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gularly beautiful and commanding ; enjoyed high animal spirits , was eloquent in speech , and ardent in the pursuit of pleasure , as well of all other objects ; and seems from his earliest youth to have subdued envy and hostility by the degree of those qualities which usually excite them .
No wonder therefore that he gained a patron and friend at his entrance into the world by whom he was at once placed out of the reach of necessity , so that he seemed to have passed through life without a want and without a calamity : —at least he has informed us , both in prose and verse , that he never suffered a wound which he did not heal , nor an affliction which he did not assuage , by turning it into poetry . Though it is very certain that he for
a short period at least led a life of tumultuous gaiety and pleasure , yet his passions seem to have been always under the restraint of his understanding ; and nature had blessed him with such a bodily frame , that though he underwent one or two alarming trials of his strength , the greater part of his life has been in health 5 and in addition to this singular union of bodily and intellectual qualities , he was endowed with that rare temperament which Hume , in
one of his most subtle disquisitions ^ has represented as the grand ingredient in human happiness : —he enjoyed and cultivated , to its utmost refinement , delicacy of taste , without delicacy of passion * . Of this singularly happy , as well as great man , we shall proceed to give some account , protesting however against haying imputed to us the presumption of attempting to write a characteristic either of him or of his works . This will be a theme on
which the greatest men of his own country will exercise their talents for successive generations ; since the writings of Goethe will , for ages to come , certainly modify where they do not determine the character of German literature . To characterize an author eminently national , and peculiarly appertaining to the age , is in fact to characterize his age and country . But German philosophy and German literature are not to be developed in an obituary . Were we adequate to the task , this is not the place . We shall for the present content ourselves with giving a general account of the man , and reserve for a future number a catalogue of the more important of his numerous writings , adding occasionally brief notes that may be useful to the student of German
literature . John Wolfgang Goethe was born on the 28 th of August , 1749 , at Frankfort on the Maine . To use his own words , The constellation was happy . The sun stood in the sign of the Virgin ^ and was Lord of the Ascendant ; Jupiter and Venus favourable ; Mercury not hostile ; Saturn and Mars indifferent ; only the Inoon was at the full , and its planetic hour having just begun , it exercised its power so effectually , that the birth was delayed
* Bee Essay 00 entitled .
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290 Goethe .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1832, page 290, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1812/page/2/
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