The Life and Works of Goethe - 1856 Author:George Henry Lewes Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: $u. M,r.j.,V.-t 3T IJ(. 1 / / .?/ CHAPTER II. THE PRECOCIOUS CHILD. k uutt Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born on the 28th ',; August, 1749, as the ... more »clock sounded the hour of noon, int4 the busy town of Frankfurt-on-the-Maine. The busy town, as may be supposed, was quite heedless of what " was then passing in the corner of that low, heavy-beamed room in the Grosse Hirsch Graben, where an infant, black and almost lifeless, was watched with agonizing anxiety — an anxiety dissolving into tears of joy, as the aged grandmother exclaimed to the pale mother : ' Rd- iliia. er lebt I he lives!' But if the town was heedless, not so were the stars, as astrologers will certify; the stars knew who was gasping for life beside his trembling ( mother, and in solemn convocation they prefigured his ' v, future greatness. Goethe, with a grave smile, notes this conjunction of the stars ; as Condivi, in his Vita di Micfielagnolo, does of his hero, without a smile. Whatever the stars may have betokened, this August, 1749, was a momentous month to Germany, if only because it gave birth to the man whose influence has been greater than that of any man since Luther. A momentous month in very momentous times. It is the middle of the eighteenth century: a period when the movement carried out by Luther was passing from religion to politics, and freedom of thought was translating itself into liberty of act. From theology the movement had communicated itself to philosophy, morals and politics. The agitation was still mainly in the higher classes, but it was gradually descending to the lower. A period of deep unrest, big with events which would distend the conceptions of all men, and bewilder some of the wisest. A few random glances at the ' notables' may serve to call up something like the histo...« less