Part 2

I have asked for my release from court and shall, I hope, receive it, and you will forgive me for not first seeking your permission. I simply had to get away, and I know all too well what you would have said to talk me into staying; so—break this gently to my mother, I cannot help myself, and she must accept it if I cannot help her either. Of course it must pain her. To see the fine career her son had just begun toward privy councillor and ambassador suddenly halted, and turned backward with the little beast into the stable! Make of it what you will, and combine the possible cases under which I might and should have stayed; enough, I am going, and so that you know where I am headed: here is the Prince **, who takes great pleasure in my company; he begged me, when he heard of my intention, to go with him to his estates and spend the lovely spring there. I am to be left entirely to myself, he promised me, and since we understand each other up to a certain point, I will risk it on fortune's favor and go with him.

News

April 19

Thanks for your two letters. I did not reply because I left this sheet lying until my leave from court was secured; I feared my mother might turn to the minister and make my plan more difficult. But now it is done, my leave is granted. I will not tell you how unwillingly they gave it, and what the minister writes—you would burst into new lamentations. The hereditary prince sent me twenty-five ducats at parting, with a word that moved me to tears; so I do not need the money from mother that I wrote about recently.

May 5

Tomorrow I leave here, and since my birthplace lies only six miles from the road, I mean to see it again, to recall the old, happily dreamt days. Through the very gate I mean to enter that my mother drove out of with me, when after my father's death she left the dear, intimate place to shut herself up in her unbearable city. Adieu, Wilhelm, you shall hear of my journey.

May 9

I have completed the pilgrimage to my homeland with all the devotion of a pilgrim, and many unexpected feelings have seized me. At the great linden that stands a quarter hour before the town toward S..., I had the postilion stop, got out, and bade him drive on, so as to taste on foot every memory quite anew, vividly, according to my heart. There I stood under the linden that formerly, as a boy, had been the goal and limit of my walks. How different! Back then I longed, in happy ignorance, out into the unknown world, where I hoped for so much nourishment for my heart, so much enjoyment, to fill and satisfy my striving, yearning breast. Now I return from the wide world—oh my friend, with how many disappointed hopes, with how many destroyed plans!—I saw the mountains before me that had been a thousand times the object of my wishes. For hours I could sit here and yearn across, lose myself with intimate soul in the woods, the valleys that presented themselves to my eyes so friendly-dim; and when I then had to return at the appointed time, with what reluctance did I leave the dear spot!—I came nearer the town, all the old, familiar garden houses were greeted by me, the new ones were distasteful, as were all the changes otherwise made. I entered at the gate and found myself at once and wholly again. Dear friend, I will not go into detail; as charming as it was to me, it would become as monotonous in the telling. I had resolved to lodge at the market, right next to our old house. On the way there I noticed that the schoolroom, where an honest old woman had penned our childhood together, was transformed into a haberdasher's. I remember the unrest, the tears, the dullness of sense, the heart-anxiety I suffered in that hole.—I took no step that was not remarkable. A pilgrim in the Holy Land finds not so many sites of religious memory, and his soul is hardly so full of holy emotion.—One more for a thousand. I went down along the river to a certain farm; that too was once my path, and the spots where we boys practiced producing the most skips of flat stones from the water. I remembered so vividly how sometimes I stood and watched the water, with what wondrous presentiments I followed it, how adventurously I imagined the regions where it now flowed, and how soon I found limits to my imagination; and yet it had to go on, ever further, until I lost myself wholly in the contemplation of an invisible distance.—See, my dear, so limited and so happy were the glorious forefathers! So childlike their feeling, their poetry! When Ulysses speaks of the unmeasured sea and the infinite earth, it is so true, human, intimate, narrow and mysterious. What good is it to me that I can now repeat with every schoolboy that it is round? Man needs but few clods of earth to enjoy upon, fewer to rest beneath. Now I am here, at the princely hunting lodge. One can still get along quite well with the lord; he is true and simple. Strange people are about him, whom I cannot comprehend at all. They seem no knaves and yet have not the look of honest folk. Sometimes they seem honest to me, and yet I cannot trust them. What still grieves me is that he often speaks of things he has only heard and read of, and indeed from just the viewpoint that another may have presented them to him. Also he values my understanding and talents more than this heart, which is yet my only pride, my wholly and entirely all-miserable. Ah, what I know, anyone can know—my heart I have alone.

