De Piscibus Libri V et De Cetis Liber Unus

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

Reading Greek and Roman history acted upon me strongly. I grieved that this world of virtues and energy had long been buried; I wept over its grave—when suddenly, a more attentive reading of one author I had in my hands proved to me that the very world that 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; to you I owe the sacred moments of my early youth! How many tears flowed from my eyes over your poems! What an altar I raised to you in my soul! You are, above all, the poet of youth. The same dreamy gaze turned only toward the future, "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 now, in sad moments, his pure song heals me. For a long time, I placed Goethe below him. In order to know how to understand Goethe and Shakespeare, one must have all one's faculties unfolded, one must become acquainted with life, one must have dire experiences, one must live through a portion of the sufferings of Faust, Hamlet, and Othello: striving for virtue and a burning sympathy for the sublime are sufficient to sympathize with Schiller. I feared Goethe: he insulted me with his indifference, with his lack of sympathy for me—at that time, I could not understand sympathy with the universe. Let Goethe be the 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 of the Thirty Years' War, reflecting the Alps and the clouds that cover their summits. I forgot then that a river also flows into the sea, into the earth-embracing ocean, equally inseparable from the sky and the earth. Much later, the powerful Goethe swept me away; I did not fully understand him even then, but I felt his sea wave, his depth, his vastness, and (the illness of youth is never to know weight and measure!) upon...