新GRE写作名人素材库：歌德_GRE写作

新GRE写作名人素材库：歌德

　　In 1787 he had a lengthy stay in Italy, visiting Naples, Pompeii, Rome, and Milan. Returning to Weimar, he began writing Egmont. In 1795 he made the acquaintance of poet and dramatist Friedrich von Schiller, with whom he quickly became friendly and with whom he worked on the Horen, a journal designed to elevate the literary tastes of the masses.

　　About this period, too, Goethe wrote his play Hermann und Dorothea and also began translating Voltaire, Diderot, and Benvenuto Cellini.

　　The year 1806 was a significant one in Goethe s life, marked by his marriage and also by the entry of Napoleon into Weimar. The conquering general and the German poet found much in each other to admire, and Napoleon decorated Goethe with the cross of the Legion of Honour.

　　In 1811 Goethe wrote Dichtung und Wahrheit, Wilhelm Meister s Wanderjahre; in 1821 he began working at a second part of Faust. During this time he had two famous visitors--Beethoven from Vienna and Thackeray from London. Although the composer thought himself coldly received, the novelist spoke with enthusiasm of the welcome accorded him. Goethe was then well advanced in years, however, and his health was beginning to fail. He died March 22, 1832.

　　Few great writers--not even Disraeli or Sir Walter Scott--had fuller lives than Goethe. His love affairs were many, and his early taste for the graphic arts continued to the end of his days, resulting in a vast collection of treasures. He also expressed an interest in mysticism, which manifested itself in various forms besides the writing of Faust. With a temperament aspiring to the unattainable, Goethe s mind was essentially a speculative one. During his childhood at Frankfurt he did symbolic drawings of the soul s aspirations to the deity, and he later became immersed in the study of the Christian religion. Eventually he grew skeptical on this subject, his ideas being altered not only by his own ruminations but by reading various iconoclastic philosophers, especially Rousseau. Later his intellect was seemingly less engaged by Christianity than by ancient Eastern faiths, as demonstrated by some of his works, notably Westtliche Divan.