May 25

I had something in my head of which I would tell you nothing until it was done: now, since nothing comes of it, it is just as well. I meant to go to war; that lay long on my heart. Chiefly for that reason I followed the prince here, who is general in ***'s service. On a walk I disclosed my plan to him; he dissuaded me, and it must have been more passion than whim in me if I would not give ear to his reasons.

June 11

Say what you will, I cannot stay longer. What am I to do here? Time hangs heavy. The prince keeps me as well as one can, and yet I am not in my place. We have fundamentally nothing in common with each other. He is a man of understanding, but of quite common understanding; his company entertains me no more than if I read a well-written book. Eight days more I stay, and then I wander astray again. The best I have done here is my drawing. The prince feels in art and would feel still more strongly if he were not confined by that loathsome scientific pedantry and the usual terminology. Sometimes I gnash my teeth when I lead him with warm imagination through nature and art, and he suddenly thinks to do quite well when he stumbles in with a stamped art-word.

June 16

Yea, I am but a wanderer, a pilgrim upon the earth! Are you aught more?

June 16

Where would I go? Let that be opened to you in confidence. Fourteen days yet must I remain here, and then I have persuaded myself that I would visit the mines in the *** region; but in truth there is nothing to it, I only want to be nearer Lotte again, that is all. And I laugh at my own heart—and do its bidding.

July 29

No, it is good! All is good!—I—her husband! Oh God, who made me, if you had prepared me this blessedness, my whole life should be a continual prayer. I will not contend, and forgive me these tears, forgive me my vain wishes!—She my wife! If I had clasped the dearest creature under the sun in my arms—a shudder runs through my whole body, Wilhelm, when Albert clasps her about the slender waist.

And, may I say it? Why not, Wilhelm? She would have been happier with me than with him! Oh he is not the man to fill all the wishes of this heart. A certain want of sensibility, a want—take it as you will—that his heart does not beat sympathetically at—oh!—at the passage of a beloved book where my heart and Lotte's meet as one; in a hundred other occurrences, when it comes that our feelings over an action of a third person break forth aloud. Dear Wilhelm!—Though he loves her with his whole soul, and such a love, what does it not deserve!

—An intolerable person has interrupted me. My tears are dried. I am distracted. Adieu, dear one!

August 4

It is not only thus with me. All men are deceived in their hopes, betrayed in their expectations. I visited my good wife under the linden. The eldest boy ran to meet me, his cry of joy brought the mother, who looked very downcast. Her first word was: "Good sir, ah, my Hans is dead!"—It was the youngest of her boys. I was silent. "And my husband," said she, "is returned from Switzerland and brought nothing; and without good people he would have had to beg his way, he had the fever on the road."—I could say nothing to her and gave the little one something; she begged me to accept some apples, which I did and left the place of sorrowful remembrance.

August 21

As one turns a hand, it is otherwise with me. Sometimes a joyful glance of life will dawn again—ah, but for a moment!—When I thus lose myself in dreams, I cannot ward off the thought: what if Albert died? You would! Yes, she would—and then I chase the phantom until it leads me to abysses before which I recoil.

When I go out the gate, the road I first drove to fetch Lotte to the dance, how utterly different it was then! All, all has passed away! No hint of the former world, no pulse-beat of my feeling then. It is to me as it must be to a spirit returning to the burned-out, destroyed castle that as a flourishing prince he once built and furnished with all gifts of glory, leaving it hopefully at his death to his beloved son.

September 3

I sometimes cannot comprehend how another can love her, may love her, since I love her so wholly alone, so inwardly, so fully, know, nor have, nor know aught else but her!

September 4

Yes, it is so. As nature inclines to autumn, autumn comes in me and about me. My leaves grow yellow, and already the leaves of the neighboring trees have fallen. Did I not once write you of a peasant lad, just when I came here? Now I inquired after him again in Wahlheim; it was said he had been turned out of service, and no one would know more of him. Yesterday I met him by chance on the way to another village; I spoke to him, and he told me his story, which moved me two- and threefold, as you will readily conceive when I retell it. But what is all this for? Why do I not keep to myself what anguishes and hurts me? Why do I still grieve you? Why do I always give you occasion to pity and scold me? Be it so, that too may belong to my fate!

