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lished work * The thirty-second volume begins with the year 1807 . On that memorable day , < while the cannon were thundering around and the life of every man was in extreme peril , Goethe was married : an act not to be considered as one of mere whim
and affected singularity ; he had a son to whom he could not legally leave the rich inheritance of his name but by a marriage with his mother ; in this respect , the law of Germany being that of Scotland and nearly all Europe—the power of legitimation being left as an inducement to the performance , however late , of an important social duty .
During the years that followed this battle , and generally during the long and melancholy period when the military despotism of Bonaparte had succeeded the transient and ever changing excesses of the revolution ; when Germany was in a state of political vassalage , Goethe pursued his studies in repose , having the happy faculty of withdrawing his attention from offensive objects .
He could not , indeed , withdraw himself from the notice of the conqueror , nor escape having the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour hung round his neck by the Imperial hand ; but no trace of this ambiguous honour appears on his writings * Indeed the name of Napoleon would probably never have been written by Goethe , had he not translated the famous ode of Manzoni , —* The
Sixth of May . ' It is worthy of remark that , at a later period of his life , 1821 , he refers back to the year 1810 , when he was sixty-one years old , as that when he was impelled for the last time to give expression to his own views of nature , arid which occupied him for several months , —the produce of which we gather to have been small poems . But- in the year 1813 , however his non-productive
powers might have declined , he was in close contact with the eminent spirits of his age . He thus writes , — From the point of . view where I had been placed by God and nature , and standing on which I had nat failed to act as circumstances permittedv I looked around me on all sides : wherever I saw great energy at work , I strove to meet these by my own studies , labours , and experiments , that so , honestly preparing myself , I might deserve
to appropriate to myself , with activity and zeal , what I could of myself never have produced , and what the mightiest spirits of the age presented me . i ^ nd thus while I was taking my ow n ; course on a line parallel witK the noble undertakings of others , I could at the same time unite with them . The new was never strange to me ; and I was in no danger of rashly adopting it , or of rejecting it on account of old prejudices /
We remark , in corroboration , that to the very last he anxiously read every English and French work on Chromatics , however opr posed to his own vfews : he mentions those of Bancroft , Sowerbyr Dr . Read , and Brewister ; and as soon as he became acquainted
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No , 65 . ^
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Goethe . & 0 &
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1832, page 305, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1812/page/17/
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