De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem

elegant statues meet the youth at his first step into the realm of consciousness, and from the height of their majesty instill in him the first lessons of civic virtue...

Reading Greek and Roman history acted upon me powerfully. I grieved that this world of virtue and energy had long been buried; I wept over its grave—when suddenly a more careful reading of one author, whom I had in my hands, proved to me that the world which surrounds me, in which I live, is not devoid of the valiant and the great. This discovery brought about a revolution in my being.

Schiller! I bless you; I owe to you the holy minutes of my early youth! How many tears flowed from my eyes onto your poems! What an altar I erected to you in my soul! You are, par excellence, the poet of youth. The same dreamy gaze turned toward the future alone, "thither, thither!"; the same noble, energetic, captivating feelings; the same love for people and the same sympathy for modernity... Once I took Schiller into my hands, I did not let him go, and even now, in sad moments, his pure song heals me. For a long time, I ranked Goethe below him. In order to be able to understand Goethe and Shakespeare, one must have all one's faculties developed, one must become acquainted with life, one must have formidable experiences, one must live through a portion of the sufferings of Faust, Hamlet, Othello: striving for virtue and a hot sympathy for the sublime are sufficient to sympathize with Schiller. I feared Goethe: he offended me with his neglect, with his lack of sympathy for me—I could not then understand sympathy with the universe. Let Goethe be a sea, I thought, at the bottom of which are goodness knows what treasures; I prefer the German river, this Rhine, flowing between feudal castles and vineyards. The Rhine, witness to the Thirty Years' War, reflecting the Alps and the clouds covering their summits. I forgot then that the river also flows into the sea, into the earth-embracing ocean, equally inseparable from heaven and earth. Much later, the powerful Goethe captivated me; I did not yet fully understand him then, but I felt his sea wave, his depth, his space, and (the illness of youth is never to know weight and measure!) I

original: "Шиллер, Гёте, Шекспир, Фауст, Гамлет, Отелло, Рейн, Альпы, юность, гражданскія добродѣтели, германская литература"