-so great indeed as to cause a dangerous attack of bodily
disease,--could not outweigh the pangs which he endured in his penitent
contemplation of the consequences of his folly.

The next five years were spent partly in Frankfort and partly in
Wetzlar, partly in the forced exercise of his profession, but chiefly in
literary labors and the use of the pencil, which for a time disputed
with the pen the devotion of the poet-artist. They may be regarded as
perhaps the most fruitful, certainly the most growing, years of his
life. They gave birth to "Goetz von Berlichingen" and the "Sorrows of
Werther," to the first inception of "Faust," and to many of his sweetest
lyrics. It was during this period that he made the acquaintance of
Charlotte Buff, the heroine of the "Sorrows of Werther," from whom he
finally tore himself away, leaving Wetzlar when he discovered that their
growing interest in each other was endangering her relation with
Kestner, her betrothed. In those years, also, he formed a matrimonial
engagement with Elizabeth Schoenemann (Lili), the rupture of which, I
must think, was a real misfortune for the poet. It came about by no
fault of his. Her family had from the first opposed themselves to the
match on the ground of social disparity. For even in mercantile
Frankfort rank was strongly marked; and the Goethes, though respectable
people, were beneath the Schoenemanns in the social scale. Goethe's
genius went for nothing with Madame Schoenemann; she wanted for her
daughter an aristocratic husband, not a literary one,--one who had
wealth in possession, and not merely, as Goethe had, in prospect. How
far Lili was influenced by her mother's and brother's representations it
is impossible to say; however, she showed herself capricious, was
sometimes cold, or seemed so to him, while favoring the advances of
others. Goethe was convinced that she did not entertain for him that
devoted love without which he felt that their union could not be a happy
one. They separated; but on her death-bed she confessed to a friend that
all she was, intellectually and morally, she owed to him.

In 1775 our poet was invited by the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl
August,--whose acquaintance he had made at Frankfort and at Mentz, his
junior by two or three years,--to establish himself in civil service at
the Grand-Ducal Court. The father, who had other views for his son, and
was not much inclined to trust in princes, objected; many wondered, so