Book Two

October 20, 1771

We arrived here yesterday. The envoy is unwell and will keep to his rooms for a few days. If only he weren’t so disagreeable, all would be well. I can tell, I can tell, fate has hard trials in store for me. But courage! A light heart carries everything! A light heart? It makes me laugh, the way that word comes into my pen. Oh, a little lighter blood would make me the happiest man under the sun. What! Others, with their scrap of strength and talent, swagger about in front of me in comfortable self-satisfaction, and I despair of my strength, of my gifts? Good God, who gave me all this, why did you not hold back half of it and give me self-confidence and contentment instead?

Patience! Patience! Things will get better. For I tell you, my dear friend, you are right. Since I have been driven about among people every day and see what they do and how they go about it, I am on far better terms with myself. Surely, since we are once and for all so made that we compare everything with ourselves and ourselves with everything, our happiness or misery lies in the things we keep company with, and nothing is more dangerous than solitude. Our imagination, urged by its very nature to rise, and fed on the fantastic images of poetry, builds itself a ladder of beings going upward, on which we stand lowest, and everything outside us seems more splendid, everyone else more perfect. And that comes about quite naturally. We so often feel that we lack this or that, and precisely what we lack, someone else often seems to us to possess; and then we give him everything we have as well, and a certain idealized contentment on top of it. And so the happy man stands finished and complete, a creature of our own making.

On the other hand, when, with all our weakness and toil, we simply keep working straight on, we very often find that with our dawdling and tacking we get further than others with their sailing and rowing—and—it is a true feeling of yourself, after all, when you keep pace with others or even run ahead of them.

November 26

I am beginning to find things here quite tolerable, so far as that goes. The best of it is that there is enough to do; and then the many kinds of people, all these new figures, put on a colorful show before my soul. I have made the acquaintance of Count C., a man I cannot help revering more every day, a broad, great mind, and not cold for all that, though he takes in so much; a man whose company shines with so much feeling for friendship and love. He took an interest in me when I carried out a piece of business with him and he noticed at the first words that we understood each other, that he could talk with me as he could not with everyone. Nor can I praise enough his open manner toward me. There is no joy in the world so true and so warm as seeing a great soul open itself to you.

December 24

The envoy gives me a great deal of vexation; I foresaw it. He is the most punctilious fool there could possibly be; one step at a time and as fussy as an old aunt; a man who is never satisfied with himself, and whom therefore nobody can satisfy. I like to work briskly, and as it stands, so it stands; and he is quite capable of handing a draft back to me and saying, “It is good, but look it over; one can always find a better word, a purer particle.”—Then I could go to the devil. Not one “and,” not one little conjunction may be left out, and he is the mortal enemy of all the inversions that sometimes slip out of me; if you do not grind out your sentences to the customary tune, like a barrel organ, he understands nothing in them. It is a torment to have to deal with such a man.

The confidence of Count C. is still the one thing that makes up for it. The other day he told me quite frankly how dissatisfied he was with the slowness and the scruples of my envoy. Such people make things hard for themselves and for others. “But,” he said, “one has to resign oneself to it, like a traveler who has to cross a mountain; of course, if the mountain were not there, the road would be much easier and shorter; but there it is, and over it one must go!”

My old man no doubt senses, too, the preference the count gives me over him, and it annoys him, and he seizes every opportunity to speak ill of the count to me; naturally I take the other side, and that only makes matters worse. Yesterday he actually made me lose my temper, for he meant me too: for worldly business of that kind, he said, the count was quite good; he worked with great ease and wielded a good pen, but he lacked solid learning, like all belletrists. And he made a face as if to say, “Do you feel the sting?” But it did not have that effect on me; I despised a man who could think and behave like that. I stood up to him and fought back with some heat. I said the count was a man who deserved respect, for his character as much as for his knowledge. “I have never known anyone,” I said, “who has succeeded so well in enlarging his mind, spreading it over countless subjects, and still keeping this activity for ordinary life.”—To that brain it was all Greek, and I took my leave so as not to swallow any more bile over more of his nonsense.

And you are all to blame for it, all of you who talked me into this yoke and sang me so many songs about activity. Activity! If the man who plants potatoes and rides into town to sell his grain does not do more than I do, then I will slave ten more years on the galley to which I am now chained.

