Excerpt from Goethe: The Man and His Character Goethe still treads the stage of the world in the character of Faust, but the true story of his life is far more attractive than the melodramatic mutila tion of his great tragedy which is annually presented in the theatres of every land. We have from his own hand a minute and masterly description of the boyhood of a genius; we behold, in his narrative and his impulsive letters, the exquisitely sensitive youth awakening in a world which is a hundred years too old for him, and, while conscious of a mighty task, wavering time after time between the valleys of love and the hills of learning; we find his developed nature so many-sided that he attracts into his life nearly every person of consequence in his age, and reflects in his art every spasm of its travail for the birth of the new world; and even in his later years we see his genius linked, in rare association, with a passion that holds him to the common rank of men. The greatest literary artist since Shakespeare, and no inconspicuous figure in the scientific culture of the new world, he is, never theless, so profoundly human that almost every chapter in his career is a romantic love-story. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.