In Goethe we pass, as over a bridge, from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth; but though he lived to see a third of the nineteenth century, he hardly belongs to it. Of its political characteristics he had few or none. He was no democrat. As the prophet of inward culture, he took the French Revolution for a disturbance, an interruption, and not a development in the progress of the world's history; and for all its horrors and the pernicious demoralisation of its leaders, he had the profoundest aversion. But afterwards he came to see that it had beneficial results; that a revolution is
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