And the glittering misery, the boredom among the nasty people who are thrown together here! Their craving for rank, the way they watch and lie in wait to gain one little step on each other; the most wretched, most pitiful passions, without so much as a petticoat to cover them. There is a woman, for example, who entertains everyone with talk of her nobility and her country, so that every stranger must think: there is a fool who imagines wonders of her bit of nobility and the fame of her country.—But it is much worse than that: this very woman is a district clerk’s daughter from the neighborhood.—Look, I cannot understand the human race, that it has so little sense as to prostitute itself so flatly.

To be sure, I see more every day, my dear friend, how foolish it is to measure others by oneself. And because I have so much to do with myself, and this heart is so stormy—ah, I am glad to let the others go their own way, if only they could let me go mine.

What galls me most is the wretched business of station and class. To be sure, I know as well as anyone how necessary the distinction of ranks is, how many advantages it brings me myself: only it should not stand squarely in my way just where I might still enjoy a little joy, a glimmer of happiness on this earth. On a walk recently I made the acquaintance of a Miss B., a lovable creature who has kept a great deal of nature in the midst of this stiff life. We took pleasure in our conversation, and when we parted I asked her permission to call on her. She granted it with such frankness that I could hardly wait for the proper moment to go to her. She is not from here and lives in the house of an aunt. I did not like the old woman’s physiognomy. I paid her much attention, my conversation was mostly addressed to her, and in less than half an hour I had pretty well made out what the young lady herself afterward admitted to me: that her dear aunt, in her old age, lacks everything, has no decent fortune, no wit, and no support but the line of her ancestors, no shelter but the rank behind which she has palisaded herself, and no pleasure but looking down from her upper floor over the heads of the commoners. In her youth she is said to have been beautiful and to have trifled her life away, first tormenting many a poor young man with her willfulness, and in her riper years to have ducked meekly under the rule of an old officer, who for that price and a tolerable living spent the age of bronze with her and died. Now, in the age of iron, she finds herself alone, and no one would look at her if her niece were not so lovable.

January 8, 1772

What people they are, whose whole soul rests on ceremony, whose every thought and effort for years on end is bent on edging one chair higher up the table! And not that they had nothing else to attend to: no, the work piles up precisely because the petty vexations keep everyone from getting the important things done. Last week there was a quarrel on the sleigh ride, and all the fun was spoiled.

The fools, who do not see that the place really does not matter at all, and that the one who has the first place so seldom plays the first part! How many a king is governed by his minister, how many a minister by his secretary! And who, then, is first? The one, it seems to me, who sees over the others and has power or cunning enough to harness their strengths and passions to the carrying out of his plans.

January 20

I must write to you, dear Lotte, here in the parlor of a humble country inn where I have taken refuge from a heavy storm. As long as I have been dragging about in that dreary hole D., among strangers, utter strangers to my heart, I have not had one moment, not one, in which my heart bade me write to you; and now, in this hut, in this solitude, in this confinement, with snow and hail raging against my little window, here you were my first thought. As I came in, your figure came over me, the memory of you, O Lotte! So holy, so warm! Good God! The first happy moment again.

If you could see me, my dear Lotte, in this flood of distractions! How dried up my senses become! Not one moment of fullness of heart, not one blissful hour! Nothing! Nothing! I stand as if before a peep show and watch the little men and little horses jerking about in front of me, and I often ask myself whether it is not an optical illusion. I play along, or rather, I am played like a marionette, and sometimes I take my neighbor by his wooden hand and shrink back with a shudder. In the evening I resolve to enjoy the sunrise, and I do not get out of bed; in the daytime I hope to delight in the moonlight, and I stay in my room. I do not really know why I get up, or why I go to bed.

The leaven that set my life in motion is missing; the charm that kept me awake and lively in the deep of night is gone; the charm that woke me from sleep in the morning is gone.

One single womanly creature I have found here, a Miss B.; she resembles you, dear Lotte, if anyone can resemble you. “Well!” you will say, “the man is taking to pretty compliments!” It is not entirely untrue. For some time now I have been very agreeable, because after all I cannot be otherwise; I am very witty, and the ladies say no one knows how to praise so delicately as I do (and to lie, you will add, for it cannot be done without that, you understand?). I meant to speak of Miss B. She has a great deal of soul, which looks out fully from her blue eyes. Her rank is a burden to her; it satisfies none of the wishes of her heart. She longs to be out of the bustle, and we dream away many an hour in rural scenes of unmixed happiness; ah! and of you! How often she must pay you homage; no, not must, she does it freely, she so likes to hear about you, she loves you.—Oh, if I could sit at your feet in that dear, familiar little room, and our little dear ones were tumbling all around me, and when they got too loud for you, I would gather them quietly around me with a gruesome fairy tale.

