Book One

May 4, 1771

How glad I am to be away! Dearest friend, what a thing is the human heart! To leave you, whom I love so much, from whom I was inseparable, and to be glad! I know you forgive me. Weren’t my other attachments chosen by fate precisely to torment a heart like mine? Poor Leonore! And yet I was innocent. Could I help it that, while her sister’s willful charms gave me pleasant entertainment, a passion was forming in that poor heart? And yet—am I wholly innocent? Didn’t I feed her feelings? Didn’t I myself delight in those utterly true expressions of nature that so often made us laugh, little as they were laughable? Didn’t I—oh, what is man, that he may complain of himself! I will, dear friend, I promise you, I will improve; I will no longer chew over every little trouble that fate sets before us, as I always have. I will enjoy the present, and the past shall be past for me. You are certainly right, my dear friend: there would be less pain among people if they did not—God knows why they are made that way!—busy their imaginations so diligently with calling back the memories of past troubles, rather than bearing an indifferent present.

Be so good as to tell my mother that I shall manage her business as well as I can and send her news of it very soon. I have spoken with my aunt and found her far from the wicked woman they make of her at home. She is a lively, impetuous woman with the best of hearts. I explained my mother’s complaints to her about the share of the inheritance she has been holding back; she told me her reasons, her grounds, and the conditions on which she would be willing to hand over everything, and more than we asked—in short, I don’t want to write about it now; tell my mother that all will go well. And in this small affair, my dear friend, I have found once again that misunderstandings and indolence perhaps cause more trouble in the world than cunning and malice. At least the last two are certainly rarer.

For the rest, I am very well here. Solitude is a precious balm to my heart in this paradise of a countryside, and this season of youth warms my often shivering heart with all its abundance. Every tree, every hedge is a bouquet of blossoms, and you would like to turn into a May beetle so as to float about in that sea of fragrance and find all your nourishment in it.

The town itself is unpleasant, but all around it lies an inexpressible beauty of nature. That is what moved the late Count M. to lay out a garden on one of the hills, which cross one another in the loveliest variety and form the sweetest valleys. The garden is simple, and as soon as you enter you feel that it was not a scientific gardener who drew up the plan but a feeling heart that wanted to enjoy itself here. I have already wept many a tear for the departed in the crumbling little summerhouse that was his favorite spot and is mine too. Soon I shall be master of the garden; the gardener has taken to me, after only these few days, and he will not lose by it.

May 10

A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my whole soul, like the sweet spring mornings that I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone and glad of my life in this countryside, which was made for souls like mine. I am so happy, dear friend, so completely sunk in the feeling of quiet existence, that my art suffers for it. I could not draw now, not a single line, and yet I have never been a greater painter than in these moments. When the lovely valley steams around me, and the high sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable darkness of my forest, and only a few stray rays steal into the inner sanctuary, and I lie in the tall grass by the falling brook, and, closer to the earth, a thousand different little grasses catch my notice; when I feel the teeming of the little world among the stalks, the countless, unfathomable forms of the little worms and gnats, closer to my heart, and feel the presence of the Almighty, who created us in his image, the breath of the All-loving, who bears and sustains us, floating in eternal rapture; my friend! When it grows dim before my eyes then, and the world around me and the sky rest wholly in my soul like the form of a beloved—then I often feel a longing and think: ah, if only you could express all this again, if only you could breathe onto paper what lives in you so fully, so warmly, so that it would become the mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the infinite God!—my friend—but it is ruin to me; I am overwhelmed by the power and splendor of these appearances.

I don’t know whether deceiving spirits hover about this place, or whether it is the warm, heavenly fancy in my heart that makes everything around me seem such a paradise. Just outside the town there is a well, a well that holds me spellbound like Melusine and her sisters.—You go down a little hill and find yourself in front of a vault, where some twenty steps lead down to where the clearest water wells up out of marble rock. The low wall that encloses it above, the tall trees that shade the place all around, the coolness of the spot: there is something so inviting about it all, something that makes you shiver. Not a day goes by that I don’t sit there for an hour. The girls come out from the town to fetch water, the most innocent of tasks and the most necessary, which in times gone by the daughters of kings performed themselves. When I sit there, the world of the patriarchs comes so vividly alive around me: how they, all the forefathers, made acquaintance and courted at the well, and how kindly spirits hover about wells and springs. Oh, anyone who cannot feel this with me has never refreshed himself at the coolness of a well after a hard day’s walking in summer.

May 13

You ask whether you should send me my books?—My dear friend, I beg you for God’s sake, keep them off my back! I no longer want to be guided, encouraged, fired up; this heart of mine surges enough on its own. What I need is a cradle song, and I have found it in all its fullness in my Homer. How often I lull my rebellious blood to rest; for you have never seen anything so uneven, so restless as this heart. My dear friend! Do I need to tell you that, you who have so often borne the burden of watching me pass from grief to wild excess, and from sweet melancholy to ruinous passion? And I treat my poor heart like a sick child; it is allowed its every wish. Don’t tell anyone; there are people who would hold it against me.

May 15

The humble folk of the place know me already and love me, especially the children. I have made a sad observation. When I first joined them and asked them in a friendly way about this and that, some of them thought I meant to make fun of them and brushed me off quite rudely. I did not let that vex me; I only felt most keenly what I have often noticed before: people of some rank will always keep themselves at a cold distance from the common people, as though they believed they would lose by coming close; and then there are frivolous types and nasty jokers who seem to condescend only in order to make the poor people feel their arrogance all the more painfully.

I know very well that we are not equal and cannot be; but I hold that anyone who believes he must keep away from the so-called rabble in order to preserve their respect is just as much to blame as a coward who hides from his enemy because he is afraid of being beaten.

The other day I came to the well and found a young servant girl who had set her pitcher on the lowest step and was looking around to see whether some friend would come along to help her lift it onto her head. I went down and looked at her. “Shall I help you, miss?” I said.—She blushed scarlet all over. “Oh no, sir!” she said.—“No fuss now.”—She settled her collar, and I helped her. She thanked me and went up the steps.

May 17

I have made all sorts of acquaintances, but I have found no company yet. I don’t know what it is about me that attracts people; so many of them like me and attach themselves to me, and then it hurts me when our ways run together for only a short stretch. If you ask what the people here are like, I must tell you: like people everywhere! The human race is a monotonous thing. Most of them spend the greater part of their time working in order to live, and the little bit of freedom they have left frightens them so much that they look for every means of getting rid of it. Oh, the destiny of man!

But a very good sort of people! When I forget myself now and then, and now and then enjoy with them the pleasures still granted to human beings, joking around a nicely laid table with all openness and good faith, arranging a drive or a dance at the right moment, and things like that, it does me a lot of good; only I must not let it occur to me that so many other powers lie dormant in me, all moldering unused, which I have to hide carefully. Ah, that cramps the whole heart so.—And yet! To be misunderstood is the fate of people like us.

Ah, that the friend of my youth is gone! Ah, that I ever knew her!—I would say to myself: you are a fool! You are looking for what is not to be found here below! But I did have her, I felt that heart, that great soul, in whose presence I seemed to myself more than I was, because I was all that I could be. Good God! Was there a single power of my soul left unused then? Could I not unfold before her the whole wonderful feeling with which my heart embraces nature? Was our companionship not a never-ending weaving of the finest feeling and the keenest wit, whose variations, down to their very naughtiness, were all stamped with genius? And now!—Ah, the years she had on me led her to the grave before me. I will never forget her, never her steady mind and her divine forbearance.

A few days ago I met a young V., an open-hearted boy with a very happy cast of face. He has only just come down from the university; he doesn’t exactly think himself wise, but he does believe he knows more than others. He has worked hard, too, as I can tell from all sorts of things; in short, he has a nice store of knowledge. When he heard that I drew a great deal and knew Greek (two prodigies in these parts), he turned to me and unpacked a great deal of learning, from Batteux to Wood, from de Piles to Winckelmann, and assured me that he had read the first part of Sulzer’s Theory all the way through and owned a manuscript by Heyne on the study of antiquity. I let that pass.

I have come to know another very good man, too, the prince’s magistrate, an open, trusting person. They say it is a joy to the soul to see him among his children, of whom he has nine; people make a great deal of his eldest daughter especially. He has invited me to his house, and I mean to visit him one of these days. He lives at a hunting lodge of the prince’s, an hour and a half from here, where he was given permission to move after his wife’s death, since staying here in town and in the magistrate’s house had become too painful for him.

Besides these, a few warped eccentrics have crossed my path, in whom everything is unbearable, and most unbearable of all their displays of friendship.

Farewell! You will like this letter; it sticks entirely to the facts.

May 22

That human life is only a dream has occurred to many before me, and the feeling goes about with me everywhere too. When I look at the confinement in which the active and inquiring powers of man are shut up; when I see how all our efforts come down to satisfying needs that in turn have no purpose but to prolong our poor existence, and then, that all our reassurance on certain points of inquiry is only a dreaming resignation, in which we paint the walls we sit imprisoned between with colorful figures and bright prospects—all that, Wilhelm, leaves me speechless. I go back into myself and find a world! Again, more in intimation and dark desire than in clear form and living power. And then everything swims before my senses, and I go on smiling into the world, dreaming.

That children do not know why they want things, all the highly learned schoolmasters and tutors agree; but that grown people, too, stagger about on this earth like children and, like them, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act just as little for true ends, are governed just as much by biscuits and cake and the birch rod: nobody likes to believe that, and yet it seems to me you can grasp it with your hands.

I readily admit to you, for I know what you would like to say to me here, that the happiest are those who, like children, live from one day to the next, drag their dolls around, dress and undress them, and creep with great respect around the drawer where Mama has locked away the sugar bread, and when at last they snatch what they want, gobble it down with full cheeks and cry, “More!”—those are happy creatures. Those too are well off who give grand titles to their shabby occupations, or even to their passions, and put them down to the account of the human race as gigantic operations for its salvation and welfare.—Happy the man who can be like that! But whoever recognizes in his humility where all this leads, who sees how neatly every comfortable citizen knows how to trim his little garden into a paradise, and how tirelessly even the unhappy man keeps panting on his way under his burden, and how all are equally eager to see the light of this sun one minute longer—yes, he is quiet, and he too builds his world out of himself, and he too is happy, because he is a human being. And then, however confined he is, he still keeps in his heart the sweet feeling of freedom, and knows that he can leave this prison whenever he likes.

