ment and dissatisfaction at the disadvantageous change. In October of the same year, he received from Horn the following explanation:

"But, dear Moors! how glad you will be to learn that we have lost no friend in our Goethe, as we falsely supposed. He had so travestied himself as to deceive not only me but a great many others, and we should never have discovered the real truth of the matter, if your letter had not threatened him with the loss of a friend. I must tell you the whole story as he himself told it to me, for he has commissioned me to do so in order to save him the trouble. He is in love it is true- he has confessed it to me, and will confess it to you; but his love, though his circumstances are sad, is not culpable, as I formerly supposed. He loves. But not that young lady whom I suspected him of loving. He loves a girl beneath him in rank, but a girl whom I think I do not say too much you would yourself love if you saw her. I am no lover, so I shall write entirely without passion. Imagine to yourself a woman, well-grown though not very tall; a round, agreeable, though not extraordinarily beautiful face; open, gentle, engaging manners; a very pretty understanding, without having had any great education. He loves her very tenderly, with the perfect, honest intentions of a virtuous man, though he knows that she can never be his. Whether she loves him in return I know not. You know, dear Moors, that is a point about which one cannot well ask; but this much I can say to you, that they seem to be born for each other. Now observe his cunning! That no one may suspect him of such an attachment, he undertakes to persuade the world of precisely the opposite, and hitherto he has been extraordinarily successful. He makes a great parade and seems to be paying court to a certain young lady of whom I have told you before. He can see his beloved and converse with her at certain

times without giving occasion for the slightest suspicion, and I often accompany him to her. If Goethe were not my friend, I should fall in love with her myself. Meanwhile he is supposed to be in love with the Fräulein (but what do you care about her name?) and people are fond of teasing him about her. Perhaps she herself believes that he loves her, but the good lady deceives herself. Since that time he has admitted me to closer confidence, has made me acquainted with his affairs, and shown me that his expenditure is not so great as might be supposed. He is more of a philosopher and moralist than ever; and innocent as his love is, he nevertheless disapproves it. We often dispute about this, but let him take what side he will, he is sure to win; for you know what weight he can give to only apparent reasons. I pity him and his good heart, which really must be in a very melancholy condition, since he loves the most virtuous and perfect of girls without hope. But if we suppose that she loves him in return, how miserable must he be on that very account! I need not explain that to you, who so well know the human heart. He has told me that he will write you one or two things about it himself. There is no necessity for me to recommend silence to you on this subject; for you yourself see how necessary it is. . . ."

In his little poem, " Der Wahre Genuss," he says, " She is perfect, and her only fault is that she loves me:"

"Sie ist vollkommen, und sie fehlet
Darin allein dass sie mich liebt."

And he wishes us to believe that he teased her with trifles and idle suspicions; was jealous without cause, convinced without reason; plagued her with fantastic quarrels, till at last her endurance was exhausted, and her love was washed away in tears. No sooner was he aware of this, than he repented, and tried to recover

the jewel which like a prodigal he had cast away. In vain. He was in despair, and tried in dissipation to forget his grief.

This is his version of the affair given in the Autobiography, but by the evidence of his letters it is clear that it was not he who trifled with her affections, but she who played with him. It was not he who was inclined to escape when he found her love secured; he never did secure it.

"Erringen will der Mensch; er will nicht sicher seyn."
("Man loves to conquer, not to feel secure.")

As he truly says, in the little piece wherein he dramatises this episode; but the truth is often as applicable to woman as to man. At any rate, we know from the poet's own letters that it was Käthchen who teased and laughed at him, and it was in reality his own torments that he dramatised.

