time. Their meetings always gave him a thrill of pleasure, and though his love
was like many first loves, very spiritual and awakened by goodness and beauty,
it gave a new brightness to the whole world, and to be near her seemed to him an
indispensable condition of his being. Her fiancé was generally with her, and
Goethe experienced a shock in finding that she had become a milliner's assistant
for although, like all natural boys of aristocratic families, he loved common
people, this interest was not favored by his parents. The night following the
coronation day several were compelled to spend in chairs, and he and his
Gretchen, with others, slept, she with her head upon his shoulder, until all the
others had awakened in the morning. At last they parted at her door, and for the
first and last time they kissed but never met again, although he often wept in
thinking of her. He was terribly affronted to fully realize that, although only two
years older than himself, she should have regarded him as a child. He tried to
strip her of all loving qualities and think her odious, but her image hovered over
him. The sanity of instinct innate in youth prompted him to lay aside as childish
the foolish habit of weeping and railing, and his mortification that she regarded
him somewhat as a nurse might, gradually helped to work his cure.
He was very fond of his own name, and, like young and uneducated people,
wrote or carved it anywhere; later placed near it that of a new love, Annette, and
afterward on finding the tree he shed tears, melted toward her, and made an idyl.
He was also seized with a passion of teasing her and dominating over her
devotedness with wanton and tyrannical caprice, venting upon her the ill humor
of his disappointments, and grew absurdly jealous and lost her after she had
borne with him with incredible patience and after terrible scenes with her by
which he gained nothing. Frenzied by his loss, he began to abuse his physical
nature and was only saved from illness by the healing power of his poetic talent;
the "Lover's Caprice" was written with the impetus of a boiling passion. In the
midst of many serious events, a reckless humor, which was due to the excess of
life, developed which made him feel himself superior to the moment, and even
to court danger. He played tricks, although rarely with premeditation. Later he
mused much upon the transient nature of love and the mutability of character;
the extent to which the senses could be indulged within the bounds of morality;
he sought to rid himself of all that troubled him by writing song or epigram
about it, which made him seem frivolous and prompted one friend to seek to
subdue him by means of church forms, which he had severed on coming to
Leipzig. By degrees he felt an epoch approaching when all respect for authority
was to vanish, and he became suspicious and even despairing with regard to the
best individuals he had known before and grew chummy with a young tutor