The sun is setting gloriously over the snow-bright countryside, the storm has passed over, and I—must shut myself up in my cage again.—Adieu! Is Albert with you? And how—? God forgive me this question!

February 8

For a week we have had the most abominable weather, and it does me good. For as long as I have been here, not one fine day has appeared in the sky that someone has not spoiled or soured for me. Now when it really rains and drifts and freezes and thaws: ha! I think, it can’t be worse indoors than it is outside, or the other way around, and so it’s all right. When the sun rises in the morning and promises a fine day, I can never keep from exclaiming: there they have another heavenly good that they can rob each other of! There is nothing they do not rob each other of. Health, good name, cheerfulness, rest! And mostly out of silliness, incomprehension, and narrowness, and, if you listen to them, with the best intentions. Sometimes I would like to beg them on my knees not to rage so madly against their own entrails.

February 17

I am afraid my envoy and I will not hold out together much longer. The man is utterly unbearable. His way of working and conducting business is so ridiculous that I cannot keep from contradicting him and often doing a thing after my own head and in my own way, which of course never suits him. For this he recently complained of me at court, and the minister gave me a reprimand, a gentle one, but a reprimand all the same, and I was on the point of asking for my discharge when I received a private letter from him, a letter before which I knelt down and worshiped the lofty, noble, wise mind that wrote it. How he corrects my excessive sensitivity; how he honors my overstrained ideas of effectiveness, of influence on others, of pushing things through in affairs, as youthful good spirits, and tries not to root them out but only to temper them and guide them to where they have their true play and can work with full force. And so I have been strengthened for a week and at one with myself. Peace of soul is a glorious thing, and joy in oneself. Dear friend, if only the jewel were not as fragile as it is beautiful and precious.

February 20

God bless you, my dear ones, and give you all the good days he takes away from me!

I thank you, Albert, for deceiving me: I was waiting for news of when your wedding day would be, and had resolved on that very day to take Lotte’s silhouette down from the wall with all solemnity and bury it among other papers. Now you are married, and her picture is still here! Well, so it shall stay! And why not? I know that I am with you too, that I am in Lotte’s heart without harm to you; I have, yes, I have the second place in it, and I want to keep it and must. Oh, I would go mad if she could forget—Albert, there is a hell in that thought. Albert, farewell! Farewell, angel of heaven! Farewell, Lotte!

March 15

I have had a vexation that will drive me away from here. I am gnashing my teeth! The devil! There is no making it good, and it is all your fault after all, you who spurred me and drove me and tormented me into taking a post that was not to my liking. Now I have it! Now you have it! And so that you will not say again that my overstrained ideas spoil everything, here, my dear sir, is an account, plain and neat, as a chronicler would set it down.

Count C. loves me, singles me out; everyone knows it; I have told you so a hundred times. Well, yesterday I dined with him, on the very day when the noble society of gentlemen and ladies gathers at his house in the evening, which I never thought about; nor did it ever occur to me that we subordinates do not belong there. Good. I dine with the count, and after dinner we walk up and down in the great hall, I talk with him, and with Colonel B., who joins us, and so the hour of the party draws near. I am thinking, God knows, of nothing. In comes the more than gracious Mrs. von S. with her lord and husband and their well-hatched gosling of a daughter, with her flat chest and her dainty laced bodice; en passant they put on their customary, highborn eyes and nostrils, and since I heartily detest the breed, I meant to take my leave at once and was only waiting until the count was free of their dreadful chatter, when my Miss B. came in. Since my heart always opens a little when I see her, I simply stayed, stood behind her chair, and noticed only after some time that she was talking to me with less openness than usual, with some embarrassment. That struck me. Is she, too, like all these people? I thought, and I was stung and wanted to go, and yet I stayed, because I would have liked to excuse her, and did not believe it, and still hoped for a kind word from her, and—whatever you like. Meanwhile the company filled up. Baron F. with his entire wardrobe from the coronation days of Francis the First, Court Councilor R., here, however, styled in qualitate Mr. von R., with his deaf wife, and so on, not to forget the shabbily veneered J., who patches the holes in his old-fashioned wardrobe with new-fashioned rags: they come crowding in, and I talk with some of my acquaintances, who are all very laconic. I was thinking—and paid attention only to my Miss B. I did not notice that the women at the end of the hall were whispering in one another’s ears, that it was going around among the men, that Mrs. von S. was talking with the count (Miss B. told me all this afterward), until at last the count came straight up to me and took me aside into a window.—“You know,” he said, “our strange conditions here; the company, I notice, is displeased to see you here. I would not for anything—” “Your Excellency,” I broke in, “I beg your pardon a thousand times; I should have thought of it before, and I know you will forgive me this inconsistency; I meant to take my leave some time ago. An evil genius held me back,” I added with a smile, bowing.—The count pressed my hands with a feeling that said everything. I slipped quietly out of the distinguished company, went off, got into a cabriolet, and drove to M., to watch the sun go down from the hill there and to read in my Homer the glorious book that tells how Odysseus is entertained by the excellent swineherd. That was all good.

