Of the thousand-plus Goethe works (excluding the lyrical poetry, business and official papers, and aphoristic writings) projected as articles for the complete, alphabetically arranged, EGW, volume 4 contains about fifty (nos. 276–326) between the key words Entstehen and Farbenlehre. Many of Goethe's smaller, or incomplete, works and independent drafts are categorized under the rubrics Entstehen, Entwurf, Epoche, and Erklärung—two or three pages of discoverable documents here, two or three there. Momme Mommsen's originally stated aspiration deserves repeating in light of this exhaustive plan: “der ganze Goethe” shall be accounted for in the EGW. Even for many a specialist the idea of “the entire Goethe” will acquire impressive new meaning between these covers. Are any documents missing here? No doubt, though in their effort to make a comprehensive survey the editors have drawn from some two hundred printed and manuscript sources (in a sense, to own the EGW, in which all documents relevant to the genesis of Goethe's works have been extracted, is to own that entire resource library). Included among the larger writings—more accurately, works having a lengthier genesis and consequently commanding greater numbers of documentary pages—are Des Epimenides Erwachen (90 pp.), Ueber epische und dramatische Dichtung von Goethe und Schiller (22 pp.), and Erwin und Elmire (19 pp.). By far the lion's share of volume 4, however, belongs to the final article, Zur Farbenlehre (726 pp., which accounts for the exceptional length of this volume, nearly double that of each of the previous three). Goethe's Farbenlehre is a huge work, after all, spanning a lifetime of his attention from the first observations on color as a child in 1755 to a letter written only a week before his death to Polizeirat Joseph Grüner, in which he discusses a recent university dissertation by one H. Lövy that deals in its twelfth chapter with Goethe's concept of polarity in color theory.

The richness of the EGW manifests itself not only diachronically but also, and most palpably, in the kaleidoscopic minutiae in letters from or to Goethe or between other correspondents—many of them obscure enough not to be mentioned in the Goethe Handbuch—concerning the respective work. To wander through the often day-by-day entries is to share the pleasure of Schubert's miller.