Subjoined is the passage from the _Prospective Review_ of August, 1853:
"Goethe's works are too much in the nature of literary studies; the mind is often deeply impressed by them, but one doubts if the author was. He saw them as he saw the houses of Weimar and the plants in the act of metamorphosis. He had a clear perception of their fixed condition and their successive transitions, but he did not really (at least so it seems to us) comprehend their motive power. In a word, he appreciated their life but not their liveliness.... And we trace this not to a defect in imaginative power--a defect which it would be a simple absurdity to impute to Goethe--but to the tone of his character and the habits of his mind. He moved hither and thither through life, but he was always a man apart. He mixed with unnumbered kinds of men, with courts and academies, students and women, camps and artists, but everywhere he was with them, yet not of them. In every scene he was there, and he made it clear that he was there with a reserve and as a stranger. He went there _to experience_. As a man of universal culture, and well skilled in the order and classification of human life, the fact of any one class or order being beyond his reach or comprehension seemed an absurdity; and it was an absurdity. He thought that he was equal to moving in any description of society, and he was equal to it; but then, on that account, he was absorbed in none."
[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Sept. 1853.]
As for me, I am in the best health and spirits. I have had a letter from Mr. Combe to-day, urging me to go to Edinburgh, but I have made an engagement with Mr. Chapman to do work which will oblige me to remain in London. Mrs. P. is a very bonny, pleasant-looking woman, with a smart drawing-room and liberal opinions--in short, such a friend as self-interest, well understood, would induce one to cultivate. I find it difficult to meet with any lodgings at once tolerable and cheap. My theory is to _live_ entirely--that is, pay rent and find food--out of my positive income, and then work for as large a surplus as I can get. The next number of the _Review_ will be better than usual. Froude writes on the "Book of Job"! He at first talked of an article on the three great _subjective_ poems--Job, Faust, and Hamlet--an admirable subject--but it has shrunk to the Book of Job alone.