l gladly endure
what he loathes with his whole soul.

Reizender ist mir des Fruehlings Bluete
Nun nicht auf der Flur;
Wo du, Engel, bist, ist Lieb' and Guete,
Wo du bist, Natur.

Now the blooms of springtide on the meadow
Touch no more my heart;
Where thou, angel, art, is truth and goodness;
Nature, where thou art.

So he sang in tones befitting the true lover, but, as it happens, we
have a prose commentary from his own hand which gives perhaps a truer
picture of his real state of mind. Towards the end of January, when he
was already deep in his passion for Lili, he received a letter which
opened a new channel for his emotions. The letter came from an
anonymous lady who, as she explained, had been so profoundly moved by
the tale of Werther that she could not resist the impulse to express
her gratitude to its author. The fair unknown, as he was subsequently
to discover, was no less distinguished a person than an Imperial
Countess--the Countess Stolberg, sister of two equally fervid youths,
of whom we shall presently hear in connection with Goethe. It was
quite in keeping with the spirit of the time that two persons of
different sexes, who had never seen each other, should proceed
mutually to unbosom themselves with a freedom of self-revelation
which an age, habituated to greater reticence, finds it difficult to
understand; and there began a correspondence between Goethe and his
adorer in which we have the astonishing spectacle of her becoming the
confidant of all his emotions with regard to another woman, while he
is using the language of passion towards herself.[200] Here is the
opening sentence of his first letter to her, and it strikes the note
of all that was to follow: "My dear, I will give you no name, for what
are the names--Friend, Sister, Beloved, Bride, Wife, or any word that
is a complex of all these, compared with the direct feeling--with
the---- I cannot write further. Your letter has taken possession of me
at a wonderful time."[201]

[Footnote 200: It may be regarded as significant that Goethe makes no
reference to the Countess in his Autobiography.]

[Footnote 201: _Werke, Briefe_, ii. 230.]

In his second letter to her, while she was still unknown to him,
written about three weeks later (February 13th), he depicts the
condition in which we are to imagine him at the time it was penned. It
will be seen that it is a prose rendering of the lines _An Belinden_,