by one of the officials of the order, by name Buff, an honest man with a large family of children.  The second daughter, Lotte, blue-eyed, fair and just twenty years of age, was first met by Goethe, shortly after his arrival, at a ball at Wolpertshausen.  She strongly attracted him; he became a constant visitor at the house.  He found that Lotte was a second mother to her brothers and sisters.  Lotte, was really, though not formally, engaged to Kestner, a man of two-and-thirty, secretary to the Hanoverian legation.  The discovery of this relation made no difference to Goethe; he remained the devoted friend to both.  But the position was too critical to last.  On September 10 they met in the German house for the last time.  Goethe and Schlosser went together to Wetzlar in November.  Here he heard of the death of Jerusalem, a young man attached to the Brunswick legation.  He had been with Goethe at the University of Leipsic.  Of a moody temperament, disheartened by failure in his profession, and soured by a hopeless passion for the wife of another, he had borrowed a pair of pistols under pretense of a journey, and had shot himself on the night of October 29.

Goethe immediately afterwards began his Werther.  Goethe tells us that it was written in four weeks.  In October it spread over the whole of Germany.  It was enthusiastically beloved or sternly condemned.  It was printed, imitated, translated into every language of Europe.  Goetz and Werther formed the solid foundation of Goethe’s fame.  It is difficult to imagine that the same man can have produced both works, so different are they in matter and style.  Goetz was the first manly appeal to the chivalry of German spirit, which, caught up by other voices, sounded throughout the Fatherland like the call of a warder’s trumpet, till it produced a national courage, founded on the recollection of an illustrious past, which overthrew the might of the conqueror at the moment when he seemed about to dominate the world.  Werther, as soft and melodious as Plato, was the first revelation to the world of that marvelous style which, in the hands of a master, compels a language which is as rich as Greek to be also as musical.

The spring of 1773, which witnessed the publication of Goetz, saw him actively employed as an advocate.  In November, Goethe’s sister Cornelia was married to Schlosser and left Strasburg.  Goethe felt the loss deeply.  She lived but a short time.  Her married life was tortured with suffering, and she died in 1777.

The summer of 1774 was spent in a journey to the Rhine.  Goethe returned to Frankfort at the beginning of August.  On December 11, Goethe was surprised by the visit of a stranger.  It was Karl Ludwig von Knebel, who was traveling with the two princes of Saxe-Weimar, the reigning duke, Karl August, then just seventeen, and his younger brother, Constantine.  This meeting decided the future course of Goethe’s life.

He now came under the influence of Lili Schoenemann, the daughter of a rich banker.  This passion seemed to be of a more lasting nature than the others.