Voltaire was the _cleverest_ of all
past and present men; but a great man is something more, and this he
surely was not.
As poets, the two live not in the same hemisphere, not in the same
world. Of Voltaire's poetry, it were blindness to deny the polished
intellectual vigour, the logical symmetry, the flashes that from time
to time give it the colour, if not the warmth, of fire: but it is in
a far other sense than this that Goethe is a poet; in a sense of which
the French literature has never afforded any example. We may venture
to say of him, that his province is high and peculiar; higher than any
poet but himself, for several generations, has so far succeeded in,
perhaps even has steadfastly attempted. In reading Goethe's poetry,
it perpetually strikes us that we are reading the poetry of our own
day and generation. No demands are made on our credulity; the light,
the science, the scepticism of the age, are not hid from us. He does
not deal in antiquated mythologies, or ring changes on traditionary
poetic forms; there are no supernal, no infernal influences, for _Faust_
is an apparent rather than a real exception: but there is the barren
prose of the nineteenth century, the vulgar life which we are all
leading; and it starts into strange beauty in his hands; and we pause
in delighted wonder to behold the flower of Poesy blooming in that
parched and rugged soil.
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