Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/74

Rh their working in other men, but never enough to receive their inmost regenerating influence."

Margaret finds a decline of sentiment and poetic power in Goethe, dating from his relinquishment of Lili.

“After this period we find in him rather a wide and deep wisdom than the inspirations of genius. His faith that all most issue, well wants the sweetness of piety; and the God he manifests to us is one of law of necessity rather than of intelligent love.

“This mastery that Goethe prizes seems to consist rather in the skilful use of means than in the clear manifestation of ends. Yet never let him be con- founded with those who sell all their birthright. He became blind to the more generous virtues, the nobler impulses, but ever in self-respect was busy to develop his nature. He was kind, industrious, wise, gentle. manly, if not manly."

Margarct, with bold and steady hand, draws a parallel between Dante's Paradiso and the second part of Goethe's Faust. She prefers “the grandly humble reliance of old Catholicism" to "the loop-hole redemption of modern sagacity." Yet she thinks that Dabte, perhaps, had not so hard a battle to wage as this other great poet." The fiercest passions she finds less dangerous to the soul than the cold scepticism of the understanding. She sums up grandly the spiritual ordeals of different'historical periods:—

"The Jewish demon assailed the man of Uz with physical ills, the Lucifer of the Middle Ages tempted his passions; but the Mephistopheles of the eighteenth century bade the finite strive to compass the infinite, and the intellect attempt to solve all the problems of the soul.”