THE time was at last ripe for the coming of the king.
But let his kingship be looked for in no one period of his
life, in no one phase of his work; rather in the totality of
his many-sided, finely balanced, and marvellously clear-
sighted genius.

GOETHE, christened JOHANN WOLFGANG, was born at
Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1749 and died at Weimar in
1832. By his mother he was imaginative and artistic,
by his father precise, methodical, studiously observant of
his own ways. The blood that flowed in his veins was
full of opposing potentialities. In his youth he was as
capricious as an April day; now taciturn, distraught,
brooding over nameless woes; again jovial, hilarious,
ready for the wildest lark; one moment a sentimentalist
revelling in the joy of tears, the next a satirist turning
his weapons back upon himself, or a phlegmatic observer
surveying his own vagaries in the white light of reason.
He knew all moods, passions, enthusiasms. He had in
him the germs of a poet, a painter, a mystic, a ration-
alist, a scholar, a man of science, an administrator, a
devoted publicist.

The atmosphere of the Goethe household in Frankfort
was one of patrician refinement. The family lived rather

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