his passion for her
were really so consuming as in his old age he declared it to have
been. They at least speak a very different language from that of the
simple lyrics in which he expressed his love for Friederike Brion. Yet
when we turn to his correspondence, written on the inspiration of the
moment, we find all the indications of a genuinely distracted lover.

During the month of March we are to believe that he underwent all the
pangs of a passionate wooer. Surrounded by numerous admirers, Lili was
difficult of access, and apparently took some pleasure in reminding
him that he was only one among others.[211] "Oh! if I did not compose
dramas," he wrote on the 6th to his confidant the Countess, "I should
be shipwrecked." A few days of unalloyed bliss he did enjoy, and the
length at which he records them in his Autobiography shows that they
remained a vivid memory with him. In the course of the month Lili
spent some time with an uncle at Offenbach on the Main, and, joining
her there, Goethe found her all that his heart could wish. "Take the
girl to your heart; it will be good for you both," he wrote out of his
bliss to his other female confidant, Johanna Fahlmer.[212]

[Footnote 211: To this period probably belongs _Lilis Park_, the most
playfully humorous of Goethe's poems, in which he banters Lili on her
capricious treatment of himself (represented as a bear) as one of her
menagerie--the motley crowd of her suitors.]

[Footnote 212: Certain pranks played by Goethe during his stay in
Offenbach show that he was not wholly given up to "lover's
melancholy." On a moonlight night, robed in a white sheet, and mounted
on stilts (a form of exercise to which he was addicted), he went
through the town and created a panic among the inhabitants by looking
into their windows. On another occasion, at a baptism, he secretly
deposited the baby in a dish, and covering it with a towel, placed the
dish on a table where the company were assembled. It was only after
some time that the contents of the dish were revealed.]

On their return to Frankfort, however, his former griefs were renewed,
and a new distraction was added to them. "I am delighted that you are
so enamoured of my _Stella_," he writes to Fritz Jacobi on March 21st,
immediately after his return; "my heart and mind are now turned in
such entirely different directions that my own flesh and blood is
almost indifferent to me. I can tell you nothing, for what is there
that ca