Tuesday, January 27.—­Goethe talked with me about the continuation of his memoirs, with which he is now busy.  He observed that this later period of his life would not be narrated with such minuteness as the youthful epoch of Dichtung and Wahrheit.[13] “I must,” said he, “treat this later period more in the fashion of annals:  my outward actions must appear rather than my inward life.  Altogether, the most important part of an individual’s life is that of development, and mine is concluded in the detailed volumes of Dichtung and Wahrheit.  Afterwards begins the conflict with the world, and that is interesting only in its results.

“And then the life of a learned German—­what is it?  What may have been really good in my case cannot be communicated, and what can be communicated is not worth the trouble.  Besides, where are the hearers whom one could entertain with any satisfaction?

“When I look back to the earlier and middle periods of my life, and now in my old age think how few are left of those who were young with me, I always think of a summer residence at a bathing-place.  When you arrive, you make acquaintance and friends of those who have already been there some time, and who leave in a few weeks.  The loss is painful.  Then you turn to the second generation, with which you live a good while, and become most intimate.  But this goes also, and leaves us alone with the third, which comes just as we are going away, and with which we have, properly, nothing to do.

“I have ever been esteemed one of Fortune’s chiefest favorites; nor will I complain or find fault with the course my life has taken.  Yet, truly, there has been nothing but toil and care; and I may say that, in all my seventy-five years, I have never had a month of genuine comfort.  It has been the perpetual rolling of a stone, which I have always had to raise anew.  My annals will render clear what I now say.  The claims upon my activity, both from within and without, were too numerous.

“My real happiness was my poetic meditation and production.  But how was this disturbed, limited, and hindered by my external position!  Had I been able to abstain more from public business, and to live more in solitude, I should have been happier, and should have accomplished much more as a poet.  But, soon after my Goetz and Werther, that saying of a sage was verified for me—­’If you do anything for the sake of the world, it will take good care that you shall not do it a second time.’

“A wide-spread celebrity, an elevated position in life, are good things.  But, for all my rank and celebrity, I am still obliged to be silent as to the opinion of others, that I may not give offense.  This would be but poor sport, if by this means I had not the advantage of learning the thoughts of others without their being able to learn mine.”

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Wednesday, February 25.—­Today, Goethe showed me two very remarkable poems, both highly moral in their tendency, but in their several motives so unreservedly natural and true, that they are of the kind which the world styles immoral.  On this account he keeps them to himself, and does not intend to publish them.