Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/177

Rh affected Goethe, what instructed him and ministered to his culture, was the integrity, the truth to its type of the given force. The development of this force was the single interest of Winckelmann, unembarrassed by anything else in him. Other interests, religious, moral, political, those slighter talents and motives not supreme, which in most men are the waste part of nature, and drain away their vitality, he plucked out and cast from him. The protracted longing of his youth is not a vague romantic longing; he knows what he longs for, what he wills. Within its severe limits his enthusiasm burns like lava. 'You know,' says Lavater, speaking of Winckelmann's countenance, 'that I consider ardour and indifference by no means incompatible in the same character. If ever there was a striking instance of that union, it is in the countenance before us.' 'A lowly childhood,' says Goethe, 'insufficient instruction in youth, broken, distracted studies in early manhood; the burden of school-keeping! He was thirty years old before he enjoyed a single favour of fortune, but as soon as he had attained to an adequate condition of freedom, he appears before us consummate and entire, complete in the ancient sense.'

But his hair is turning grey, and he has not yet reached the south. The Saxon court had become