In the evening I come back to dinner; there were still only a few people in the public room; they were playing dice at one corner and had turned back the tablecloth. Then in comes honest Adelin, puts down his hat, looking at me, comes over to me, and says quietly, “You’ve had some trouble?”—“I?” I said.—“The count turned you out of the party.”—“The devil take them!” I said. “I was glad to get out into the fresh air.”—“Good,” he said, “that you take it lightly. Only it annoys me; it’s all over town already.”—It was only then that the thing began to gnaw at me. Everyone who came in to dinner and looked at me, I thought, is looking at you because of it! That bred bad blood.

And now today, wherever I go, people pity me; I hear that my enviers are triumphant and saying: there you could see where the arrogant end up, who pride themselves on their bit of brains and think it entitles them to set themselves above all conventions, and whatever else that dogs’ gossip runs to—and you could drive a knife into your heart; for say what you like about independence, I would like to see the man who can bear having scoundrels talk about him when they have an advantage over him; when their chatter is empty, ah, then it is easy to let them be.

March 16

Everything is hounding me. Today I meet Miss B. in the avenue; I could not keep from speaking to her and, as soon as we were some way from the others, showing her how hurt I was by her behavior the other day.—“O Werther,” she said in a heartfelt tone, “could you take my confusion that way, when you know my heart? What I suffered for your sake, from the moment I came into the hall! I foresaw everything; a hundred times it was on the tip of my tongue to tell you. I knew that the S. and T. women and their husbands would leave rather than stay in your company; I knew that the count cannot afford to fall out with them—and now the uproar!”—“What do you mean, miss?” I said, hiding my alarm; for everything Adelin had told me the day before yesterday ran through my veins like boiling water at that moment.—“What it has cost me already!” said the sweet creature, with tears standing in her eyes.—I was no longer master of myself; I was on the point of throwing myself at her feet.—“Explain yourself!” I cried.—The tears ran down her cheeks. I was beside myself. She dried them without trying to hide them.—“You know my aunt,” she began. “She was there and—oh, with what eyes she looked at it all! Werther, last night, and again this morning, I had to sit through a sermon about my friendship with you, and I have had to listen to you being belittled and degraded, and I could defend you, I was allowed to defend you, only halfway.” Every word she spoke went through my heart like a sword. She did not feel what a mercy it would have been to keep all this from me, and now she went on to tell me what further gossip there would be, how a certain kind of people would triumph over it.

How they would now tickle themselves and gloat over the punishment of my arrogance and my contempt for others, which they have long held against me. To hear all this, Wilhelm, from her, in a voice of the truest sympathy—I was shattered, and I am still raging inside. I wish someone would dare to reproach me with it, so that I could run my sword through his body; if I saw blood, I would feel better. Ah, a hundred times I have seized a knife to give air to this oppressed heart. They tell of a noble breed of horses that, when they are terribly overheated and hard driven, instinctively bite open one of their own veins to help themselves breathe. I often feel like that; I would like to open a vein that would bring me eternal freedom.

March 24

I have asked the court for my discharge and will, I hope, receive it, and you will forgive me for not asking your permission first. I simply had to go, and I know everything you had to say to talk me into staying, and so—break it to my mother in a spoonful of syrup; I cannot help myself, and she will have to put up with it if I cannot help her either. Of course it must hurt her. To see the fine career on which her son had just set off, straight toward privy councilor and envoy, suddenly halted, and back to the stable with the little beast! Make of it what you like, and work out all the possible cases in which I could and should have stayed; enough, I am going, and so that you know where I am going: Prince ∗∗ is here, who takes great pleasure in my company; when he heard of my intention, he asked me to go with him to his estates and spend the lovely spring there. I am to be left entirely to myself, he has promised me, and since we understand each other up to a certain point, I will take my chances and go with him.

