The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

elegant statues meet the youth at his first step into the realm of consciousness; from the height of their greatness, let them impart their first lessons of civic virtue...

The reading of Greek and Roman history acted powerfully upon me. I grieved that this world of virtues and energy had long since 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 caused a revolution in my being.

Schiller! I bless you; to you I owe the holy moments 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, par excellence, the poet of youth. The same dreamy gaze, turned only toward the future, "thither, thither!"; the same noble, energetic, captivating feelings; the same love for people and the same sympathy for modernity... Once I took Schiller in my hands, I never let him go, 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, it is necessary for all faculties to have unfolded, it is necessary to become acquainted with life, one needs formidable experiences, one needs to have lived through a share of the sufferings of Faust, Hamlet, Othello: 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—at that time, I could not understand sympathy for the universe. Let Goethe be the sea, I thought, at the bottom of which lie heaven-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 covering their summits. I forgot then that the river also flows into the sea, into the world-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 vastness, and (a disease of youth is to never know weight and measure!) I