The Remaining Works of Benedictus 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 impart to 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 that surrounds me, in which I live, is not devoid of the valiant and the great. This discovery caused 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 upon 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 only to the future, "thither, thither!"; the same noble, energetic, captivating feelings; the same love for people and the same sympathy for modernity... Having once taken Schiller into my hands, I did not abandon him, and even now, in sad moments, his pure song heals me. For a long time, I ranked Goethe below him. In order to know how to understand Goethe and Shakespeare, one must have all one's faculties unfolded, one must become acquainted with life, one must have terrible experiences, one must survive a portion of the sufferings of Faust, Hamlet, Othello: an aspiration toward virtue and a hot sympathy for the high are sufficient to sympathize with Schiller. I was afraid of Goethe: he offended me with his disdain, his lack of sympathy for me—the sympathy for the universe I could not understand then. Let Goethe be a sea, I thought, at the bottom of which are God-knows-what treasures; I prefer the German river, this Rhine flowing between feudal castles and vineyards. The Rhine, a witness to the Thirty Years' War, reflecting the Alps and the clouds covering their peaks. I forgot then that a river also flows into the sea, into the earth-embracing ocean, equally inseparable from heaven and earth. Much later, the powerful Goethe captivated me; I did not understand him fully then, but I felt his sea wave, his depth, his vastness, and (a sickness of youth is to never know weight and measure!) I