I now experienced no satisfaction except in ruminating on my misery, and in a thousand-fold imaginary multiplication of it.  My whole inventive faculty, my poetry and rhetoric, had pitched on this diseased spot, and threatened, precisely by means of this vitality, to involve body and soul into an incurable disorder.  In this melancholy condition nothing more seemed to me worth a desire, nothing worth a wish.  An infinite yearning, indeed, seized me at times to know how it had gone with my poor friends and my beloved, what had been the result of a stricter scrutiny, how far they were implicated in those crimes, or had been found guiltless.  This also I circumstantially painted to myself in the most various ways, and did not fail to hold them as innocent and truly unfortunate.  Sometimes I longed to see myself freed from this uncertainty, and wrote vehemently threatening letters to the family friend, insisting that he should not withhold from me the further progress of the affair.  Sometimes I tore them up again, from the fear of learning my unhappiness quite distinctly, and of losing the principal consolation with which hitherto I had alternately tormented and supported myself.

Thus I passed both day and night in great disquiet, in raving and lassitude; so that I felt happy at last when a bodily illness seized me with considerable violence, when they had to call in the help of a physician, and think of every way to quiet me.  They supposed that they could do it generally by the sacred assurance that all who were more or less involved in the guilt had been treated with the greatest forbearance; that my nearest friends, being as good as innocent, had been dismissed with a slight reprimand; and that Gretchen had retired from the city, and had returned to her own home.  They lingered the most over this last point, and I did not take it in the best part; for I could discover in it, not a voluntary departure, but only a shameful banishment.  My bodily and mental condition was not improved by this:  my distress now only augmented; and I had time enough to torment myself by picturing the strangest romance of sad events, and an inevitably tragical catastrophe.

PART THE SECOND.

OF WHAT ONE WISHES IN YOUTH, WHEN OLD HE HAS IN ABUNDANCE.

SIXTH BOOK.

Thus I felt urged alternately to promote and to retard my recovery; and a certain secret chagrin was now added to my other sensations, for I plainly perceived that I was watched, that they were loath to hand me any sealed paper without taking notice what effect it produced, whether I kept it secret, whether I laid it down open and the like.  I therefore conjectured that Pylades, or one of the cousins, or even Gretchen herself, might have attempted to write to me, either to give or to obtain information.  In addition to my sorrow, I was now more cross than hitherto, and had again fresh opportunities to exercise my conjectures, and to mislead myself into the strangest combinations.