May 26

You have long known my way of settling in, of putting up a little hut for myself in some intimate spot and living there within the narrowest limits. Here too I have found another little place that has drawn me.

About an hour from town there is a place they call Wahlheim. Its situation on a hillside is very interesting, and when you come out of the village at the top by the footpath, you suddenly see the whole valley below you. A good landlady, obliging and lively for her age, serves wine, beer, and coffee; and best of all are two linden trees whose spreading branches cover the little square in front of the church, which is closed in all around by farmhouses, barns, and yards. I have rarely found such an intimate, homely little place, and I have my little table brought out there from the inn, and my chair, and drink my coffee there and read my Homer. The first time I came under the lindens, by chance, on a fine afternoon, I found the little square quite deserted. Everyone was out in the fields; only a boy of about four was sitting on the ground, holding another child of about six months, which sat between his feet in front of him, with both arms against his chest, so that he served it as a kind of armchair, and for all the liveliness with which his black eyes looked about him, he sat perfectly still. The sight delighted me: I sat down on a plow that stood opposite and drew the brotherly pose with great pleasure. I added the nearest fence, a barn door, and some broken cartwheels, all just as they stood one behind another, and after an hour I found that I had made a well-composed, very interesting drawing without adding the least thing of my own. That strengthened me in my resolve to keep to nature alone from now on. Nature alone is infinitely rich, and nature alone forms the great artist. A great deal can be said in favor of rules, roughly what can be said in praise of civil society. A man who forms himself by them will never produce anything tasteless or bad, just as one who lets himself be molded by laws and propriety can never become an intolerable neighbor or a remarkable villain; but on the other hand, say what you like, every rule will destroy the true feeling of nature and its true expression! You will say, ‘That is too harsh! A rule only restrains, prunes the rank vines,’ and so on.—My good friend, shall I give you a parable? It is like love. A young heart clings wholly to a girl, spends every hour of the day with her, squanders all his strength, all his fortune, to show her at every moment that he gives himself to her completely. And then along comes a philistine, a man in public office, and says to him: ‘My fine young sir! To love is human, only you must love in a human way! Divide up your hours, some for work, and devote the hours of recreation to your girl. Count up your means, and out of what is left over from your necessities I do not forbid you to make her a present, only not too often, say on her birthday and her name day,’ and so on.—If the fellow obeys, you get a useful young man, and I would advise any prince to put him on a board of administration; only it is all over with his love, and, if he is an artist, with his art. Oh, my friends! Why does the torrent of genius so rarely burst forth, so rarely come roaring in on high floodwaters and shake your astonished souls?—Dear friends, because on both banks live the placid gentlemen whose little garden houses, tulip beds, and cabbage patches would be ruined, and who therefore know how to ward off the threatening danger in good time with dams and drainage ditches.

May 27

I see I have fallen into raptures, parables, and declamation, and in the process forgotten to finish telling you what became of the children. Deep in a painter’s feelings, which my letter of yesterday sets out for you in very broken pieces, I sat on my plow for a good two hours. Then toward evening a young woman comes up to the children, who had not stirred in the meantime, with a little basket on her arm, and calls from a distance: “Philipps, you’re a very good boy.”—She greeted me; I thanked her, got up, went closer, and asked whether she was the children’s mother. She said yes, and, giving the elder half a roll, she picked up the little one and kissed it with all a mother’s love.—“I gave my Philipps the little one to hold,” she said, “and went into town with my eldest to get white bread and sugar and an earthenware pan for porridge.”—I saw it all in the basket, whose lid had fallen off.—“I want to cook my Hans (that was the name of the youngest) a little soup for supper; that rascal, the big one, broke my pan yesterday when he was squabbling with Philipps over the scrapings of the porridge.”—I asked about the eldest, and she had hardly told me that he was out in the meadow chasing a couple of geese when he came bounding up and brought the second boy a hazel switch. I went on talking with the woman and learned that she was the schoolmaster’s daughter, and that her husband had gone on a journey to Switzerland to collect an inheritance from a cousin.—“They meant to cheat him out of it,” she said, “and didn’t answer his letters; so he went there himself. If only nothing bad has happened to him; I hear nothing from him.”—I found it hard to tear myself away from the woman; I gave each of the children a kreuzer, and gave her one for the youngest too, to bring him a roll for his soup when she went into town, and so we parted.

I tell you, my dear, when my senses will no longer hold together at all, all the tumult is soothed by the sight of such a creature, going in happy calm around the narrow circle of its existence, getting by from one day to the next, watching the leaves fall and thinking nothing of it but that winter is coming.

Since then I have often been out there. The children are quite used to me; they get sugar when I drink coffee, and in the evening they share their bread and butter and sour milk with me. On Sundays they never go without their kreuzer, and if I am not there after the hour of prayers, the landlady has orders to pay it out.

They are at ease with me, tell me all sorts of things, and I take special delight in their passions and their simple outbursts of desire when more children from the village gather round.

It cost me a great deal of trouble to relieve the mother of her worry that they might be a nuisance to the gentleman.

May 30

What I told you the other day about painting surely holds for poetry too; it is only a matter of recognizing what is excellent and daring to express it, and that, to be sure, is saying a great deal in few words. Today I witnessed a scene that, simply copied down, would make the loveliest idyll in the world; but what are poetry, scene, and idyll for? Must everything always be tinkered with before we are allowed to take part in a natural event?

If after such a preamble you are expecting something lofty and distinguished, you are badly deceived once again; it is nothing but a farmhand who has carried me away into such lively sympathy. As usual I shall tell it badly, and as usual, I imagine, you will find me exaggerating; again it is Wahlheim, always Wahlheim, that produces these rarities.

There was a party out under the lindens, drinking coffee. As it was not quite to my taste, I stayed behind on some pretext.

A farmhand came out of a neighboring house and set about fixing something on the plow I had drawn the other day. Since I liked his manner, I spoke to him and asked about his circumstances; we were soon acquainted and, as usually happens to me with people of this sort, soon on intimate terms. He told me that he was in service with a widow and was very well treated by her. He talked so much about her and praised her so highly that I could soon see he was devoted to her body and soul. She was no longer young, he said; she had been badly treated by her first husband and did not want to marry again; and from his story it shone out so plainly how beautiful, how charming she was to him, how much he wished she might choose him, to wipe out the memory of her first husband’s faults, that I would have to repeat it word for word to make you see the pure affection, the love and faithfulness of this man. Indeed, I would need the gift of the greatest poet to bring alive for you at the same time the expression of his gestures, the harmony of his voice, the secret fire of his looks. No, there are no words for the tenderness that was in his whole being and expression; anything I could bring out again is merely clumsy. What moved me especially was how he feared I might think wrongly of his relations with her and doubt her good conduct. How charming it was when he spoke of her figure, of her body, which, without the charms of youth, drew him to it powerfully and held him captive, I can only repeat to myself in my innermost soul. Never in my life have I seen urgent desire and hot, yearning longing in such purity; indeed, I may well say I have never imagined or dreamed it in such purity. Don’t scold me if I tell you that at the memory of this innocence and truth my innermost soul glows, and that the image of this faithfulness and tenderness follows me everywhere, and that I, as if set on fire by it myself, thirst and languish.

Now I shall try to see her too, as soon as I can, or rather, now that I think it over properly, I shall avoid it. It is better that I see her through the eyes of her lover; perhaps to my own eyes she would not appear as she stands before me now, and why should I spoil the beautiful picture for myself?

June 16

Why don’t I write to you?—You ask that, and you one of the learned? You should guess that I am well, and indeed—in short, I have made an acquaintance who touches my heart more nearly. I have—I don’t know.

To tell you in proper order how it came about that I got to know one of the loveliest creatures will be hard. I am contented and happy, and so no good historian.

An angel!—Pah! Everyone says that of his own, don’t they? And yet I am not able to tell you how perfect she is, why she is perfect; enough, she has taken my every sense captive.

So much simplicity with so much understanding, so much goodness with so much firmness, and calm of soul together with real life and activity.—All this I am saying of her is ugly drivel, wretched abstractions that do not express a single feature of her self. Another time—no, not another time, I will tell you right now. If I don’t do it now, it will never happen. For, between ourselves, since I began writing I have three times been on the point of putting down my pen, having my horse saddled, and riding out. And yet this morning I swore to myself that I would not ride out, and still I keep going to the window every moment to see how high the sun still is.—I couldn’t hold out; I had to go out to her. Here I am again, Wilhelm; I’ll eat my bread and butter for supper and write to you. What rapture it is for my soul to see her in the circle of those dear, lively children, her eight brothers and sisters!—If I go on like this, you will be as wise at the end as at the beginning. Listen, then; I will force myself to go into detail.

I wrote to you the other day how I had come to know Magistrate S., and how he had asked me to visit him soon in his hermitage, or rather his little kingdom. I neglected it, and might never have gone there if chance had not revealed to me the treasure that lies hidden in that quiet spot.

Our young people had arranged a ball in the country, and I readily agreed to go. I offered my hand to a girl from here, good, pretty, and otherwise unremarkable, and it was settled that I should hire a carriage, drive out with my partner and her cousin to the scene of the festivities, and pick up Charlotte S. on the way.—“You are going to meet a beautiful young lady,” said my companion as we drove through the wide, thinned-out forest toward the hunting lodge.—“Take care,” added the cousin, “that you don’t fall in love!”—“Why?” I said.—“She is already promised,” the first replied, “to a very fine man, who has gone away to put his affairs in order, because his father has died, and to apply for a good position.”—The news was fairly indifferent to me.

