JOHN STERLING ON GOETHE.
[To nun Bravos or vas “Sracrarol."] SIR,—May I call the attention of your readers to a striking letter to Carlyle, in which hie friend Sterling thus writes of Goethe P-
" I have been looking at Goethe, especially the Life, much as a skying home at a post. In truth, I am afraid of him. I enjoy and admire him so much, and feel I could so easily be tempted to go along with him. And yet I bar a deeply rooted and sad persuasion that he was the most splendid of anachronisms. A thoroughly, nay, intensely Pagan Life, in an ago when it is men's duty to be Christian. I therefore never take him up without a kind of inward check, as if I were trying some forbidden spell, while, on the other hand, there is so infinitely much to be learnt from him, and it is so needful to understand the world we live in. . . . There mush as I think, have been some prodigious defect in his mind to let him hold such views as he does about woman and some other things; and in another respect I find so much coldness and hollowness as to the highest truths, and feel so strongly that the heaven he looks up to is but a vault of ice, that„these two indications leading to the same conclusions guise to convince me he was a profoundly immoral and irreligious spirit, with as rare faculties of intelligence as ever belonged to anyone." —Carlyle, Life of Sterling, p. 123.
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