This is the end of his _Mignons_ and _Harpers_,
of his _Tassos_ and _Meisters_. Poetry, as he views it, exists not in
time or place, but in the spirit of man; and Art, with Nature, is now
to perform for the poet, what Nature alone performed of old. The
divinities and demons, the witches, spectres, and fairies, are vanished
from the world, never again to be recalled: but the Imagination which
created these still lives, and will forever live in man's soul; and
can again pour its wizard light over the Universe, and summon forth
enchantments as lovely or impressive, and which its sister faculties
will not contradict. To say that Goethe has accomplished all this,
would be to say that his genius is greater than was ever given to any
man: for if it was a high and glorious mind, or rather series of minds,
that peopled the first ages with their peculiar forms of poetry, it
must be a series of minds much higher and more glorious that shall so
people the present. The angels and demons that can lay prostrate our
hearts in the nineteenth century must be of another and more cunning
fashion than those that subdued us in the ninth.
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