"True poetry announces itself thus, that, as a worldly gospel, it can by internal cheerfulness and external comfort free us from the earthly burdens which press upon us. ... The most lively, as well as the most serious works, have the same aim of moderating both pleasure and pain by a felicitous intellectual form."
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography, tr. John Oxenford (1891), Book 13