The sun was still a quarter of an hour above the mountains when we drew up at the courtyard gate. It was very sultry, and the ladies voiced their fear of a thunderstorm that seemed to be gathering all around the horizon in small, close, whitish-gray clouds. I allayed their fear with a pretended knowledge of the weather, though I myself was beginning to suspect that our festivities would suffer a blow.

I had got out, and a maid who came to the gate asked us to wait a moment; Miss Lotte would be right out. I went across the courtyard to the well-built house, and when I had climbed the steps in front and stepped into the doorway, my eyes fell on the most charming scene I have ever beheld. In the front hall six children, from eleven down to two years old, were swarming around a girl with a lovely figure, of medium height, who wore a simple white dress with pale pink ribbons at her arms and breast. She was holding a loaf of black bread and cutting a piece for each of the little ones around her in proportion to their age and appetite, giving it to each with such kindness, and each one cried its “Thank you!” so artlessly, having stretched its little hands up high for a long while before the piece was even cut, and now went off contented with its supper, either bounding away or, if of a quieter nature, walking calmly toward the courtyard gate to see the strangers and the carriage in which their Lotte was to drive away.—“I beg your pardon,” she said, “for troubling you to come in and keeping the ladies waiting. What with dressing and giving all sorts of orders for the house while I am away, I forgot to give my children their afternoon bread, and they won’t have their bread cut by anyone but me.”

I paid her some insignificant compliment; my whole soul rested on her figure, her voice, her bearing, and I had just time to recover from my surprise when she ran into the parlor to fetch her gloves and fan. The little ones were looking at me sideways from some distance, and I went up to the youngest, a child with the happiest face. He drew back just as Lotte came out of the door and said, “Louis, give your cousin your hand.”—The boy did so very frankly, and I could not keep from kissing him heartily, his runny little nose notwithstanding.

“Cousin?” I said, as I gave her my hand. “Do you think I am worthy of the good fortune of being related to you?”—“Oh,” she said with a mischievous smile, “our cousinhood is very far-flung, and I should be sorry if you were to be the worst of the lot.”—As she went, she told Sophie, the eldest sister after her, a girl of about eleven, to keep a good eye on the children and to give Papa her love when he came home from his ride. She told the little ones to mind their sister Sophie as if it were she herself, which some of them expressly promised. But a pert little blonde of about six said, “But she isn’t you, Lotte, we like you better.”—The two eldest boys had climbed up on the back of the carriage, and at my pleading she allowed them to ride with us as far as the edge of the forest, if they promised not to tease each other and to hold on tight.

We had hardly settled in, the ladies had hardly welcomed one another, made their remarks in turn about each other’s dress and especially about the hats, and given the company they were expecting a proper going-over, when Lotte had the coachman stop and let her brothers get down; they wanted to kiss her hand once more, which the elder did with all the tenderness that can belong to the age of fifteen, the other with a great deal of impetuousness and carelessness. She sent her love to the little ones once more, and we drove on.

The cousin asked whether she had finished the book she had sent her the other day.—“No,” said Lotte, “I don’t like it; you can have it back. The one before wasn’t any better either.”—I was astonished when I asked what books they were and she answered me:—I found so much character in everything she said; with every word I saw new charms, new rays of the spirit break from her features, which seemed gradually to open out with pleasure because she felt that I understood her.

“When I was younger,” she said, “I loved nothing so much as novels. God knows how happy I was when on Sundays I could sit down in some little corner and share with my whole heart in the good and ill fortune of a Miss Jenny. I don’t deny that the kind still has some charm for me. But since I so seldom get to a book, it really has to be to my taste. And the author I like best is the one in whom I find my own world again, where things go on as they do around me, and whose story still becomes as interesting and dear to me as my own domestic life, which, to be sure, is no paradise, but on the whole a source of unspeakable happiness.”

I tried to hide how these words stirred me. That did not get very far, to be sure: for when I heard her speak, in passing and with such truth, of The Vicar of Wakefield, of ——, I was quite beside myself and told her everything I had to, and only noticed after some time, when Lotte turned the conversation to the others, that they had been sitting there all the while with their eyes wide open as if they were not there at all. The cousin looked at me more than once with a mocking little turn of the nose, which mattered nothing to me.

The talk fell on the pleasures of dancing.—“If this passion is a fault,” said Lotte, “I’ll gladly confess to you that I know nothing better than dancing. And when I have something on my mind and drum out a contredanse for myself on my out-of-tune clavier, everything is all right again.”

How I feasted on her black eyes as we talked—how her lively lips and her fresh, glowing cheeks drew my whole soul—how, completely absorbed in the glorious sense of what she said, I often did not even hear the words she used to express it—of that you have some idea, because you know me. In short, I got out of the carriage like a man in a dream when we stopped in front of the pavilion, and I was so lost in dreams in the dusky world around me that I hardly noticed the music that rang down to meet us from the lighted ballroom.

The two Messrs. Audran and a certain N. N.—who can keep all the names?—who were the cousin’s and Lotte’s partners, received us at the carriage door, took possession of their ladies, and I led mine upstairs.

We wound around one another in minuets; I asked one lady after another, and precisely the most insufferable could not bring themselves to give you their hand and make an end of it. Lotte and her partner began an English dance, and you can imagine how happy I was when she came to dance the figure with us in the line. You have to see her dance! You see, she is in it with her whole heart and her whole soul, her whole body one harmony, so carefree, so unselfconscious, as if that really were everything, as if she thought of nothing else, felt nothing else; and at that moment, surely, everything else vanishes before her.

I asked her for the second contredanse; she promised me the third, and with the most charming frankness in the world she assured me that she loved to dance the German dance.—“It is the fashion here,” she went on, “for each couple who belong together to stay together for the German dance, and my partner waltzes badly and will thank me if I spare him the work. Your lady can’t do it either and doesn’t care to, and I saw in the English dance that you waltz well; so if you want to be mine for the German dance, go and ask my gentleman for me, and I will go to your lady.”—I gave her my hand on it, and we arranged that her partner should keep my partner company in the meantime.

Now it began, and for a while we delighted in all the ways of winding our arms together. With what charm, with what lightness she moved! And when we came to the waltz itself and went rolling around each other like the spheres, things were a little chaotic at first, of course, since very few know how to do it. We were clever and let them wear themselves out, and when the clumsiest had cleared the floor, we joined in and held out bravely with one other couple, Audran and his partner. Never have I moved so lightly. I was no longer human. To hold the loveliest creature in your arms and fly around with her like the wind, so that everything around you dissolved, and—Wilhelm, to be honest, I did swear to myself that a girl I loved, on whom I had any claim, should never waltz with anyone but me, even if it were the ruin of me. You understand me!

We took a few turns around the room walking, to catch our breath. Then she sat down, and the oranges I had put aside, which were now the only ones left, had an excellent effect, except that with every slice she gave, for politeness’ sake, to a greedy lady next to her, a stab went through my heart.

In the third English dance we were the second couple. As we danced down the line and I hung, God knows with what rapture, on her arm and her eyes, which were full of the truest expression of the frankest, purest pleasure, we come to a woman who had caught my eye because of the lovely expression of a face no longer quite young. She looks at Lotte with a smile, raises a warning finger, and as she flies past says the name Albert twice with great meaning.

“Who is Albert?” I said to Lotte, “if it is not presumptuous to ask.”—She was about to answer when we had to separate to make the grand figure eight, and I thought I saw something pensive on her brow as we crossed past each other.—“Why should I deny it to you?” she said as she gave me her hand for the promenade. “Albert is a fine man, to whom I am as good as engaged.”—Now this was nothing new to me (for the girls had told me on the way), and yet it was so completely new, because I had not yet thought of it in relation to her, who in so few moments had become so precious to me. Enough: I grew confused, forgot myself, and blundered in between the wrong couple, so that everything went topsy-turvy, and it took all Lotte’s presence of mind and a good deal of tugging and pulling to put it quickly right again.

The dance was not yet over when the lightning, which we had long seen flashing on the horizon and which I had kept passing off as heat lightning, began to grow much stronger, and the thunder drowned out the music. Three ladies ran out of the line, followed by their gentlemen; the disorder became general, and the music stopped. It is natural that when a misfortune or something terrible surprises us in the midst of pleasure, it makes a stronger impression on us than at other times, partly because of the contrast, which can be felt so keenly, partly, and still more, because our senses, once opened to feeling, take an impression all the faster. To these causes I must ascribe the extraordinary grimaces into which I saw several of the ladies break out. The cleverest sat down in a corner with her back to the window and held her ears shut. Another knelt down in front of her and hid her head in the first one’s lap. A third pushed in between the two and hugged her little sisters with a thousand tears. Some wanted to go home; others, who knew even less what they were doing, had not enough presence of mind to check the impudence of our young scamps, who seemed very busy catching from the lips of the fair ladies in distress all the anxious prayers that were meant for heaven. Some of our gentlemen had gone downstairs to smoke a pipe in peace; and the rest of the company did not refuse when the landlady hit on the clever idea of showing us into a room that had shutters and curtains. We had hardly got there when Lotte was busy setting out a circle of chairs and, when the company had sat down at her request, proposing a game.

