. In _Egmont_, you have a bold {380} specimen of the romantic _tragedy_; in _Iphygenia_, a beautiful reproduction of the classical Greek; while _Torquato Tasso_, a drama of the most exquisite grace and refinement, occupies a middle ground between the two. To pass from this to _Faust_, is to be suddenly borne away from a quiet scene of rural beauty to a rugged mountain peak, whence, through a tempest, you catch glimpses of the distant sunny earth, and mid the elemental strife, beautiful in its terrors, hear sounds as though a heaven-strung æolian harp snatched music from the blast. In _Herman and Dorothea_, executed with matchless felicity, reigns the pure _epic_ spirit. This one poem were enough to make a reputation. But the highest exhibition of Goethe's manifold powers is _Wilhelm Meister_, in which a mixed assemblage of fictitious personages, each one possessing the vital individuality and yet generic breadth of Falstaff and of Juliet, bound together in a vast circle of the most natural and complex relations, presents so truthful and significant and art-beautified a picture of the struggles and attainments, the joys and griefs, the labors and recreations, the capacities and failings of mortal men, that from its study we rise with strength freshened and feelings purified, and our vision of all earthly things brightened. Unhesitatingly characterizing this work as the greatest prose fiction ever produced, I close this brief notice of its wonderful author.