Goethe
Faust, translated in English Poetry by Bayard Taylor. Wilhelm Meister, in Carlyle's translation. Goethe's Conversations with Eckerman, translation in Bohn's Library.
No other human name, except Da Vinci's, carries the high associations of oracular and occult wisdom as far as Goethe's does. He hears the voices of “ the Mothers" more clearly than other men and in heathen loneliness he "builds up the pyramid of his existence."
The deep authority of his formidable insight can be best enjoyed, not without little side-lights of a laconic irony, in the "Conversations"; while in Wilhelm Meister we learn to become adepts in the art of living in the Beautiful and True, in Faust that abysmal doubt as to the whole mad business of life is undermined with a craft equal to his own in the delineation and defeat of "the queer son of Chaos."