I saw more than one of them pursing his lips and stretching his limbs in hope of a juicy forfeit.—“We’ll play counting!” she said. “Now pay attention! I’ll go around the circle from right to left, and you count around the circle too, each the number that comes to him, and it has to go like wildfire, and whoever falters or makes a mistake gets a box on the ear, and so on up to a thousand.”—Now that was fun to watch: she went around the circle with her arm outstretched. “One,” the first began, his neighbor “two,” “three” the next, and so on. Then she began to go faster, faster and faster; then someone slipped: smack! A box on the ear, and in the laughter the next one too: smack! And faster and faster. I myself got two slaps and thought I noticed, with deep delight, that they were harder than the ones she usually dealt out to the others. General laughter and uproar ended the game before the thousand had been counted out. Those who were closest drew one another aside, the storm was over, and I followed Lotte into the ballroom. On the way she said, “With all the slaps they forgot the weather and everything!”—I could give her no answer.—“I was one of the most frightened,” she went on, “and by acting brave to give the others courage, I became brave myself.”—We went to the window. The thunder was moving off to one side, and the glorious rain whispered down on the land, and the most refreshing fragrance rose up to us in all the fullness of the warm air. She stood leaning on her elbows; her gaze took in the whole countryside; she looked up at the sky and at me; I saw her eyes full of tears; she laid her hand on mine and said, “Klopstock!”—At once I remembered the glorious ode she had in mind, and I sank into the stream of feelings that she poured over me with that one word. I could not bear it; I bent over her hand and kissed it amid the most rapturous tears. And looked into her eyes again—Noble poet! If you had seen your apotheosis in that gaze! And may I never again hear your so often profaned name spoken!

June 19

I no longer know where I left off with my story the other day; what I do know is that it was two in the morning when I got to bed, and that if I could have chattered to you instead of writing, I might have kept you up until daybreak.

What happened on our drive back from the ball I have not told you yet, and today is not the day for it either.

It was the most glorious sunrise. The dripping forest and the refreshed fields all around! Our companions dozed off. She asked me whether I didn’t want to join them; I needn’t mind on her account.—“As long as I see those eyes open,” I said, looking at her steadily, “there is no danger of that.”—And we both held out until we reached her gate, where the maid quietly opened for her and, in answer to her questions, assured her that her father and the little ones were well and all still asleep. Then I left her, asking to be allowed to see her again that same day; she granted it, and I went—and since that time sun, moon, and stars may go calmly about their business; I don’t know whether it is day or night, and the whole world fades away around me.

June 21

I am living through days as happy as those God saves for his saints; and whatever becomes of me, I cannot say that I have not enjoyed the joys, the purest joys of life.—You know my Wahlheim; I am completely settled there; from there it is only half an hour to Lotte; there I feel myself and all the happiness that is given to man.

Had I imagined, when I chose Wahlheim as the goal of my walks, that it lay so close to heaven! How often, on my long rambles, now from the mountain, now from the plain across the river, I have seen the hunting lodge that now holds all my wishes!

Dear Wilhelm, I have been thinking about all sorts of things: about the desire in man to expand, to make new discoveries, to roam about; and then again about the inner urge to surrender willingly to confinement, to go along in the rut of habit and not trouble oneself about right or left.

It is wonderful: when I came here and looked down from the hill into the lovely valley, how everything around drew me.—There the little wood!—Ah, if you could mingle with its shadows!—There the mountaintop!—Ah, if you could look out over the wide country from there!—The hills linked one into another, and the intimate valleys!—Oh, if I could lose myself in them!—I hurried there, and came back, and had not found what I hoped for. Oh, it is with distance as it is with the future! A great dim whole lies before our soul; our feeling blurs into it as our eye does, and we long, ah! to give up our whole being, to let ourselves be filled with all the rapture of a single, great, glorious feeling.—And ah! when we hurry there, when There becomes Here, everything is as it was before, and we stand in our poverty, in our confinement, and our soul thirsts for the refreshment that has slipped away.

So the most restless vagabond longs at last for his own country again and finds in his hut, at his wife’s breast, in the circle of his children, in the work of keeping them, the rapture he looked for in vain in the wide world.

When I go out to my Wahlheim at sunrise in the morning and pick my own sugar peas there in the inn garden, sit down, string them, and read in my Homer in between; when I choose a pot in the little kitchen, cut myself some butter, put the pods on the fire, cover them, and sit down by them to shake them now and then: then I feel so vividly how Penelope’s arrogant suitors slaughter, cut up, and roast oxen and swine. There is nothing that fills me with such a quiet, true feeling as the traits of patriarchal life, which, thank God, I can weave into my way of living without affectation.

How glad I am that my heart can feel the simple, innocent rapture of a man who brings to his table a head of cabbage he has grown himself, and now enjoys, all in one moment, not the cabbage alone but all the good days, the fine morning when he planted it, the lovely evenings when he watered it and took pleasure in its growing.

June 29

The day before yesterday the doctor came out here from town to see the magistrate and found me on the floor among Lotte’s children, some of them crawling all over me, others teasing me, while I tickled them and raised a great uproar with them. The doctor, a very dogmatic puppet on a wire who pleats his cuffs as he talks and keeps tugging out his frill without end, found this beneath the dignity of a sensible man; I could tell that by his nose. But I didn’t let anything disturb me; I let him hold forth on very sensible matters and built the children’s houses of cards up again, which they had knocked down. Afterward he went around town complaining that the magistrate’s children were spoiled enough as it was, and now Werther was ruining them completely.

Yes, dear Wilhelm, children are closest to my heart of anything on earth. When I watch them and see in the little things the seeds of all the virtues, all the powers they will one day need so badly; when I see in their stubbornness future steadfastness and firmness of character, in their mischief good humor and the lightness to slip past the dangers of the world, all so unspoiled, so whole!—always, always I repeat then the golden words of the Teacher of humankind: “Unless you become like one of these!” And now, my dear friend, these, who are our equals, whom we should look upon as our models, we treat as subjects. They are to have no will!—And have we none? And where does the privilege lie?—Because we are older and wiser!—Good God in your heaven, you see old children and young children, and nothing more; and which of them gives you more joy, your Son proclaimed long ago. But they believe in him and do not listen to him—that is an old story too!—and they form their children in their own image and—Adieu, Wilhelm! I don’t want to ramble on about it any further.

July 1

What Lotte must be to a sick person I feel in my own heart, which is worse off than many a heart pining away on a sickbed. She is going to spend a few days in town with a good woman who, the doctors say, is nearing her end and wants to have Lotte with her in these last moments. Last week I went with her to visit the pastor of St., a little village an hour off to one side in the mountains. We got there toward four. Lotte had brought her second sister along. When we stepped into the parsonage yard, shaded by two tall walnut trees, the good old man was sitting on a bench in front of the door, and when he saw Lotte he came alive as if new, forgot his knotted stick, and ventured to get up and go to meet her. She ran to him, made him sit down again as she sat beside him, brought him many greetings from her father, and hugged his ugly, dirty youngest boy, the little pet of his old age. You should have seen her keeping the old man occupied, raising her voice to make herself heard by his half-deaf ears, telling him of young, robust people who had died unexpectedly, of the excellence of Karlsbad, praising his decision to go there next summer, finding that he looked much better and was much livelier than the last time she had seen him.—Meanwhile I had paid my respects to the pastor’s wife. The old man grew quite lively, and since I could not help praising the fine walnut trees that shaded us so pleasantly, he began, though with some difficulty, to give us their history.—“The old one,” he said, “we don’t know who planted it; some say this pastor, others that. But the younger one there at the back is as old as my wife, fifty years in October. Her father planted it in the morning, and she was born toward evening. He was my predecessor in office, and how dear the tree was to him I can’t tell you; to me it is certainly no less dear. My wife was sitting under it on a beam, knitting, when I first came into this yard twenty-seven years ago, a poor student.”—Lotte asked after his daughter; we were told she had gone out to the meadow with Mr. Schmidt, to the workers, and the old man went on with his story: how his predecessor had grown fond of him, and the daughter too, and how he had become first his curate and then his successor. The story was not long over when the pastor’s daughter came through the garden with the so-called Mr. Schmidt: she welcomed Lotte with heartfelt warmth, and I must say I rather liked her; a quick, well-made brunette who would have kept one well entertained for a short stay in the country. Her suitor (for Mr. Schmidt at once presented himself as such), a refined but quiet man, would not join in our conversation, though Lotte kept drawing him in. What troubled me most was that I seemed to see in his features that it was more stubbornness and bad temper than any limit of understanding that kept him from opening up. Unfortunately this became only too clear later on; for when Friederike, out walking, went with Lotte and now and then with me as well, the gentleman’s face, which was of a brownish color anyway, darkened so visibly that it was time for Lotte to tug at my sleeve and give me to understand that I had been too gallant with Friederike. Now nothing vexes me more than when people torment one another, most of all when young people in the bloom of life, when they could be most open to every joy, spoil each other’s few good days with sulks, and only see too late that what they have squandered can never be replaced. It galled me, and toward evening, when we had gone back to the parsonage and were sitting at a table eating curds and milk, and the conversation turned to the joys and sorrows of the world, I could not help taking up the thread and speaking out from my heart against bad temper.—“We human beings often complain,” I began, “that there are so few good days and so many bad ones, and, it seems to me, mostly without reason. If we always had an open heart to enjoy the good that God prepares for us each day, we would then have strength enough to bear the evil when it comes.”—“But we don’t have our moods in our power,” replied the pastor’s wife; “how much depends on the body! When one is not well, nothing is right anywhere.”—I granted her that.—“Then let us look at it,” I went on, “as an illness, and ask whether there is no remedy for it.”—“That makes sense,” said Lotte. “I believe at least that a great deal depends on ourselves. I know it from myself. When something nags at me and tries to make me cross, I jump up and sing a couple of contredanses up and down the garden, and it’s gone at once.”—“That is what I meant to say,” I replied. “It is exactly the same with bad temper as with sloth, for it is a kind of sloth. Our nature leans very much that way, and yet if only we once have the strength to pull ourselves together, the work goes briskly from our hands, and we find a true pleasure in activity.”—Friederike was very attentive, and the young man objected that one is not master of oneself, and least of all can one command one’s feelings.—“We are talking here about an unpleasant feeling,” I replied, “which everyone is glad to be rid of; and no one knows how far his strength goes until he has tried it. Surely anyone who is ill will ask every doctor around, and will not refuse the greatest renunciations, the bitterest medicines, to recover the health he wishes for.”—I noticed that the honest old man was straining his hearing to take part in our discussion; I raised my voice and turned my words to him. “People preach against so many vices,” I said; “I have never yet heard of anyone working against bad temper from the pulpit.”—“That is for the town pastors to do,” he said; “peasants have no bad tempers. Though it might not do any harm now and then; it would be a lesson for the pastor’s wife at least, and for the magistrate.”—The company laughed, and he heartily with us, until he fell into a fit of coughing that interrupted our discussion for a while; whereupon the young man spoke up again: “You called bad temper a vice; that seems to me an exaggeration.”—“Not at all,” I answered, “if that by which we harm ourselves and our neighbor deserves the name. Is it not enough that we cannot make one another happy; must we also rob one another of the pleasure that every heart can still sometimes grant itself? And name me the man who is in a bad temper and yet decent enough to hide it, to bear it alone, without destroying the joy around him! Or is it not rather an inward discontent with our own unworthiness, a displeasure with ourselves that is always bound up with an envy stirred up by foolish vanity? We see happy people whom we have not made happy, and that is unbearable.”—Lotte smiled at me when she saw how stirred I was as I spoke, and a tear in Friederike’s eye spurred me on.—“Woe to those,” I said, “who use the power they have over a heart to rob it of the simple joys that spring up from within it. All the gifts, all the kindnesses in the world cannot make up for one moment of pleasure in ourselves that the envious discomfort of our tyrant has embittered.”

