op. cit._ i. 45-6.]

On leaving the Jacobis Goethe proceeded to Ems, where he again met
Lavater and Basedow. On the day following Lavater went home, and
Goethe and Basedow remained till the second week of August. On the
13th Goethe was in his father's house, and in a state of exaltation
after his late experiences, to which he gives lively expression in a
letter to Fritz Jacobi. "I dream of the moment, dear Fritz, I have
your letter and hover around you. You have felt what a rapture it is
to me to be the object of your love. Oh! the joy of believing that one
receives more from others than one gives. Oh, Love, Love! The poverty
of riches--what force works in me when I embrace in him all that is
wanting in myself, and yet give to him what I have.... Believe me, we
might henceforth be dumb to each other, and, meeting again after many
a day, we should feel as if we had all along been walking hand in
hand."[189]

[Footnote 189: _Werke, Briefe_, ii. 182.]

In the first weeks of October Goethe made personal acquaintance with a
more distinguished personage than either Lavater or Basedow or
Jacobi--"the patriarch of German poetry," Klopstock, the author of the
_Messias_.[190] Since his childhood, the name of Klopstock had been
familiar to Goethe. To his conservative father, the _Messias_, as
written in unrhymed verse, was a monstrosity in German literature, and
he refused to give it a place in his library. Surreptitiously
introduced into the house, however, Goethe had read it with enthusiasm
and committed its most striking passages to memory. And he had
retained his admiration throughout all the successive changes in his
own literary ideals. Like all the youth of his generation, he saw in
Klopstock a great original genius to whom German poetry owed
emancipation from conventional forms and new elements of thought,
feeling, and imagination. Klopstock, on his part, had been interested
in the rising genius whose _Goetz von Berlichingen_ had taken the world
by storm, and had signified through a common friend that he would be
gratified to see other works from his hand. Goethe had responded in
the spirit of a youthful adorer, conscious of the honour which the
request implied. "And why should I not write to Klopstock," he wrote,
"and send him anything of mine, anything in which he can take an
interest? May I not address the living, to whose grave I would make a
pilgrimage?"[191]

[Footnote 190: Klopstock came from Goettingen, where