himself in the role of Orestes, in the spring of 1779.  Eight years later, the author being then in Italy, it was recast with great care in mellifluous blank verse. Iphigenie is essentially a drama of the soul, there being little in it of what is commonly called action.  A youth who is the prey of morbid illusions, so that his life has become a burden, is cured by finding a noble-minded sister, whose whole being radiates peace and self-possession.  The entire power of Goethe’s chastened art is here lavished on the figure of his heroine who, by her goodness, her candor, her sweet reasonableness, not only heals her soul-sick brother, but so works on the barbarian king Thoas, who would fain have her for his wife, that he wins a notable victory over himself.

By the end of his first decade in Weimar Goethe began to feel that he needed and had earned a vacation.  His conduct of the public business had been highly successful, but he had starved his esthetic nature; for after all Weimar was only a good-sized village that could offer little to the lover of art.  Overwork had so told upon him that he was unable to hold himself long to any literary project.  He had begun half a dozen important works, but had completed none of them, and the public was beginning to suspect that the author of Goetz and Werther was lost to literature.  The effect of the whole situation—­that inner conflict between the poetic dreamer and the man of affairs which is the theme of Tasso—­was to produce a feeling of depression, as of a bird caught in a net.  So acute did the trouble become that he afterwards spoke of it as a terrible disease.  In the summer of 1786 he contracted with the Leipzig publisher Goeschen for a new edition of his works in eight volumes; and to gain time for this enterprise he resolved to take a trip to the land upon which he had already twice looked down with longing—­once in 1775 and again in 1779—­from the summit of the Gotthard.

[Illustration:  GOETHE IN THE CAMPAGNA]

On the 3d of September, at three o’clock in the morning, he stole away from Karlsbad, where he had been taking the waters, and hurried southward, alone and incognito, over the Alps.

In Italy, where he remained nearly two years, Goethe’s mind and art underwent another notable change.  He himself called it a spiritual rebirth.  Freed from all oppressive engagements, he gave himself to the study of ancient sculpture and architecture, reveled in the splendors of Renaissance painting, and pursued his botanical studies in the enticing plant-world of the Italian gardens.  Venice, Naples, Vesuvius, Sicily, the sea, fascinated him in their several ways and gave him the sense of being richer for the rest of his life.  Sharing in the care-free existence of the German artist-colony in Rome made him very happy.  It not only disciplined his judgment in matters of art and opened a vast new world of ideas and impressions, but it restored the lost balance between the intellectual and duty-bound man on the one hand and the esthetic and sensual man on the other.  He resolved never again to put on the harness of an administrative drudge, but to claim the freedom of a poet, an artist, a man of science.  To this desire the Duke of Weimar generously assented.