th horrors. The peasants rise in rebellion and wreak frightful
vengeance on their oppressors. In the hope of controlling them,
Gottfried, at their own request, puts himself at their head, but finds
himself powerless to check their excesses, and on their defeat he is
again taken prisoner. But the main interest of the last act is
concentrated in Adelheid, who now reveals all the depths of her
sensual nature and her unscrupulous ambition. Weislingen she has
discovered to be a despicable creature, and she attaches herself to
Sickingen, in whom she finds a man after her own heart, able to
satisfy all the cravings of her nature. She poisons Weislingen, who
dies as he has lived, the victim of weakness rather than of
wickedness. Her crimes are known to the judges of the Vehmgericht, who
in their mysterious tribunal adjudge her to death, which is effected
in a curious scene by one of their agents. The drama closes with the
death of Gottfried in prison, baffled in his dearest schemes, blasted
in reputation, and with gloomy forebodings for the future of his
country.

[Footnote 104: In the characters of Marie and Elizabeth we have traits
of Friederike and of Goethe's mother.]

Such is an outline of the production in which Goethe made his first
appeal to his countrymen at large,[105] and which is in such singular
contrast to the ideals of his maturity. That it was not the inevitable
birth of his whole heart and mind is proved by the fact that he never
repeated the experiment. Neither the incidents nor the hero of the
piece, indeed, were of a nature to elicit the full play of his genius.
Goethe had not, like Scott, an inborn interest in the scenes of the
camp and the field, and could not, like Scott, take a special delight
in describing them for their own sake. To the portrayal of a character
like Gottfried Scott could give his whole heart, but Goethe required
characters of a subtler type to enlist his full sympathies and to give
scope to his full powers. Goethe himself has told us how, as he
proceeded in the writing of the play, his interest in his hero
gradually flagged. In depicting the charms of Adelheid, he says, he
fell in love with her himself, and his interest in her fate gradually
overmastered him. In truth, it is in scenes where Gottfried is not the
principal actor that any originality in the play is to be found, for
in these scenes Goethe was drawing from his own experience and
recording emotions that had distracted hims