One estranged friend he could always replace with another. From the beginning the world gave him all that he most craved. It may be said, indeed, that losses of his own he never had. Neither his own losses, nor the pains of sympathy for others, - for his friends, or for mankind at large, - had ever bruised or scarred his soul.
#UNDISTRACTED CROSSWORD CLUE FULL#
His coldness was the antiseptic that kept him from decay : it does not astonish us to learn that at eighty-three, with his marvelous faculties still alert and his body comparatively unworn, his enjoyment of mere living was full and fresh as it had ever been. The joy springing from the interchange of affection, like all things most worth having, must be paid for with a price, - the possibility of exquisite suffering and if Goethe lost the satisfactions of true and enduring love, he also escaped its corresponding pangs.
He never felt his poverty was never conscious of wanting that which most men value as among the As students of human character we know the difference between sentiments and affections proper, and we discern that this man, so abundantly supplied with the former, was yet a very pauper in his lack of those feelings which enrich the commonest of mankind. But the delusion discovers itself after a time. Our minds do not readily take in such a singular conception of a man, and at first we interpret his speech and actions as meaning what they would mean in any ordinary mortal. It is hard to conceive of a man born without a heart, but on close inspection one is forced to look on Goethe as a being as really destitute of the normal human affections as though he had actually come into the world unfurnished with the genuine flesh-and-blood organ, but with some subtly-working mechanism in its place, which nature put there for once by way of an experiment. IN reading Grimm’s Life and Times of Goethe 1 we have wondered anew at that defect of the great man’s nature which renders him, to us, an almost incomprehensible, half-human being, - we mean the absolute coldness of heart which seems to have served to advance his giant intellectual growth, while it kept him morally dwarfed.