My whole heart was full at that moment; the memory of so much in the past crowded in on my soul, and tears came to my eyes.

“If only one told oneself this every day,” I cried. “You can do nothing for your friends but leave them their joys and increase their happiness by sharing it with them. When their inmost soul is tormented by an anxious passion, shattered by grief, can you give them one drop of relief?

“And when the last, most fearful illness falls upon the creature you undermined in her days of bloom, and she lies there in the most pitiful exhaustion, her eyes looking up to heaven without feeling, the sweat of death coming and going on her pale brow, and you stand before the bed like one of the damned, with the deepest feeling that with all you have you can do nothing, and anguish cramps you inside, so that you would give everything to be able to pour into the perishing creature one drop of strength, one spark of courage.”

At these words the memory of such a scene, at which I had been present, fell on me with all its force. I put my handkerchief to my eyes and left the company, and only Lotte’s voice, calling to me that we were leaving, brought me back to myself. And how she scolded me on the way for taking everything too warmly to heart, and said that it would be the ruin of me! That I should spare myself!—Oh, the angel! For your sake I must live!

July 6

She is always with her dying friend, and she is always the same, always that attentive, lovely creature who, wherever she looks, eases pain and makes people happy. Yesterday evening she went for a walk with Mariane and little Malchen; I knew of it and met them, and we walked together. After an hour and a half we came back toward town, to the well that is so dear to me and is now a thousand times dearer. Lotte sat down on the low wall; we stood in front of her. I looked around, ah, and the time when my heart was so alone came alive before me again.—“Dear well,” I said, “since then I have not rested in your coolness again; hurrying past, I have sometimes not even looked at you.”—I looked down and saw Malchen climbing up, very busy with a glass of water.—I looked at Lotte and felt everything I have in her. Just then Malchen comes up with a glass. Mariane wanted to take it from her: “No!” cried the child with the sweetest expression, “no, Lotte, you must drink first!”—I was so delighted by the truth, the goodness with which she cried it, that I could express my feeling in no other way than by lifting the child from the ground and kissing her warmly, whereupon she at once began to scream and cry.—“You have done wrong,” said Lotte.—I was taken aback.—“Come, Malchen,” she went on, taking her by the hand and leading her down the steps, “wash yourself in the fresh spring, quick, quick, and then it won’t matter.”—As I stood there and watched how eagerly the little one rubbed her cheeks with her wet little hands, with what faith that the miraculous spring would wash away all defilement and spare her the disgrace of growing an ugly beard; how Lotte said, “That’s enough!” and the child still went on washing eagerly, as if a lot would do more than a little—I tell you, Wilhelm, I have never attended a baptism with more reverence; and when Lotte came up, I would gladly have thrown myself down before her as before a prophet who has consecrated away the guilt of a nation.

In the evening, in the joy of my heart, I could not help telling the incident to a man whom I credited with human feeling because he has a good mind; but what a reception I got! He said that it had been very wrong of Lotte; one should not tell children such tales; that sort of thing gave rise to countless errors and superstitions, from which children must be protected early.—Then it occurred to me that the man had had a child baptized a week before, so I let it pass and remained true in my heart to the truth: we should do with children as God does with us, who makes us happiest when he lets us stagger along in friendly illusion.

July 8

What a child one is! How one hungers for a single look! What a child one is!—We had gone to Wahlheim. The ladies drove out, and during our walks I thought I saw in Lotte’s black eyes—I am a fool, forgive me! You should see them, those eyes.—To be brief (for my eyes are closing with sleep): you see, the ladies got into the carriage, and standing around it were young W., Selstadt, Audran, and I. There was chatter through the carriage door with those young fellows, who were light and airy enough, to be sure.—I sought Lotte’s eyes: ah, they went from one to the other! But on me! Me! Me! who stood there, resigned to her alone, they did not fall!—My heart bade her a thousand farewells! And she did not see me! The carriage drove past, and a tear stood in my eye. I looked after her and saw Lotte’s headdress lean out of the carriage door, and she turned around to look, ah! at me?—My dear friend! I hover in this uncertainty; that is my comfort: perhaps she turned around to look at me! Perhaps!—Good night! Oh, what a child I am!

July 10

You should see the silly figure I cut when she is talked about in company! And when someone actually asks me how I like her?—Like! I hate that word like death. What sort of person must he be who likes Lotte, whose every sense, every feeling she does not fill! Like! Like! The other day someone asked me how I liked Ossian!

July 11

Mrs. M. is very ill; I pray for her life, because I suffer with Lotte. I see Lotte seldom, at a friend’s house, and today she told me of a remarkable incident.—Old M. is a miserly, grasping skinflint who has thoroughly tormented and pinched his wife all her life; but the woman always knew how to manage. A few days ago, when the doctor had given her up, she sent for her husband (Lotte was in the room) and spoke to him thus: “I must confess something to you that might cause confusion and trouble after my death. Until now I have kept house as orderly and thriftily as possible; but you will forgive me for having deceived you these thirty years. At the beginning of our marriage you set aside a small sum to pay for the kitchen and other household expenses. When our household grew larger and our business bigger, you could not be moved to increase my weekly allowance in proportion; in short, you know that at the time when it was largest you demanded that I make do with seven gulden a week.

“I took them without a word of protest and every week fetched the rest from the till, since no one suspected that the wife would rob the cash box. I have wasted nothing, and I would have gone to meet eternity in peace even without confessing it, if it were not that the woman who has to keep house after me would not know how to manage, and you could always insist that your first wife made do with it.”

I talked with Lotte about the incredible blindness of the human mind: that a man should not suspect there must be something else behind it when someone makes do with seven gulden where you can see the expense running to perhaps twice as much. But I have known people myself who would have accepted the prophet’s never-failing little jar of oil in their house without any surprise.

July 13

No, I am not deceiving myself! I read in her black eyes true sympathy for me and for my fate. Yes, I feel, and in this I may trust my heart, that she—oh, may I, can I speak heaven in these words?—that she loves me!

She loves me!—And how precious I become to myself, how I—to you I may say it, you understand such things—how I adore myself, since she loves me!

Is that presumption, or a feeling of how things truly stand?—I don’t know the man I would fear in Lotte’s heart. And yet—when she speaks of her fiancé, speaks of him with such warmth, such love—then I feel like a man stripped of all his honors and dignities, whose sword is taken from him.

July 16

Ah, how it runs through all my veins when my finger accidentally touches hers, when our feet meet under the table! I draw back as from fire, and a secret power draws me forward again—all my senses grow so dizzy.—Oh! And her innocence, her unselfconscious soul does not feel how much these little intimacies torment me. When, in conversation, she even lays her hand on mine and, absorbed in what we are saying, moves closer to me, so that the heavenly breath of her mouth can reach my lips:—I think I will sink to the ground, as if struck by lightning.—And, Wilhelm! If I ever presume upon this heaven, this trust—! You understand me. No, my heart is not so corrupt! Weak! Weak enough!—And isn’t that corruption?—She is sacred to me. All desire falls silent in her presence. I never know what is happening to me when I am with her; it is as if my soul were turning over in every nerve.—She has a melody she plays on the clavier with the power of an angel, so simple and so full of spirit! It is her favorite song, and it cures me of all pain, confusion, and fancies the moment she strikes the first note of it.

Not a word about the magic power of ancient music seems improbable to me. How that simple song takes hold of me! And how well she knows when to play it, often at a time when I would like to put a bullet through my head! The confusion and darkness of my soul scatter, and I breathe more freely again.

July 18

Wilhelm, what is the world to our heart without love! What a magic lantern is without light! You have hardly put the little lamp inside when the most colorful pictures shine onto your white wall! And if it were nothing but that, nothing but passing phantoms, it still makes our happiness when we stand in front of it like young boys and are enchanted by the miraculous apparitions. Today I could not go to Lotte; a party I could not get out of kept me away. What was to be done? I sent my servant out there, just to have someone near me who had been close to her today. With what impatience I waited for him, with what joy I saw him again! I would gladly have taken his head in my hands and kissed him, if I had not been ashamed.

They tell of the Bologna stone that, if you lay it in the sun, it draws in the sun’s rays and glows for a while at night. That is how it was for me with the lad. The feeling that her eyes had rested on his face, his cheeks, his coat buttons, and the collar of his overcoat made all of it so sacred to me, so precious! At that moment I would not have given the boy up for a thousand thaler. I felt so good in his presence.—God keep you from laughing at it. Wilhelm, are they phantoms, when we feel happy?

July 19

“I shall see her!” I cry out in the morning when I wake and look out with all serenity toward the beautiful sun; “I shall see her!” and then I have no other wish for the whole day. Everything, everything is swallowed up in that prospect.

