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    GOETHE'S WORKS.—No. 3.

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    Volumes 5 and 6 belong to the least popular of our author ' s works ; and though of deep interest to the philosophical sthdent , such as will not be attractive to the general reader . They consist , the 5 th volume of the text , and the 6 th of the prose commentary to the West-Eastern Divan . As this book is altogether

    unknown in this country , an account of it may be acceptable . The sacred Scriptures had engaged a very large share of Goethe ' s attention in early youth , and his first puerile literary exercises were founded on that his first study . Through life his reading was always ancillary to the cultivation of his own productive powers ; and accordingly as he successively studied the French , English , Italian , and Greek literature , he produced those dramatic works of which we are about to give an account . And it was not till late in life , at an age wheu the powers of imagination in

    most men have entirely ceased , and in him must have declined , that is , in the year 1814 , that he was brought back to his earliest pursuit , oriental literature , by the perusal of the works of Hammer , the author of the Fund-grube des Orients—Mine of the Eastand especially by his translation of the works of Hafis—Oelsner ' s life of Mahomet—Von Dletz s book of Cabus , successively occupied his attention . He reperused the travels of Marco Polo , Andrea della Valle , Tavernier , and Chardin ; took in hand the works of Sir William Jones , of which a copy had been presented

    to him two-and-forty years before by Eichorn : and so during the year 1815 , a period of general alarm and peril at home , his mind , as it were , was on a pilgrimage to the East . But it was contrary to his nature to be passively occupied in the mere appropriation of the thoughts of others : his spirit associated itself with the spirits of the great oriental poets , especially with the

    seven stars which , during five hundred years , rose on the Persian firmament . With these his spirit held , as it were , a council , a Divan , and to the result he has given the appropriate title , West-Eastern . He compares himself with one engaged in foreign travel , who delights in the adoption of the sentiments and manners

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    MONTHLY REPOSITORY . NEW SERIES , No . LXVIII .

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    AUGUST , 1832 .

    Goethe's Works.—No. 3.

    GOETHE'S WORKS . —No . 3 .

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    No . 68 . 2 O

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1832, page unpag, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1818/page/1/