The Collected Works of Benedict de Spinoza

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 over its grave—when suddenly a more attentive reading of one author I had in my hands proved to me that even the world that surrounds me, in which I live, is not exempt from the valiant and the great. This discovery brought about a revolution in my existence.

Schiller! I bless you; to you I owe the sacred minutes of my early youth! How many tears flowed from my eyes over 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 toward 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 put him down, and even now, in sad moments, his pure song heals me. For a long time, I placed Goethe below him. In order to be able to understand Goethe and Shakespeare, one must have all one's faculties unfolded, one must become acquainted with life, one must have formidable experiences, one must live through a portion of the sufferings of Faust, Hamlet, 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 with the universe. Let Goethe be a sea, I thought, 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, a 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 earth-embracing ocean, equally inseparable from the sky and the earth. Much later, the powerful Goethe captivated me; I did not fully understand him then, but I felt his sea wave, his depth, his space, and (the illness of youth is never to know weight and measure!)