Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 13.djvu/55

Rh nevertheless received with enthusiasm, was translated into Latin, and read in schools in company with Tacitus and Caesar.

This Seven Years' War was a circumstance from which, as it is thought, Goethe ought to have received some epic inspiration. He received from it precisely that which was food to his character. He caught the grand enthusiasm, but, as he says, it was the personality of the hero, rather than the greatness of his cause, which made him rejoice in every victory, copy the songs of triumph, and the lampoons directed against Austria. He learnt now the effects of party spirit. At the table of his grandfather he had to hear galling sarcasms, and vehement declamations showered on his hero. He heard Frederick "shamefully slandered." "And as in my sixth year, after the Lisbon earthquake, I doubted the beneficence of Providence, so now, on account of Frederick, I began to doubt the justice of the world."

Over the doorway of the house in which he was born was a lyre and a star, announcing, as every interpreter will certify, that a poet was to make that house illustrious. The poetic faculty early manifested itself. We have seen him inventing conclusions for his mother's stories; and as he grew older he began to invent stories for the amusement of his playfellows, after he had filled his mind with images —

"Lone sitting on the shores of old Romance."

He had read the "Orbis Pictus," Ovid's "Metamorphoses," Homer's Iliad in prose, Virgil in the original, "Telemachus," "Robinson Crusoe," "Anson's Voyages," with such books as "Fortunatus," "The Wandering Jew," "The Four Sons of Aymon," etc. He also read and learned by heart most of the poets of that day: Gellert, Haller, who had really some gleams of poetry;