Goethe has been called the soul of his century.

It is true that we have but meagre biographies of Shakespeare or of Plato;
yet how much we know about them.

Statesmen and Generals enjoy great celebrity during their lives. The
newspapers chronicle every word and movement. But the fame of the
Philosopher and Poet is more enduring.

Wordsworth deprecates monuments to Poets, with some exceptions, on this
very account. The case of Statesmen, he says, is different. It is right to
commemorate them because they might otherwise be forgotten; but Poets live
in their books forever.

The real conquerors of the world indeed are not the generals but the
thinkers; not Genghis Khan and Akbar, Rameses, or Alexander, but Confucius
and Buddha, Aristotle, Plato, and Christ. The rulers and kings who reigned
over our ancestors have for the most part long since sunk into
oblivion--they are forgotten for want of some sacred bard to give them
life--or are remembered, like Suddhodana and Pilate, from their
association with higher spirits.

Such men's lives cannot be compressed into any biography. They lived not
merely in their own generation, but for all time. When we speak of the
Elizabethan period we think of Shakespeare and Bacon, Raleigh and Spenser.
The ministers and secretaries of state, with one or two exceptions, we
scarcely remember, and Bacon himself is recollected less as the Judge than
as the Philosopher.

Moreover, to what do Generals and Statesmen owe their fame? They were