With a quiet sadness, in which I seemed to notice a little shyness, the man answered my questions at first; but very soon more openly, as if he recognized himself and me at once, he confessed his faults, complained to me of his misfortune. Could I, my friend, set before you each of his words! He confessed, yea told with a kind of pleasure and happiness of recollection, that the passion for his mistress grew in him daily, that at last he knew not what he did, not, as he expressed it, where his head was to go. He could neither eat nor drink nor sleep, it stuck in his throat, he did what he should not, what was entrusted him he forgot, he was as if pursued by an evil spirit, until one day, when he knew her in an upper chamber, he followed her, or rather was drawn after her; since she gave no ear to his prayers, he would have seized her by force; he knew not how it happened to him, and took God to witness that his intentions toward her were always honest, and that he wished nothing more earnestly than that she would marry him, that she might spend her life with him. When he had spoken a while, he began to falter like one who has something yet to say and dares not bring it out; at last he also confessed to me with shyness what small familiarities she had allowed him, and what nearness she had granted him. He broke off two or three times and repeated the liveliest protests that he did not say this to make her look bad, as he put it, that he loved and esteemed her as before, that nothing of the sort had passed his lips, and that he told me only to convince me he was no wholly perverse and senseless man.

—And here, my dearest, I begin my old song again, which I shall eternally intone: could I present the man to you as he stood before me, as he still stands before me! Could I say all rightly, so that you felt how I take part in his fate, must take part! But enough, since you know my fate too, know me too, you know all too well what draws me to all the unhappy, what draws me especially to this unhappy one.

As I read the blood again, I see I forgot to tell the end of the story, which is easily supplied. She defended herself; her brother came up, who had long hated him, long wished him out of the house, because he feared that through a new marriage of the sister the inheritance would escape his children, which now, since she is childless, gives fair hopes; this one thrust him at once out of the house and made such an outcry that the wife, even had she wished, could not have taken him back. Now she has taken another servant, and even over him, they say, she has fallen out with the brother, and it is asserted for certain she will marry him, but he is firmly resolved not to live to see it.

What I tell you is not exaggerated, nothing enfeebled, nay I may well say, weakly, weakly have I told it, and coarsened it, in that I set it forth in our accustomed moral words.

This love, this fidelity, this passion is then no poetic invention. It lives, it is in its greatest purity among the class of men we call unformed, whom we call rude. We cultivated ones—deformed to nothing! Read the history with devotion, I beg you. I am quiet today, as I write this; you see by my hand that I do not scrawl and scribble as usual. Read, my beloved, and think meanwhile that it is also the history of your friend. Yea thus has it gone with me, thus will it go, and I am not half so good, not half so resolved as the poor unhappy one, with whom I scarce dare compare myself.

September 5

She had written a little note to her husband in the country, where he was on business. It began: "Best, dearest, come as soon as you can, I await you with a thousand joys."—A friend who came in brought word that he, on account of certain circumstances, would not return so soon. The note lay there and fell into my hands in the evening. I read it and smiled; she asked at what.—"What a divine gift imagination is," I cried, "I could for a moment fancy it was written to me."—She broke off, it seemed to displease her, and I was silent.

September 6

It was hard until I resolved to lay aside my blue plain coat, in which I first danced with Lotte; but at last it grew quite shabby. I have also had one made exactly like the former, collar and cuffs, and again yellow waistcoat and breeches to match. It does not quite have the effect. I know not—I think in time it shall become dearer to me too.

September 12

She was away some days, to fetch Albert. Today I stepped into her room, she came toward me, and I kissed her hand with a thousand joys.

A canary bird flew from the mirror to her shoulder. —"A new friend," said she, and lured him to her hand, "he is meant for my little ones. He is too dear! See him! When I give him bread, he flutters with his wings and pecks so prettily. He kisses me too, see!"

As she held her mouth to the little creature, it pressed so sweetly into the sweet lips, as if it could feel the bliss it enjoyed.

"He shall kiss you too," said she, and offered the bird over.—The beak made its way from her mouth to mine, and the pecking touch was like a breath, a presentiment of loving enjoyment.

"His kiss," said I, "is not quite without desire, he seeks nourishment and returns unsatisfied from the empty caress."

