Argus-eyed, able and happy to cope with this rolling miscellany of
facts and sciences, and, by his own versatility, to dispose of them
with ease; a manly mind, unembarrassed by the variety of coats of
convention with which life had got encrusted, easily able by his
subtlety to pierce these, and to draw his strength from nature, with
which he lived in full communion. What is strange, too, he lived in
a small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, and in a time
when Germany played no such leading part in the world's affairs as to
swell the bosom of her sons with any metropolitan pride, such as might
have cheered a French, or English, or, once, a Roman or Attic genius.
Yet there is no trace of provincial limitation in his muse. He is not
a debtor to his position, but was born with a free and controlling
genius.

The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a philosophy of literature
set in poetry; the work of one who found himself the master of
histories, mythologies, philosophies, sciences, and national
literatures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which modern erudition,
with its international intercourse of the whole earth's population,
researches into Indian, Etruscan, and all Cyclopaean arts, geology,
chemistry, astronomy; and every one of these kingdoms assuming a certain
aerial and poetic character, by reason of the multitude. One looks at
a king with reverence; but if one should chance to be at a congress
of kings, the eye would take liberties with the peculiarities of each.
These are not wild miraculous songs, but elaborate forms, to which the
poet has confided the results of eighty years of observation. This
reflective and critical wisdom makes the poem more truly the flower
of this time. It dates itself. Still he is a poet,--poet of a prouder
laurel than any contemporary, and under this plague of microscopes
(for he seems to see out of every pore of his skin), strikes the harp