If we reverse the positions, we may read in some of his lyrics the burden of this experience. One entire play, or pastoral, is devoted to a poetical representation of these lovers' quarrels: this is "Die Laune des Verliebten," which is very curious as the earliest extant work of the great poet, and as the earliest specimen of his tendency to turn experience into song. In the opera of "Erwin und Elmire" he subsequently treated a similar subject, in a very different manner. first effort is the more curious of the two. The style of composition is an imitation of those pastoral dramas, which, originated by Tasso and Guarini in the soft and almost luscious "Aminta" and "Pastor Fido," had by the French been made popular all over Europe.

The

Two happy and two unhappy lovers are somewhat artificially contrasted; the two latter representing Käthchen and the poet. Action there is none; the piece is made up of talk about love, some felicitous verses of the true stamp and ring, and an occasional

glimpse of insight into the complexities of passion. Eridon, the jealous lover, torments his mistress in a style at once capricious and natural; with admirable truth she deplores his jealousy and excuses it:

"Zwar oft betrübt er mich, doch rührt ihn auch mein Schmerz.
Wirft er mir etwas vor, fängt er mich an zu plagen,
So darf ich nur ein Wort, ein gutes Wort nur sagen,
Gleich ist er umgekehrt, die wilde Zanksucht flieht,
Er weint sogar mit mir, wenn er mich weinen sieht.1

It is admirably said that the very absence of any cause for grief prompts him to create a grief:

"Da er kein Elend hat, will er sich Elend machen."

Amine is also touched with a delicate pencil. Her lovingness, forgivingness, and endurance are true to life. Here is a couplet breathing the very tenderness of love:

"Der Liebe leichtes Band machst du zum schweren Joch.

Du qüalst mich als Tyrann; und ich? ich lieb dich noch !” 2

One more line and I have done: Eglé is persuading Eridon that Amine's love of dancing is no trespass on her love for him; since, after having enjoyed her dance, her first thought is to seek him:

"Und durch das Suchen selbst wirst du ihr immer lieber." 8

In such touches as these lurks the future poet; still more so in the very choice of the subject. Here, as ever, he does not cheat himself with pouring feigned

1""Tis true he vexes me, and yet my sorrow pains him.
Yet let him but reproach begin to tease me,

-

Then need I but a word, a single kind word utter,

Away flies all his anger in a moment,

And he will weep with me, because he sees me weep."

2"The fairy link of Love thou mak'st a galling yoke.

Thou treat'st me as a slave; and I? I love thee still!" 3" And in the very search her heart grows fonder of thee."

sorrows into feigning verse: he embalms his own experience. He does not trouble himself with drawing characters and events from the shelves of the library: his soul is the fountain of his inspiration. His own life was uniformly the text from which he preached. He sang what he had felt, and because he had felt it; not because others had sung before him. He was the echo of no man's joys and sorrows, he was the lyrist of his own. This is the reason why his poems have an endless charm: they are as indestructible as passion itself. They reach our hearts because they issue from his. Every bullet hits the mark, according to the huntsman's superstition, if it have first been dipped in the marksman's blood.

He has told us, emphatically, that all his works are but fragments of the grand confession of his life. Of him we may say what Horace so well says of Lucilius, that he trusted his secrets to books as to faithful friends:

"Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim

Credebat libris; neque, si male cesserat, unquam
Decurrens alio, neque si bene: quo fit, ut omnis
Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella

Vita senis."1

How clearly he saw the nullity of every other procedure is shown in various passages of his letters and conversations. Riemer has preserved one worth selecting: "There will soon be a poetry without poetry, a real ποίησις, where the subject-matter is ἐν ποιήσει, in the making a manufactured poetry." 2 He dates from

1 Horace: lib. 11. 1.

2" Briefe von und an Goethe." Herausgeg. von Riemer. 1846. What follows is untranslatable, from the play on words: “Die Dichtee heissen dann so, wie schon Moritz spasste, a spissando, densando, vom Dichtmachen, weil sie Alles zusammendrängen, und kommen mir vor wie eine Art Wurstmacher, die in den Darm des Hexameters oder Trimeters ihre Wort und Sylbenfülle stopfen."