"He eats from my mouth too," said she.—She offered him some crumbs with her lips, from which the joys of innocently partaking love smiled in all bliss.

I turned my face away. She should not do it, should not with these images of heavenly innocence and bliss excite my imagination and wake my heart from the sleep into which the indifference of life sometimes rocks it!—And why not?—She trusts me so! She knows how I love her!

September 15

One might go mad, Wilhelm, that there should be men without sense and feeling for the little that on earth still has value. You know the walnut trees under which I sat with Lotte at the honest parson's at St..., the glorious walnut trees that, God knows, always filled me with the greatest soul-pleasure! How intimately they made the parsonage, how cool! And how splendid the branches were! And the memory back to the honest clerics who planted them many years ago. The schoolmaster often named us one name, which he had heard from his grandfather; and such a worthy man he was said to have been, and his memory was always sacred under the trees. I tell you, the schoolmaster stood with tears in his eyes when we spoke yesterday of their being cut down—cut down! I could go mad, I could murder the dog that struck the first blow. I, who could grieve myself to death if such a pair of trees stood in my yard and one of them fell from age, must look on. Dear treasure, one thing is yet there: what human feeling is! The whole village murmurs, and I hope the parson's wife shall feel in butter and eggs and remaining confidence what a wound she has given her place. For it is she, the wife of the new parson (our old one is also dead), a gaunt, sickly creature, who has great cause to take no part in the world, for none takes part in her. A fool who affects to be learned, meddles in the examination of the canon, works a great deal at the new-fashioned, moral-critical reformation of Christianity and shrugs at Lavater's enthusiasms, has a quite broken health and therefore no joy on God's earth. To such a creature alone was it possible to cut down my walnut trees. You see, I cannot collect myself! Imagine: the falling leaves make her yard unclean and musty, the trees take her daylight, and when the nuts are ripe the boys throw stones at them, and that goes to her nerves, disturbs her in her deep reflections when she weighs Kennicot, Semler and Michaelis against one another. Since I saw the people in the village, especially the old ones, so dissatisfied, I said: "why did you allow it?"—"If the mayor will, here in the land," they said, "what can one do?"—But one thing was rightly done. The mayor and the parson, who also wanted something of his wife's whims, which anyway made his soups not fat, thought to share it between them; then the chamber learned of it and said: "herein!" for it still had old claims on the part of the parsonage where the trees stood, and sold them to the highest bidder. They lie! Oh, if I were prince! I would—the parson's wife, the mayor and the chamber—prince!—yea if I were prince, what would the trees in my land matter to me!

October 10

If I but see her black eyes, I am already well! See, and what vexes me is that Albert does not seem so blessed as—he hoped—as I—believed to be—if—I do not like dashes, but here I cannot express myself otherwise—and it seems to me clear enough.

October 10

Ossian has displaced humor in my heart. What a world the noble one leads me into! To wander over the heath, swept by the storm-wind that in steaming mist drives the spirits of the fathers in the dawning light of the moon. To hear from the mountain, in the roar of the forest stream, half-blown-away groaning of spirits from their caves, and the lamentations of the maiden dying in woe, around the four moss-covered, grass-grown stones of the noble-fallen, her beloved. When I then find him, the wandering gray bard, who on the wide heath seeks the footsteps of his fathers, and, ah, finds their gravestones and then lamenting looks toward the dear evening star that hides in the rolling sea, and the times of the past become living in the hero's soul, when yet the friendly ray lighted the perils of the brave and the moon shone on their wreathed, victoriously returning ship. When I read the deep sorrow on his brow, see the last, forsaken noble in all exhaustion stagger toward the grave, how he ever sucks new, painfully glowing joys from the powerless presence of the shades of his departed, and looks down on the cold earth, the high, waving grass, and cries: "The wanderer will come, come, who knew me in my beauty, and ask: 'where is the singer, Fingal's excellent son?' His step goes over my grave, and he asks in vain for me on the earth."—Oh friend! I would fain draw the sword like a noble armor-bearer, free my prince at once from the twitching torment of slowly dying life, and send my soul after the freed demigod.

October 19

Ah this gap! This dreadful gap that I feel here in my bosom!—I often think, if you could but press her once, only once, to this heart, this whole gap would be filled.

October 19

“Stories of the world, in your language.”