The works of classical artists dominate our imaginations for the brief moments they are heard or read. Goethe's poems occasionally seem to linger far too long in our minds for comfort, like the consciousness of another age bridging history with the leap of a sentence. These works are timeless not only because genius transcends time, but because values are enduringly universal; they are the representations of a culture mankind has left behind in the sweep of history, but they are also the abiding echoes of an element of human nature that individuals have forfeited in the wake of progress. In Goethe's own words, "Everything nowadays is ultra; everything transcends, in thought and in deeds. No one knows himself anymore, no one understands the element in which he moves and acts, no one the material with which he is working. Young people get stirred up much too early, and then are carried away by the whirlpool of the times...thereby only to persist in mediocrity." We can do no worse than to allow the sentimentalism of another age to grace the quotidian existence of modern living.

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