Your idea that I should go to ∗∗∗ with the envoy will not become mine yet. I am not very fond of subordination, and we all know that the man is a disagreeable person besides. My mother would like to see me in some activity, you say; that made me laugh. Am I not active now as well, and isn’t it all one in the end whether I count peas or lentils? Everything in the world comes down to a lot of nonsense in the end, and a man who wears himself out for money or honor or anything else for the sake of others, without its being his own passion, his own need, is always a fool.

July 24

Since you care so much that I not neglect my drawing, I would rather pass over the whole matter than tell you that little has been done lately.

Never was I happier, never was my feeling for nature, down to the smallest pebble, the smallest blade of grass, fuller or more intimate, and yet—I don’t know how to express it; my power of representation is so weak, everything swims and wavers so before my soul that I cannot catch an outline; but I imagine that if I had clay or wax, I could shape it well enough. I will take some clay, too, if this goes on any longer, and knead away, and if it turns out cakes, so be it!

Three times I have begun Lotte’s portrait, and three times I have made a fool of myself; which vexes me all the more because some time ago I was very good at catching a likeness. So then I made her silhouette, and that will have to do.

Yes, dear Lotte, I will see to everything and order it all; only give me more errands, and often. One thing I ask of you: no more sand on the little notes you write me. Today I raised one quickly to my lips, and my teeth crunched.

July 26

I have more than once resolved not to see her so often. Yes, if only one could keep to it! Every day I give in to temptation and promise myself solemnly: tomorrow you really will stay away. And when tomorrow comes, I find another irresistible reason after all, and before I know it, I am with her. Either she said in the evening, “You will come tomorrow, won’t you?”—who could stay away then? Or she gives me an errand, and I think it only proper to bring her the answer myself; or the day is just too beautiful, I go to Wahlheim, and once I am there, it is only another half hour to her!—I am too close within her atmosphere—whoosh! and I’m there. My grandmother had a fairy tale about the magnetic mountain: the ships that came too near were all at once robbed of all their ironwork, the nails flew to the mountain, and the poor wretches were wrecked among the planks crashing down on one another.

July 30

Albert has arrived, and I shall go; and even if he were the best, the noblest of men, one to whom I would be ready to rank myself inferior in every respect, it would be unbearable to see him before my face in possession of so much perfection.—Possession!—Enough, Wilhelm, the fiancé is here! A good, dear man whom one cannot help liking. Fortunately I was not there when she welcomed him! That would have torn my heart. And he is so decent, too: he has not kissed Lotte a single time in my presence. God reward him for it! For the respect he shows the girl, I have to love him. He means well by me, and I suspect that is more Lotte’s doing than his own feeling; for in this women are subtle, and they are right; if they can keep two admirers on good terms with each other, the advantage is always theirs, however seldom it works.

Meanwhile I cannot deny Albert my esteem. His calm exterior contrasts very sharply with the restlessness of my character, which cannot be hidden. He has a great deal of feeling and knows what he has in Lotte. He seems to have little bad temper, and you know that is the sin I hate in a human being worse than any other.

He takes me for a man of sense; and my attachment to Lotte, the warm joy I take in all she does, increases his triumph, and he loves her all the more for it. Whether he never torments her with some little fit of jealousy, I leave open; at least in his place I would not be entirely safe from that devil.

Be that as it may, my joy in being with Lotte is gone. Shall I call it folly or delusion?—What do names matter! The thing speaks for itself!—I knew everything I know now before Albert came; I knew that I had no claim to make on her, and I made none—that is, as far as it is possible not to desire, where there is so much to love—and now the idiot makes big eyes because the other one really does come and takes the girl away from him.

I grit my teeth and mock my misery, and would mock twice and three times over anyone who might say that I should resign myself, since it could not be otherwise.—Get these men of straw off my back!—I run about in the woods, and when I come to Lotte and Albert is sitting with her in the little garden under the arbor, and I can go no further, I turn wildly giddy and start a great deal of clowning, a great deal of confused nonsense.—“For heaven’s sake,” Lotte said to me today, “I beg you, no scene like the one yesterday evening! You are dreadful when you are so merry.”—Between ourselves, I watch for the times when he is busy; whoosh! I’m out there, and I am always happy when I find her alone.

August 8

I beg you, dear Wilhelm, it was certainly not aimed at you when I called those people unbearable who demand of us that we submit to inevitable fate. I really did not think that you could be of the same opinion. And at bottom you are right. Only one thing, my dear friend! In this world things are very seldom settled with an either-or; feelings and ways of acting shade into one another in as many gradations as there are between a hooked nose and a snub nose.

So you won’t hold it against me if I grant you your whole argument and still try to steal my way through between the either and the or.

Either, you say, you have hope of Lotte, or you have none. Good: in the first case, try to carry it through, try to grasp the fulfillment of your wishes; in the other, pull yourself together and try to get rid of a wretched feeling that must consume all your strength.—Dear friend! That is well said, and—soon said.

And can you demand of the unhappy man whose life is slowly, inexorably dying away under a creeping illness, can you demand of him that he should put an end to his torment at one stroke with a dagger? And does the evil that consumes his strength not also rob him of the courage to free himself from it?

You could, of course, answer me with a related parable: who would not rather have his arm cut off than put his life at risk by hesitating and faltering?—I don’t know!—And let us not bite at each other with parables. Enough—yes, Wilhelm, I sometimes have such a moment of leaping, shake-it-all-off courage, and then—if only I knew where to, I would go.

Evening

My diary, which I have neglected for some time, fell into my hands again today, and I am amazed at how knowingly I walked into all this, step by step! How I always saw my state so clearly and yet acted like a child, and still see it so clearly, and there is still no sign of improvement.

August 10

I could lead the best, the happiest life if I were not a fool. Circumstances as lovely as those I am in now do not easily come together to delight a person’s soul. Ah, so certain is it that our heart alone makes its happiness.—To be a member of that lovely family, to be loved by the old man like a son, by the little ones like a father, and by Lotte!—then honest Albert, who disturbs my happiness with no moody rudeness, who embraces me with heartfelt friendship, to whom I am, after Lotte, the dearest thing in the world!—Wilhelm, it is a joy to hear us when we go walking and talk to each other about Lotte: nothing more ridiculous than this situation has ever been invented in the world, and yet it often brings tears to my eyes.

When he tells me about her good mother: how on her deathbed she handed over her house and her children to Lotte and commended Lotte to him; how since that time a quite different spirit has animated Lotte; how, in her care for the household and in her seriousness, she has become a true mother; how not a moment of her time has passed without active love, without work, and yet her cheerfulness, her light heart have never left her.—I walk along beside him and pick flowers by the way, arrange them very carefully into a bouquet, and—throw them into the stream flowing past and watch them as they drift softly down.—I don’t know whether I have written to you that Albert is going to stay here and receive a post with a decent income from the court, where he is well liked. I have seen few to equal him for order and diligence in business.

August 12

Albert is certainly the best man under heaven. I had a remarkable scene with him yesterday. I went to take leave of him, for I had been seized by a desire to ride into the mountains, from where I am writing to you now, and as I walk up and down in the room, his pistols catch my eye.—“Lend me your pistols,” I said, “for my journey.”—“Fine with me,” he said, “if you will take the trouble to load them; with me they only hang there pro forma.”—I took one down, and he went on: “Since my caution played me such a nasty trick, I don’t want anything more to do with the stuff.”—I was curious to know the story.—“I was staying in the country with a friend,” he told me, “for about three months, had a pair of pocket pistols, unloaded, and slept soundly. Once, on a rainy afternoon, as I sit there idle, I don’t know how it comes into my head: we might be attacked, we might need the pistols and might—you know how it is.—I gave them to the servant to clean and load; and he fools around with the maids, tries to frighten them, and God knows how, the gun goes off with the ramrod still in it and shoots the ramrod into the ball of one girl’s right hand and smashes her thumb. Then I had all the lamenting, and the doctor’s bill to pay on top of it, and since then I leave all firearms unloaded. My dear fellow, what is caution? You can never learn all there is to know about danger! Although.”—Now you know that I am very fond of the man, all but his althoughs; for doesn’t it go without saying that every general statement admits of exceptions? But that is how self-justifying he is! When he thinks he has said something rash, general, half-true, he never stops limiting, modifying, adding and taking away, until in the end there is nothing left of the matter at all.

And on this occasion he got very deep into his subject: in the end I stopped listening to him altogether, fell into brooding, and with a sudden gesture pressed the mouth of the pistol to my forehead above my right eye.—“Ugh!” said Albert, pulling the pistol down, “what’s that for?”—“It isn’t loaded,” I said.—“Even so, what’s the point?” he returned impatiently. “I can’t imagine how a man can be so foolish as to shoot himself; the mere thought of it disgusts me.”

“That you people,” I cried, “when you talk about anything, must at once say, ‘That is foolish, that is wise, that is good, that is bad!’ And what does it all mean? Have you looked into the inner circumstances of an action before you say so? Can you set out with certainty the causes why it happened, why it had to happen? If you had, you would not be so hasty with your judgments.” “You will grant me,” said Albert, “that certain actions remain vicious, whatever the motive from which they are done.” I shrugged my shoulders and granted it.—“And yet, my dear fellow,” I went on, “even here there are some exceptions. It is true, theft is a vice: but the man who goes out to rob in order to save himself and his family from starving to death here and now, does he deserve pity or punishment? Who will cast the first stone at the husband who, in righteous anger, sacrifices his unfaithful wife and her worthless seducer? At the girl who in an hour of rapture loses herself in the irresistible joys of love? Even our laws, those cold-blooded pedants, let themselves be moved and hold back their punishment.”

