the new
chemistry of that time, to the language of the affections, was first
made in this book. It was afterward dwelt upon in the novel called
"Elective affinities." The phrase has long since been used, now in
ridicule and now seriously, quite as much in discussions of the
working of the human heart as to express the relations of acids and
alkalies.

It would be very hard to persuade the young people of to-day to read
"The Sorrows of Werther." It would be hard to make them understand
that for a generation of men, from 1774, when it was published, until
this century was well advanced, people of sense and real feeling
regarded it as a central and important book, which they valued because
it had awakened them and given them strength. The English critics,
when at last they found there was such a book, were content to laugh
at its exaggerated sentiment. In truth, as Carlyle has well said,
"'Werther' expressed the dim-rooted pain under which thoughtful men
were languishing." Europe responded to "Werther," because, even in its
sentimental languishing, it expressed this pain. America was finding
another method of expressing her dissatisfaction in 1774. And it may
be doubted whether from that day to the end of the century, a copy of
the "Sorrows of Werther" was heard of in the United States, unless
indeed the Baroness Riedesel soothed with it the more physical sorrows
of the bivouacs of Saratoga, or the barracks of her captivity.

"Goetz von Berlichingen" and "Werther" made the young Goethe one of
the foremost men in German literature. That theory of his boyhood,
that he was to be a lawyer or jurisconsult, could be maintained no
longer even by his father. The distinguished men of letters of Germany
made his acquaintance, and it may be said that their company lifted
him, very fortunately, from the petty society of persons inferior to
him, among whom he was a dictator. As early as 1774 Goethe had
conceived the idea of "Faust," and when Klopstock visited him at
Frankfort, in that year, Goethe read to him some fragments of that
poem.

The popularity of "Werther" was such that it was read by people of all
ranks. Among the rest, the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August,
then only nineteen years old, conceived a great admiration for Goethe,
and in 1774, on a visit to Frankfort, with his bride, he invited the
young author to his little court at Weimar. Johann Goethe, the father,
had the pride of a magistrate of a free city, and h