GOETHE wrote few essays in essay form, but, though these are worthy of the genius which made him easily the greatest poet of the nineteenth century, he is more at home in the informal style of semi-dialogue which characterizes his celebrated Shakespearean criticisms in “Wilhelm Meister.” His prose often illustrates the same mental habit which shapes the second part of “Faust,”—a result of images and ideas crowding upon him beyond his ability to control them. His is the Gothic intellect at its greatest, released by its own necessities from the severe canons of the Greek writers and expressing itself under its own laws. He is a scientist and a philosopher, as well as a poet, and in everything he does he shows the masterly quality of his genius. It was, however, in art in all its forms as a mode of expression for the higher intellect, that he took the greatest delight, and his essays on art have been even more highly valued by his countrymen than the scientific writings to which he himself attached great importance. He was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main, August 28th, 1749. His father was an imperial councilor, and by all his associations he was bound socially and morally to the higher aristocracy of Germany. Intellectually, however, he knew neither class nor country He felt himself a “world-poet,” limited neither by time nor place. During the whole period of “storm and stress,” from the French Revolution to the close of the Napoleonic wars, he worked tranquilly at his task of cultivating his genius and giving it the fullest possible expression. This was his life work, and after having determined to devote himself to it, he did not allow the greatest wars and revolutions of modern times to distract his attention from it. From 1775 to his death, March 22d, 1832, he lived and worked at the court of his friend and admirer, Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, who “ennobled” him and made him “President of the Ducal Chamber.” Goethe’s “Faust” is universally accepted as his greatest work. It ranks with “Hamlet” as the greatest metaphysical and psychological drama of modern Europe, and it does not suffer by comparison with the “Prometheus Bound” of Æschylus, the only drama of the classical epoch which can be classed with it. Among “world-poets” Goethe is usually named with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, leaving Milton, Æschylus, and Virgil unmentioned. Perhaps, however, he might be more properly classed with Shakespeare, Dante, and Æschylus than with Homer,—the only poet who has adequately expressed a sublime philosophy of the conduct of life by the free action of his heroes rather than by using them as mouthpieces, charged with the responsibility of delivering his message to the world in their set speeches.