if not, will certainly keep a Novalis-journal for you some favorable season, when I live regularly for a fortnight.”
‘June, 1833. — I return Lessing. I could hardly get
through Miss Sampson. E. Galeotti is good in the
same way as Minna. Well-conceived and sustained
characters, interesting situations, but never that
profound knowledge of human nature, those minute
beauties, and delicate vivifying traits, which lead on
so in the writings of some authors, who may be
nameless. I think him easily followed; strong, but not
deep.’
‘May, 1833. — Groton. — I think you are wrong in
applying your artistical ideas to occasional poetry. An
epic, a drama, must have a fixed form in the mind of
the poet from the first; and copious draughts of ambrosia
quaffed in the heaven of thought, soft fanning gates
and bright light from the outward world, give muscle
and bloom, — that is, give life, — to this skeleton. But
all occasional poems must be moods, and can a mood
have a form fixed and perfect, more than a wave of
the sea?’
‘Three or four afternoons I have passed very happily at my beloved haunt in the wood, reading Goethe’s “Second Residence in Rome.” Your pencil-marks show that you have been before me. I shut the book each time with an earnest desire to live as he did, — always to have some engrossing object of pursuit. I sympathize deeply with a mind in that state. While mine is being used up by ounces, I wish
