lf to the Princess Luise of Hesse-Darmstadt, and from both Goethe
received a cordial invitation to visit them at Weimar. Another
distinguished person then in the town was Klopstock, who received
Goethe with such undisguised kindness that he was induced to read
aloud to him the latest scenes of a work of which we shall hear
presently.[222] At Carlsruhe Goethe parted company from his
fellow-travellers with the intention of visiting his sister at
Emmendingen. On May 22nd he was at Strassburg, where he spent several
days, renewing old acquaintances, especially with his former monitor,
Salzmann, but, for reasons we can appreciate, did not present himself
at Sesenheim.

[Footnote 220: According to Goethe, Count Haugnitz was the only one of
the four who showed any sense of propriety.]

[Footnote 221: It was at this time that Merck gave his famous
definition of Goethe's genius. See above, p. 135.]

[Footnote 222: The _Urfaust_.]

From Strassburg he proceeded to Emmendingen, where he spent the first
week of June with his sister, whom he had not seen since her marriage
with Schlosser. For various reasons he had looked forward to their
meeting with painful feelings. He knew that she had been unhappy in
her marriage, and must expect to find her naturally depressed temper
soured by her conjugal experience. Their main theme of conversation
was his betrothal to Lili, and it was with a vehemence born of her own
bitter experience that Cornelia urged him to break off a connection
which the relations of all immediately concerned too surely foreboded
must end in disaster. The warning of Cornelia, we might have expected,
should have been welcome as confirming his own struggling attempts to
break loose from his bonds, but, if his later memories did not betray
him, it only laid a heavier load on his heart. His real state of mind
at the time we have in a letter to Johanna Fahlmer, written while he
was still with his sister. "I feel," he wrote, "that the chief aim of
my journey has failed, and when I return it will be worse for the
Bear[223] than before. I know well that I am a fool, but for that very
reason I am I."[224] The parting of the brother and sister--and the
parting was to be for ever[225]--must have been with heavy misgivings
for both. To her brother alone had Cornelia been bound by any tender
tie; he alone of her family had understood and sympathised with her
singular temperament, and her greatest happiness had been derived from