Kirms sent me a very welcome today, for which I send you my best thanks.

My wife sends kindest greetings.  May you farewell and enjoy the gay variety of entertainments by which you are surrounded in Jena.  Mellish passed through here yesterday, and has again taken up his abode in Doernburg.  I hear a great deal about the merry life they are leading in Wilhelmsthal, where the proceedings are evidently very Utopian.  My sister-in-law met with a serious accident in the carriage, which broke in two; however, she herself was not hurt.  Farewell.

* * * * *

GOETHE to SCHILLER

Jena, August I, 1800.

Tancred I laid aside yesterday morning.  I have translated—­and here and there a little more than this—­the close of the second act and the third and fourth acts, with the exception of the close of the two latter.  By this means, as I think, I have secured the worthier parts of the piece, to which I shall now have to add something of my own that is life-giving, so that the beginning and the end may become somewhat fuller than the original.  The choruses will be very appropriate; however, I shall nevertheless have to act very cautiously so as not to injure the whole.  Still, once being upon the path we have entered, I shall never regret working out and accomplishing this task.

Yesterday I attended to some business matters, and today solved a small difficulty in Faust; if I could remain here another fortnight it should assume quite a different appearance.  However, I have unfortunately taken it into my head that my presence is required in Weimar, and I am going to sacrifice my dearest wish to this fancy.

In other ways, also, these last few days have not been unfruitful in many good things.  We have long pondered over a Bride in Sorrow.  Tieck, in his poetic journal, reminds me of an old marionette play called the Hoellenbraul, which I too remember to have seen in my young days.  It is a pendent to Faust, or, rather, to Don Juan.  An extremely vain and heartless girl, who has ruined her faithful lover, consents to accept an unknown stranger as her betrothed, and he, in the end, as a devil, carries her off with him—­as she deserves.  Ought we not to be able to find the idea for a bride in sorrow here—­at least in this direction?

I have been reading a treatise of Baader’s on the Pythagorean square in nature, or the four quarters of the globe.  Whether it be that I have for some years past interested myself more in this species of writing, or that he has contrived to make his intentions clearer, the little work has pleased me and has served me as an introduction to his earlier writings; however, my faculties are still unable to comprehend all of the latter.

A student here, who is engaged with the anatomy of insects, dissected some very neatly and explained them to me, and I have thus made progress in this branch also, partly in knowledge of the subject itself, partly also in the treatment of it.