JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE, the acknowledged prince of German poets, and one of the most highly gifted and variously accomplished men of the 18th century, was born in the year 1749, at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, where his youthful years were spent. His father, Johann Kaspar Goethe, was an imperial councillor in good circumstances, and in a respectable position. In the year 1765, he went to the university of Leipsic. As a student, he pointed, by external profession, towards the law, but his real studies were in the wide domain of literature, philosophy, and above all, life and living character. In the year 1771, the young poet, now twenty-two years of age, took his degree as Doctor of Laws, and went for a short while to Wetzlar, on the Lahn, which became to him the scene of the famous "Sorrows of Werther," a glowing leaf from the life of the human soul, full of interest and beauty at all times, but which, in the then state of European thought and feeling, stirred the whole literary mind of Europe, like at breeze sweeping over a forest. After returning from Wetzlar, Goethe spent some years in his native city, engaged chiefly in literary productions. His first great work was "Gatz van Berlichingen," published at Frankfort, 1773, which at once set the Germans free from the painful constraint of French and classical models, and opened up the career of bold originality, which they have since prosecuted in so many departments of literature, learning and speculation. In the year 1775, Goethe, who had the good fortune to gain the good opinion of Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, accepted an invitation from that prince to settle in his little capital, since become so famous as the Athens of the great legislative age of German literature. Here the poet became a little statesman, and, occupying himself in various ways in the service of his benefactor, passed quickly through stages of court preferment, till, in 1779, he became Actual Privy Councillor, at the age of thirty, holding the highest dignity that a German subject could then attain; a great, a rich, and influential man. In 1782, he received a patent of nobility, and in the following years, till 1788, travelled much in Switzerland and Italy, of which latter journey we have the beautiful fruits in"Iphigenia, Egmont, Tasso, and the Venetian and Roman Elegies. After the death of the Grand Duke, in 1828, he lived much in retirement occupied occasionally with poetry, but more intensely and constantly with the study of nature and the fine arts, which from his earliest years had possessed the strongest attractions for him. He died in March, 1832, in his eighty-fourth year.
To give a detailed account of the literary and scientific productions of Goethe's pen, is altogether impossible within the limits of the present work. It is as a poet, no doubt, that this remarkable man is generally known and recognized, but it is not as a poet only that a just measure can be taken of his intellectual calibre or of his European significance. It is as a poet, thinker, critic, and original observer of nature, all combined in one admirable harmony, that his rare excellence consists.
His greatest production, Faust, has been repeatedly translated into English. It is the great drama of that moral and metaphysical questioning which thoughtful minds must go through in all times and places, but which has received the fullest and most fruitful development in modern Germany.