The Remaining Works of Benedict de Spinoza

elegant statues meet the youth at his first step into the realm of consciousness, and from the height of their greatness, may they instill in him the first lessons of civic virtues...

The reading of Greek and Roman history acted strongly upon me. I grieved that this world of virtues and energy had long been buried; I wept on its grave—when suddenly a more attentive reading of one author who was in my hands proved to me that the world which surrounds me, in which I live, is not devoid of the valiant and the great. This discovery wrought a revolution in my existence.

Schiller! I bless you; to you I owe the holy minutes of my early youth! How many tears flowed from my eyes onto your poems! What an altar I erected to you in my soul! You are, by excellence, the poet of youth. The same dreamy gaze turned to the future alone, "there, there!"; the same noble, energetic, captivating feelings; the same love for people and the same sympathy for modernity... Once I took Schiller into my hands, I did not leave him, and now, in sad moments, his pure song heals me. For a long time, I ranked Goethe below him. In order to be able to understand Goethe and Shakespeare, one needs all faculties to have unfolded, one needs to become acquainted with life, one needs formidable experiences, one needs to live through a portion of the sufferings of Faust, Hamlet, and Othello:—a striving for virtue and a hot sympathy for the high are sufficient to sympathize with Schiller. I feared Goethe: he insulted me with his indifference, with his lack of sympathy for me—I could not then understand sympathy for the universe. Let Goethe, I thought, be a sea, at the bottom of which lie God-knows-what treasures; I prefer the German river, this Rhine, flowing between feudal castles and vineyards. The Rhine, witness to the Thirty Years' War, reflecting the Alps and the clouds that cover their peaks. I forgot then that the river also flows into the sea, into the world-embracing ocean, equally inseparable from heaven and earth. Much later, the powerful Goethe captivated me; I did not fully understand him then, but I felt his sea wave, his depth, his vastness, and (the sickness of youth is to never know weight and measure!) I