909. Goethe's "Faust" is in two parts. In the first part, Goethe was and desired to be entirely German; in the second, through many reveries more or less relative to the theme, he more particularly desires to depict the union of the German spirit with that of classical genius, which formed his own life and led to intelligent action, which also was a portion of his existence. "And for beauty, drama, pathos, ease, phantasy, and fertility in varied invention, nothing has ever surpassed, if anything has even equaled, the two parts of Faust' regarded as a single poem."

910. Leopardi, the Italian poet, has been termed the "bard of suffering, of sorrow, and of despair."

911. Tolstoy was "Russia's great epic poet in prose." He was a very powerful and affecting novelist, and in some measure might have been termed a prophet. "Resurrection" shows that mournful and impassioned pity felt by Tolstoy for the humble and the "fallen"; it realizes lofty dramatic beauty. Tolstoy, in a large number of pamphlets or brief works, preached to his own people and to mankind the strict morality of Christ, -charity, renunciation, the moral degradation of war, and, therefore, the necessity for peace at any price, advocating

always brotherhood and humanity in all the relations of social life. His was the soul of an exalted poet and a lofty poetical mind.

912. John Milton has been termed "the most scholarly and the most truly classical of English poets."

913. Oliver Goldsmith was the son of a poor clergyman of the English Church in Ireland, who was the original of the country parson in "The Deserted Village." The poem begins:

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheer'd the laboring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting summer's ling'ring blooms delay'd.

How often have I bless'd the coming day,
When toil remitting lent its turn to play.

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914. William Cowper has been termed "the Poet Laureate of the fireside." He is preeminently the poet of family affections, of domestic and rural retirement. One writer has spoken of him as " the laureate of the fireside, the garden, the greenhouse, and the rabbit-coop." The Olney landscape was a tame, flat, agricultural region, where the sluggish Ouse wound between plowed fields, and the horizon was bounded by low hills; yet to Cowper it was inspiring, and his descriptions were distinctive and imaginative.

915. Robert Burns was born at Alloway in Ayrshire, Scotland, on the banks of the

bonnie Doon," in a clay cottage, or biggin, not far from "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," the scene of the witch dance in "Tam o'Shanter." His father was a hard-headed, God-fearing tenant farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle with poverty. The crops failed; the landlord pressed for rent; for weeks at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this life of toil was lightened by love and homely pleasures. In "The Cotter's Saturday Night Burns has drawn a beautiful picture of his parents' household, the rest that came at the week's end, and the family worship about the "wee bit ingle, blinkin' bonilie."

916. It was through Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was preeminently the thinker among the literary men of his generation, that the new German thought found its way into England. During a visit to Germany extending over nine months, chiefly in Ratzeburg and Göttingen, he had familiarized himself with the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and of Fichte and Schelling. On his return to England he published (in 1800) a free translation of Schiller's "Wallenstein," and through his writings, and more espe

cially through his conversations, h came the conductor by which Ge philosophic ideas reached the En literary class.

917. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and R Southey married sisters. Both far resided at Keswick, in the Lake Co of England. Southey's industry ported both families, Coleridge being cording to his own account, a booky and a dreamer.

918. Thomas De Quincey was the autho "Confessions of an English Op eater." De Quincey was a shy, bo man, of erratic habits, who impr one as a child of genius, with a c helplessness and a child's sharp obs tion. He began taking opium wh student at Oxford, where he reside five years. For several years after he suffered the most acute misery his will underwent a complete para The most impressive effect of the o habit was seen in his dreams, in th natural expansion of time and place the infinite repetition of the same ob His sleep was filled with dim, vast im measureless cavalcades deploying t sound of orchestral music; an en succession of vaulted halls, with cases climbing to heaven, up which eternally the same solitary figure.

came sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives; darkness and light, tempest, and human faces." All these experiences are related in his "Confessions."

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919. Sir Walter Scott was an outdoor poet. He spent much time in the saddle, and was fond of horses, hunting, dogs, and salmon-fishing. He had a keen eye for the beauties of natural scenery, though more especially," he admits, "when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our forefather's piety or splendor." 920. John Keats was apprenticed to a surgeon at fifteen years of age, by his father, who was groom in a London livery-stable. At school he had studied Latin but not Greek. In his seventeenth year Keats obtained a copy of Chapman's translation of Homer, and the impression that it made upon him he has recorded in his sonnet," On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." His knowledge of Greek was obtained through the medium of classic dictionaries, translations, and popular mythologies, and later through the marbles and casts in the British Museum.

921. It is said that when Thorwaldsen, the great Danish sculptor, unveiled his statue of Christ he was seen to weep. His friends