is the good, noble, and beautiful: which is confined to no particular province or country, and which he seizes upon and forms wherever he finds them. Therein he is like the eagle, who hovers with free gaze over whole countries, and to whom it is of no consequence whether the hare on which he pounces is running in Prussia or in Saxony.'"--_Ibid._ vol. ii. pp. 257, 258, and p. 427. Whoever has read these sentences attentively, and penetrated their meaning in connexion, will see that they reveal a mode of thought somewhat resembling that which we have attributed to Shakespeare, and yet essentially different from it. Both poets are distinguished by this, that they abstained systematically during their lives from the abstract, the dialectical, and the controversial, and devoted themselves, with true feeling and enjoyment, to the concrete, the real, and the unquestioned; and so far there is an obvious resemblance between them. But the manner in which this characteristic was attained was by no means the same in both cases. In Shakespeare, as we have seen, there was a metaphysical longing, a tendency towards the supersensible and invisible, absolutely morbid, if we take ordinary constitutions as the standard of health in this respect; and, if, with all this, he revelled with delight and moved with ease and firmness in the sensuous and actual, it was because the very same soul which pressed with such energy and wailing against the bounds of this life of man was also related with inordinate keenness and intimacy to all that this life spheres in. In Goethe, on the other hand, the tendency to the real existed under easier constitutional conditions, and in a state of such natural preponderance over any concomitant craving for the metaphysical, that it necessarily took, German though he was, a higher place in his estimate of what is desirable in a human character. That world of the real in which Shakespeare delighted, and which he knew so well, seemed to him, all this knowledge and delight notwithstanding, far more evanescent, far more a mere filmy show, far less considerable a shred of all that is, than it did to Goethe. To Shakespeare, as we have already said, life was but as a little island on the bosom of a boundless sea: men must needs know what the island contains, and act as those who have to till and rule it; still, with that expanse of waters all round in view, and that roar of waters ever in the ear, what can men call themselves or pretend their realm to be? "Poor fools of Nature" is the poet's own phrase--the realm so small that it is pitiful to belong to it! Not so with Goethe. To him also, of course, the thought was familiar of a vast region of the supersensible outlying nature and life; but a higher value on the whole was reserved for nature and life, even on the universal scale, by his peculiar habit of conceiving them, not as distinct from the