ote as follows to the mother of Madame Brentano: "If
you knew what passed within me before I avoided the house, you would
not think, dear Mama, of luring me back to it again. I have in these
frightful moments suffered for all the future; I am now at peace, and
in peace let me remain."[151] He had now gone the round of all the
experiences embodied in _Werther_; on February 1st he resumed the
discontinued work, and, writing "almost in a state of somnambulism,"
finished it in a few weeks.

[Footnote 151: _Werke, Briefe_, ii. 140.]

But besides his own immediate personal experience, there went other
influences to the production of _Werther_ which affected alike its
form and its contents. In his Autobiography Goethe has minutely
analysed these influences, and the most potent of them he traces to
the impression made by English literature on himself and his
contemporaries. What impressed them as the prevailing note of that
literature was a melancholy disillusion which regarded life as a sorry
business at the best, and Goethe specifies Young, Gray, and Ossian as
representative interpreters of this mood. In verses like these, he
says, we have the precise expression of the moral disease which he has
depicted in _Werther_:--

To griefs congenial prone,
More wounds than nature gave he knew;
While misery's form his fancy drew
In dark ideal hues and horrors not its own![152]

[Footnote 152: These lines are by the Earl of Rochester. On reading
the first English translation of _Werther_ (1783), Goethe wrote: "It
gave me much pleasure to read my thoughts in the language of my
instructors."]

If English literature contributed to the tone of feeling in _Werther_,
it also, though Goethe does not mention the fact, suggested the
literary form in which it is cast. In the case of his former loves,
his emotions had found vent in a succession of lyrics thrown off as
occasion prompted, but his later experiences had been of a more
complex nature, and demanded a larger canvas for their development. It
would appear that Goethe's original intention was to adopt the
dramatic form which had been so successful in the case of _Goetz_, and
we are led to believe that, in accordance with this intention, he
actually made a beginning of his work. In the interval between his
discontinuing and resuming it, however, he changed his mind; and in
the form in which we have it _Werther_ is mainly composed of letters
addressed by its ce