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GOETHE.
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On the 24 th of March last , died at Weimar suddenly , without pain , and in the eighty-third year of his age , the poet Goethe . Thus has an enviable death terminated a life of glory and now that without rashness an estimate may be formed of that life , it may be pronounced , according to all outward signs , happy as well as splendid , beyond any that literary history records . For more than half a century—and the greater number of these were years of war which desolated all Europe—he devoted himself quietly and uninterruptedly to the composition of works of genius ,
and to the pursuits of science ; and the former , at least , were a series of triumphs and victories . At the very outset of his career he acquired an immediate celebrity : a rock on which many a rising genius has perished , but which did not divert him from what he felt to be his destined task—a life of intellectual labour ; and , unstimulated by want , produced works which in quantity
only , without regard to their worth , are such as few . men ever wrote before except for bread * . It is literally true , that there is no one form of poetry , or of composition allied to poetry , appertaining either to ancient or modern literature , in which he has not produced a work that , by the common consent of the learned of his country , is considered as a masterpiece . Nor does this
comprehend the reach of his powers . So little was Goethe a mere poet , that were it possible to abstract the poetic element from his works , and reduce them to a caput mortuum , the profundity of his investigations into the natural world , and the acuteness of his contemplations of man and society , would secure him a place among the most original of our speculative and practical philosophers .
He was besides graced in an eminent degree with those personal qualities which conciliate the favour of mankind . He had a noble figure , and ( like our own' Milton ) a countenance sin-* The last edition of his works , in which his scientific writings are not included , consists of forty volumes .
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MONTHLY REPOSITORY .
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No . 65 . V
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NEW SERIES , No . LXV .
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MAY , 1832 .
Goethe.
GOETHE .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1832, page unpag, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1812/page/1/
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