Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/189

Rh mann stooped down to take them from the chest, a cord was thrown round his neck. Some time after, a child whose friendship Winckelmann had made to beguile the delay, knocked at the door, and receiving no answer, gave an alarm. Winckelmann was found dangerously wounded, and died a few hours later, after receiving the sacraments of the Romish church. It seemed as if the gods, in reward for his devotion to them, had given him a death which, for its swiftness and its opportunity, he might well have desired. 'He has,' says Goethe, 'the advantage of figuring in the memory of posterity as one eternally able and strong, for the image in which one leaves the world is that in which one moves among the shadows.' Yet, perhaps, it is not fanciful to regret that that meeting with Goethe did not take place. Goethe, then in all the pregnancy of his wonderful youth, still unruffled by the press and storm of his earlier manhood, was awaiting Winckelmann with a curiosity of the noblest kind. As it was, Winckelmann became to him something like what Virgil was to Dante. And Winckelmann, with his fiery friendships, had reached that age and that period of culture at which emotions, hitherto fitful, sometimes concentrate themselves in a vital unchangeable relationship. German literary history seems to have