The Life and Works of Goethe: with Sketches of His Age and Contemporaries, Volume 1

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Ticknor and Fields, 1856 - 593 pages

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Page 237 - Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods ! When went there by an age, since the great flood, But it was famed with more than with one man?
Page 297 - To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free ; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
Page 7 - VOM Vater hab ich die Statur, Des Lebens ernstes Führen, Vom Mütterchen die Frohnatur Und Lust zu fabulieren. Urahnherr war der 'Schönsten hold, Das spukt so hin und wieder; Urahnfrau liebte Schmuck und Gold, Das zuckt wohl durch die Glieder. Sind nun die Elemente nicht Aus dem Komplex zu trennen, Was ist denn an dem ganzen Wicht Original zu nennen?
Page 139 - They say, best men are moulded out of faults; And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little bad: so may my husband.
Page 292 - Overwhelmed by the sentence, he is some time before he recovers himself ; he then finds that every one has gone to the place of execution, and that the streets of Jerusalem are empty. Unrest and yearnings drive him forth, and his wanderings begin." This legendary conception he never executed. It lived within him for a long while, and during his travels in...
Page 30 - Circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that Man is the architect of Circumstance.
Page 293 - ... happy by those we love, but in the end man is always driven back upon himself, and it seems as if the Divinity had taken a position...
Page 405 - ... doubtless was fully aware of the small account in which he was held by Frederick, whose admiration lay in quite other directions. What culture the King had was French, and his opinion of German literature had been very explicitly pronounced in a work published this year, in which Gotz von Berlichingen was cited as a sample of the reigning bad taste.
Page 204 - Goethe has narrated in full the conception of this piece, which is very grand ; he tells us the idea arose within him of illustrating the sad fact, noticeable in the biographies of genius, that...
Page 226 - That nameless Unrest, the blind struggle of a soul in bondage, that high, sad, longing Discontent, which was agitating every bosom, had driven Goethe almost to despair. All felt it; he alone could give it voice.

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