“That is something quite different,” replied Albert, “because a man who is carried away by his passions loses all power of reflection and is regarded as drunk, as insane.” “Ah, you sensible people!” I cried with a smile. “Passion! Drunkenness! Madness! You stand there so calm, so unmoved, you moral people, scold the drunkard, abhor the madman, pass by like the priest and thank God like the Pharisee that he has not made you like one of these. I have been drunk more than once, my passions were never far from madness, and I regret neither: for I have learned to understand, to a certain degree, why all extraordinary people who did something great, something that seemed impossible, have always had to be decried as drunk or mad. But even in ordinary life it is unbearable to hear people shout after almost anyone who does something halfway free, noble, unexpected: ‘The man is drunk, he’s a fool!’ Shame on you, you sober ones! Shame on you, you wise men!” “There go your fancies again,” said Albert. “You exaggerate everything, and here at least you are certainly wrong to compare suicide, which is what we are talking about, with great actions, when it can surely be considered nothing but a weakness. For of course it is easier to die than to bear a life of torment steadfastly.” I was about to break off; for no argument puts me out of my composure so much as when someone comes along with an insignificant commonplace while I am speaking from my whole heart.

But I collected myself, because I had heard it often before and been annoyed by it more often still, and answered him with some heat: “You call that weakness? I beg you, don’t be misled by appearances. A people groaning under the unbearable yoke of a tyrant, may you call them weak when at last they rise up and tear their chains apart? A man who, in his terror that fire has caught his house, feels all his powers strained and carries away with ease loads he could hardly move in a calm state of mind; a man who, in the fury of an insult, takes on six and overpowers them, are they to be called weak? And, my good fellow, if exertion is strength, why should overexertion be the opposite?”—Albert looked at me and said, “Don’t take it amiss, but the examples you give don’t seem to belong here at all.”—“That may be,” I said; “I have often been reproached before that my way of combining things sometimes borders on drivel. Let us see, then, whether we can imagine in some other way how a man may feel who resolves to throw off the burden of life, pleasant as it otherwise is. For only insofar as we feel with him do we have the honor of talking about the matter.”

“Human nature,” I went on, “has its limits: it can bear joy, sorrow, and pain up to a certain degree, and it perishes as soon as that degree is exceeded. So the question here is not whether a man is weak or strong, but whether he can endure the measure of his suffering, be it moral or physical. And I find it just as strange to say that the man who takes his own life is a coward as it would be improper to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.”

“Paradox! Very paradoxical!” cried Albert.—“Not as much as you think,” I replied. “You grant me that we call it a sickness unto death when nature is so attacked that its forces are partly consumed, partly so put out of action that it is incapable of helping itself up again, of restoring the ordinary course of life by any fortunate turn.

“Now, my dear fellow, let us apply this to the mind. Look at a man in his confinement: how impressions work on him, how ideas fix themselves in him, until at last a growing passion robs him of all calm power of mind and destroys him.

“In vain does the calm, rational man survey the state of the unhappy one; in vain does he talk to him! Just as a healthy man standing at the sickbed cannot pour into the patient the least of his own strength.”

To Albert this was too generally put. I reminded him of a girl who had been found dead in the water not long ago, and repeated her story to him.—“A good young creature who had grown up in the narrow circle of household tasks, of fixed weekly work, who knew no prospect of pleasure beyond perhaps walking about the town on Sundays with girls like herself, in finery she had put together bit by bit, perhaps dancing once on each of the high holidays, and otherwise chattering away many an hour with a neighbor, with all the liveliness of the most heartfelt interest, over the cause of some quarrel or some bit of slander—her fiery nature at last feels deeper needs, which are increased by the flatteries of men; her former joys gradually lose their taste for her, until at last she meets a man to whom an unknown feeling irresistibly draws her, on whom she now throws all her hopes; she forgets the world around her, hears nothing, sees nothing, feels nothing but him, the only one, longs only for him, the only one. Not spoiled by the empty pleasures of a fickle vanity, her desire goes straight toward its goal: she wants to become his, she wants to find in an everlasting union all the happiness she lacks, to enjoy the union of all the joys she longed for. Repeated promises that seal for her the certainty of all her hopes, bold caresses that increase her desires, take her soul entirely captive; she floats in a dim awareness, in a foretaste of every joy; she is strained to the highest pitch; at last she stretches out her arms to embrace all her wishes—and her lover leaves her.—Numb, senseless, she stands before an abyss; all is darkness around her, no prospect, no comfort, no hope! For he has left her in whom alone she felt her existence. She does not see the wide world that lies before her, nor the many who could make up her loss to her; she feels alone, abandoned by all the world—and blindly, driven into a corner by the terrible anguish of her heart, she throws herself down, to smother all her torments in a death that closes around her on every side.—You see, Albert, that is the story of so many a human being! And tell me, is it not the case of an illness? Nature finds no way out of the labyrinth of confused and contradictory forces, and the person must die. Woe to the man who could stand by and say, ‘The foolish girl! If she had waited, if she had let time do its work, her despair would have passed, someone else would surely have turned up to comfort her.’—That is just as if someone said, ‘The fool, dying of a fever! If he had waited until his strength recovered, his humors improved, the tumult of his blood subsided: all would have gone well, and he would be alive to this day!’”

Albert, to whom the comparison was not yet clear, raised a few more objections, among others that I had spoken only of a simple girl; but how a man of understanding, who was not so confined and could see more of the circumstances, might be excused, he could not comprehend.—“My friend,” I cried, “man is man, and the little bit of understanding a man may have counts for little or nothing when passion rages and the limits of humanity press in on him. Rather—another time,” I said, and reached for my hat. Oh, my heart was so full—and we parted without having understood each other. As indeed in this world no one easily understands another.

August 15

It is certain, after all, that nothing in the world makes a person necessary but love. I can feel in Lotte that she would not like to lose me, and the children have no idea but that I will always come back tomorrow. Today I had gone out to tune Lotte’s clavier, but I couldn’t get to it, because the little ones pursued me for a fairy tale, and Lotte herself said I should do as they wished. I cut their bread for supper, which they now take almost as gladly from me as from Lotte, and told them their great favorite, the story of the princess who is waited on by hands. I learn a great deal from it, I assure you, and I am astonished at the impression it makes on them. Because I sometimes have to invent an incident, which I forget the second time, they say at once that it was different last time, so that now I am practicing reciting it without change, in a singsong cadence, straight off like beads on a string. I have learned from this how an author, by a second, altered edition of his story, however much better it may have become as poetry, must necessarily harm his book. The first impression finds us willing, and man is so made that you can persuade him of the most fantastic things; but they stick fast at once as well, and woe to anyone who tries to scratch them out and wipe them away again!

August 18

Did it have to be so, that what makes a man’s happiness should become in turn the source of his misery?

The full, warm feeling of my heart for living nature, which flooded me with so much rapture, which made the world around me a paradise, is now becoming an unbearable torturer to me, a tormenting spirit that pursues me on every path. When in the past I looked out from the rock across the river to those hills over the fertile valley and saw everything around me sprouting and welling up; when I saw those mountains clothed from foot to summit with tall, dense trees, those valleys in all their winding shaded by the loveliest woods, and the gentle river gliding along between the whispering reeds and mirroring the dear clouds that the soft evening wind rocked across the sky; when I heard the birds around me bring the forest to life, and the millions of swarming gnats danced boldly in the last red ray of the sun, and its last quivering glance freed the humming beetle from its grass, and the whirring and weaving all around me drew my attention to the ground, and the moss that wrests its nourishment from my hard rock, and the brushwood growing down the dry sandy hill, opened to me the inner, glowing, holy life of nature: how I took all that into my warm heart, felt myself as though made divine in that overflowing abundance, and the glorious forms of the infinite world moved, giving life to all, in my soul. Enormous mountains surrounded me, abysses lay before me, and torrents plunged down, the rivers streamed below me, and forest and mountains resounded; and I saw them working and creating in one another in the depths of the earth, all those unfathomable forces; and now above the earth and beneath the sky swarm the races of manifold creatures. Everything, everything peopled with a thousand forms; and then human beings huddle together for safety in little houses and make their nests and in their own minds rule over the wide world! Poor fool! You who think so little of everything, because you are so small.—From the inaccessible mountains across the wilderness that no foot has trodden, to the end of the unknown ocean, breathes the spirit of the Eternal Creator, and rejoices in every speck of dust that hears him and lives.—Ah, in those days, how often I longed, with the wings of a crane that flew over me, for the shore of the boundless sea, to drink from the foaming cup of the infinite that swelling rapture of life, and to feel, if only for one moment, in the confined strength of my breast, one drop of the bliss of the being who brings forth everything in himself and through himself.

Brother, only the memory of those hours does me good. Even this effort to call back those unspeakable feelings, to put them into words again, lifts my soul above itself, and then makes me feel doubly the anguish of the state that surrounds me now.

It is as if a curtain had been drawn back from before my soul, and the stage of infinite life is changing before me into the abyss of the forever open grave. Can you say, This is! when everything passes away? When everything rolls past with the speed of a storm, so seldom lasts out the full strength of its existence, ah, is torn away in the current, plunged under, and dashed against the rocks? There is no moment that does not consume you and those dear to you around you, no moment when you are not a destroyer, and must be one; the most harmless walk costs a thousand poor little worms their lives; one footstep shatters the laborious buildings of the ants and stamps a little world into an ignominious grave. Ha! It is not the great, rare disasters of the world, these floods that wash away your villages, these earthquakes that swallow your cities, that move me; what undermines my heart is the consuming power that lies hidden in the whole of nature, which has formed nothing that does not destroy its neighbor and itself. And so I stagger on in anguish. Heaven and earth and their weaving forces all around me: I see nothing but a monster, eternally devouring, eternally chewing its cud.

August 21

In vain I stretch out my arms toward her in the morning, when I come out of heavy dreams; in vain I seek her at night in my bed, when a happy, innocent dream has deceived me into thinking I was sitting beside her in the meadow, holding her hand and covering it with a thousand kisses. Ah, when, still half in the daze of sleep, I grope for her and wake up from it—a stream of tears bursts from my oppressed heart, and I weep, inconsolable, toward a dark future.

