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, some blamed.  Goethe himself appears to have wavered with painful indecision, and at last to have followed a mysterious impulse rather than a clear conviction or deliberate choice.  His Heidelberg friend and hostess sought still to detain him, when the last express from Weimar drove up to the door.  To her he replied in the words of his own Egmont:—­

“Say no more!  Goaded by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time run away with the light chariot of our destiny; there is nothing for it but to keep our courage, hold tight the reins, and guide the wheels now right, now left, avoiding a stone here, a fall there.  Whither away?  Who knows?  Scarcely one remembers whence he came.”

It does not appear that he ever repented this most decisive step of his life-journey, nor does there appear to have been any reason why he should.  A position, an office of some kind, he needs must have.  Even now, the life of a writer by profession, with no function but that of literary composition, is seldom a prosperous one; in Goethe’s day, when literature was far less remunerative than it is in ours, it was seldom practicable.  Unless he had chosen to be maintained by his father, some employment besides that of book-making was an imperative necessity.  The alternative of that which was offered—­the