August 22

It is a misfortune, Wilhelm: my active powers have been put out of tune into a restless idleness; I cannot be idle and yet I cannot do anything either. I have no imagination, no feeling for nature, and books disgust me. When we fail ourselves, everything fails us. I swear to you, sometimes I wish I were a day laborer, only so that on waking in the morning I might have some prospect of the coming day, an urge, a hope. I often envy Albert, whom I see buried up to his ears in documents, and imagine I would be happy if I were in his place! Several times already the impulse has seized me to write to you and to the minister to apply for the post at the legation, which, as you assure me, would not be refused me. I believe so myself. The minister has liked me for a long time and has long urged me to devote myself to some kind of work; and for an hour or so I am quite set on it too. Afterward, when I think it over again and the fable comes to mind of the horse that, impatient with its freedom, lets saddle and harness be put on it and is ridden to ruin—I don’t know what I should do.—And, my dear friend! Isn’t this longing in me for a change of circumstances perhaps an inner, uneasy impatience that will follow me wherever I go?

August 28

It is true: if my illness could be cured, these people would cure it. Today is my birthday, and very early I receive a little packet from Albert. As I open it, one of the pale pink ribbons catches my eye at once, the ones Lotte was wearing when I first met her, and which I have asked her for several times since. There were two little books in duodecimo with it, the small Wetstein Homer, an edition I had so often wanted, so as not to have to drag the Ernesti edition along on my walks. You see! That is how they anticipate my wishes, how they seek out all the little kindnesses of friendship, which are a thousand times more precious than those dazzling presents by which the giver’s vanity humiliates us. I kiss this ribbon a thousand times, and with every breath I drink in the memory of the bliss with which those few, happy, irretrievable days filled me to overflowing. Wilhelm, it is so, and I do not complain: the blossoms of life are only appearances! How many pass away without leaving a trace behind, how few set fruit, and how few of those fruits ripen! And yet there are enough of them still; and yet—oh, my brother!—can we neglect ripe fruit, despise it, let it rot unenjoyed?

Farewell! It is a glorious summer; I often sit up in the fruit trees in Lotte’s orchard with the fruit picker, the long pole, and fetch the pears down from the treetops. She stands below and takes them as I let them down to her.

August 30

Unhappy man! Aren’t you a fool? Aren’t you deceiving yourself? What is the point of this raging, endless passion? I have no prayer left but to her; no other form appears to my imagination but hers, and everything in the world around me I see only in relation to her. And that gives me many a happy hour—until I have to tear myself away from her again! Ah, Wilhelm! What my heart often drives me to!—When I have sat with her for two, three hours, and feasted on her figure, her bearing, the heavenly expression of her words, and now gradually all my senses are strained taut, it grows dark before my eyes, I can hardly hear anymore, and something seizes me by the throat like an assassin, then my heart, in wild beats, tries to give air to my oppressed senses and only increases their confusion—Wilhelm, I often don’t know whether I am in the world at all! And—if melancholy does not sometimes gain the upper hand and Lotte allows me the wretched comfort of weeping out my anguish over her hand—then I have to get away, have to go out, and then I roam far and wide across the fields; to climb a steep mountain is my joy then, to work my way along a path through a trackless forest, through the hedges that hurt me, through the thorns that tear me! Then I feel somewhat better! Somewhat! And when I sometimes lie down along the way from weariness and thirst, sometimes in the deep of night, with the high full moon above me, sit down in the lonely forest on a crooked tree to give my sore feet a little relief, and then, in an exhausted calm, doze off in the dim light! Oh, Wilhelm! The lonely dwelling of a cell, the hair shirt and the spiked belt would be refreshments for which my soul is pining. Adieu! I see no end to this misery but the grave.

September 3

I must go away! Thank you, Wilhelm, for settling my wavering resolve. For two weeks now I have been turning over the thought of leaving her. I must go away. She is in town again with a friend. And Albert—and—I must go away!

September 10

What a night that was! Wilhelm! Now I can get through anything. I shall not see her again! Oh, that I cannot fly to your neck, my dear friend, and with a thousand tears and raptures pour out to you the feelings that are storming my heart. Here I sit gasping for air, trying to calm myself, waiting for morning, and the horses are ordered for sunrise.

Ah, she is sleeping peacefully and does not think that she will never see me again. I have torn myself away; I was strong enough, in a conversation of two hours, not to betray my intention. And God, what a conversation!

Albert had promised me that he would be in the garden with Lotte right after supper. I stood on the terrace under the tall chestnut trees and watched the sun, which was now setting for me for the last time over the lovely valley, over the gentle river. So often I had stood here with her and watched that same glorious spectacle, and now—I walked up and down the avenue that was so dear to me; a secret sympathetic pull had so often held me here, even before I knew Lotte, and how glad we were when, at the beginning of our acquaintance, we discovered our shared fondness for this spot, which is truly one of the most romantic I have ever seen produced by art.

First, between the chestnut trees, you have the wide view—Ah, I remember, I think I have already written you a great deal about it: how tall walls of beeches close you in at last, and the avenue grows darker and darker through an adjoining grove, until finally everything ends in an enclosed little space, haunted by all the shivers of solitude. I can still feel how intimate and hidden it felt to me when I first stepped into it at high noon; I had the faintest foreboding of what a scene it was yet to become, of bliss and pain.

I had been feasting for about half an hour on the languishing, sweet thoughts of parting and of seeing her again, when I heard them coming up onto the terrace. I ran to meet them; with a shiver I took her hand and kissed it. We had just come up when the moon rose behind the bushy hill; we talked of many things and drew near, without noticing, to the dark summerhouse. Lotte went in and sat down, Albert beside her, and I too; but my restlessness did not let me sit for long; I got up, stood in front of her, walked up and down, sat down again: it was an anxious state. She pointed out to us the lovely effect of the moonlight, which, at the end of the walls of beeches, lit up the whole terrace in front of us: a glorious sight, all the more striking because deep dusk enclosed us on every side. We were silent, and after a while she began: “I never go walking in the moonlight, never, without the thought of my dead coming to meet me, without the feeling of death, of the future, coming over me. We shall be!” she went on, in a voice of the most glorious feeling; “but, Werther, shall we find each other again? Know each other again? What do you feel? What do you say?”

“Lotte,” I said, giving her my hand, my eyes filling with tears, “we shall see each other again! Here and there, we shall see each other again!”—I could not go on—Wilhelm, did she have to ask me that, when I had this anxious parting in my heart!

“And do the dear departed know of us,” she went on, “do they feel when things go well with us, that we remember them with warm love? Oh! My mother’s form always hovers around me when I sit on a quiet evening among her children, among my children, and they are gathered around me as they were gathered around her. Then I look up to heaven with a tear of longing and wish that she could look in for a moment and see how I keep the promise I gave her in the hour of her death: to be the mother of her children. With what feeling I cry out: ‘Forgive me, dearest, if I am not to them what you were. Ah! I do everything I can, after all; they are clothed and fed, ah, and, what is more than all of that, cared for and loved. If you could see how we live in harmony, dear saint! You would glorify with the warmest thanks the God to whom you prayed, with your last, bitterest tears, for the welfare of your children.’”—She said that! Oh, Wilhelm, who can repeat what she said! How can the cold, dead letter render this heavenly flowering of the spirit! Albert gently interrupted her: “This affects you too much, dear Lotte! I know your soul is very much drawn to these ideas, but I beg you.”—“Oh, Albert,” she said, “I know you don’t forget the evenings when we sat together at the little round table, when Papa was away and we had sent the little ones to bed. You often had a good book and so seldom got to reading anything—wasn’t the company of that glorious soul worth more than anything? That lovely, gentle, cheerful, and ever-busy woman! God knows the tears with which I often threw myself down before him in my bed, praying that he would make me like her.”

“Lotte!” I cried, throwing myself down before her, taking her hand and wetting it with a thousand tears, “Lotte! God’s blessing rests upon you, and your mother’s spirit!” “If only you had known her,” she said, pressing my hand—“she was worthy of being known by you!”—I thought I would dissolve.

Never had a greater, prouder word been spoken of me—and she went on: “And this woman had to go in the bloom of her years, when her youngest son was not six months old! Her illness did not last long; she was calm, resigned; only her children hurt her, especially the little one. When the end was coming and she said to me, ‘Bring them up to me!’ and I led them in, the little ones who didn’t understand, and the eldest, who were beside themselves, and they stood around the bed, and she raised her hands and prayed over them, and kissed them one after another and sent them away and said to me, ‘Be their mother!’—I gave her my hand on it!—‘You are promising a great deal, my daughter,’ she said, ‘a mother’s heart and a mother’s eye. I have often seen from your grateful tears that you feel what that means. Have it for your brothers and sisters, and for your father a wife’s faithfulness and obedience. You will comfort him.’—She asked for him; he had gone out to hide from us the unbearable grief he felt; the man was utterly torn apart.

“Albert, you were in the room. She heard someone walking and asked who it was and called you to her, and how she looked at you and at me, with that comforted, calm look, that we would be happy, happy together.”—Albert threw his arms around her neck and kissed her and cried, “We are! We will be!”—Calm Albert was quite beside himself, and I did not know what was happening to me. “Werther,” she began, “and this woman was to be gone! God! When I sometimes think how one lets the dearest thing in one’s life be carried away, and no one feels it as sharply as the children, who went on complaining for a long time that the black men had carried Mama away!” She stood up, and I was roused and shaken; I stayed sitting and held her hand.—“Let us go,” she said, “it is time.”—She wanted to draw back her hand, and I held it tighter.—“We shall see each other again,” I cried, “we shall find each other, in whatever form we shall know each other. I am going,” I went on, “I am going willingly, and yet, if I had to say forever, I could not bear it. Farewell, Lotte! Farewell, Albert! We shall see each other again.”—“Tomorrow, I should think,” she returned, joking.—I felt that tomorrow! Ah, she did not know, as she drew her hand out of mine—They went out down the avenue; I stood and looked after them in the moonlight, and threw myself on the ground and wept my fill, and sprang up and ran out onto the terrace and saw, still, down there in the shadow of the tall linden trees, her white dress shimmering toward the garden gate; I stretched out my arms, and it vanished.