Notice

April 19

Thank you for both your letters. I did not answer, because I let this sheet lie until my discharge from the court had come; I was afraid my mother might turn to the minister and make my plan harder. But now it is done; my discharge is here. I would rather not tell you how reluctantly they gave it to me, and what the minister writes me—you would break out in fresh lamentations. The hereditary prince has sent me twenty-five ducats as a parting gift, with a word that moved me to tears; so I do not need the money from my mother that I wrote about the other day.

May 5

Tomorrow I leave here, and because my birthplace is only six miles off the road, I want to see it again too and remember the old, happily dreamed-away days. I want to go in by the very gate through which my mother drove out with me when, after my father’s death, she left that dear, familiar place to shut herself up in her unbearable town. Adieu, Wilhelm; you shall hear about my journey.

May 9

I have completed the pilgrimage to my home with all the devotion of a pilgrim, and many unexpected feelings have seized me. At the great linden that stands a quarter of an hour outside the town on the road to S., I had the coach stop, got out, and told the postilion to drive on, so that I could taste every memory on foot, quite fresh and vivid, as my heart would have it. There I stood under the linden that once, when I was a boy, had been the goal and the boundary of my walks. How different! Then, in happy ignorance, I longed to go out into the unknown world, where I hoped to find so much nourishment for my heart, so much enjoyment, to fill and satisfy my striving, yearning breast. Now I come back from the wide world—oh, my friend, with how many failed hopes, with how many shattered plans!—I saw the mountains lying before me that had been the object of my wishes a thousand times. I could sit here for hours and long to be over there, losing myself with my whole soul in the forests and the valleys that showed themselves to my eyes in so friendly a dusk; and when I had to go back at the appointed time, with what reluctance I left that dear spot!—I came nearer the town; I greeted all the old, familiar garden houses; the new ones I disliked, as I did all the other changes that had been made. I went in at the gate and at once found myself again, wholly. My dear friend, I will not go into detail; delightful as it was to me, it would be just as monotonous in the telling. I had decided to lodge on the market square, right next to our old house. On the way there I noticed that the schoolroom where an honest old woman had penned up our childhood had been turned into a shop. I remember the restlessness, the tears, the dullness of mind, the anguish of heart I had endured in that hole.—I did not take a step that was not memorable. A pilgrim in the Holy Land does not come upon so many places of religious memory, and his soul is hardly so full of holy emotion.—One more, for a thousand. I went down the river as far as a certain farm; that used to be my way too, and there were the little spots where we boys practiced getting the most skips out of flat stones on the water. I remembered so vividly how I sometimes stood and watched the water go, with what wonderful presentiments I followed it, how adventurously I pictured the regions it was flowing to, and how I soon came up against the limits of my imagination there; and yet it had to go on, further and further, until I lost myself entirely in gazing into an invisible distance.—Look, my dear friend, so limited and so happy were the glorious forefathers! So childlike their feeling, their poetry! When Odysseus speaks of the measureless sea and the boundless earth, it is so true, human, heartfelt, narrow, and mysterious. What good does it do me that I can now repeat after every schoolboy that it is round? A man needs only a few clods of earth to enjoy himself on, and fewer to rest beneath. Now I am here at the prince’s hunting lodge. One can still get on quite well with the gentleman; he is genuine and simple. There are strange people around him whom I do not understand at all. They do not seem to be rogues, and yet they do not have the look of honest people either. Sometimes they seem honest to me, and still I cannot trust them. What I also regret is that he often talks about things he has only heard or read about, and then from exactly the point of view from which someone else may have presented them to him. He also values my understanding and my talents more than this heart, which is after all my only pride, which alone is the source of everything, of all strength, all bliss, and all misery. Ah, what I know, anyone can know—my heart I have to myself alone.

May 25

I had something in mind that I did not want to tell you about until it was carried out; now that nothing will come of it, it is just as well. I wanted to go to war; that has long been close to my heart. It was mainly for that reason that I followed the prince here; he is a general in the ∗∗∗ service. On a walk I disclosed my plan to him; he advised me against it, and it would have had to be more passion than whim with me if I had not been willing to listen to his reasons.

June 11

Say what you like, I cannot stay any longer. What am I to do here? Time hangs heavy on me. The prince treats me as well as anyone could, and yet I am not in my element. At bottom we have nothing in common. He is a man of understanding, but of a quite ordinary understanding; his company entertains me no more than reading a well-written book. I will stay another week, and then I will go wandering about again. The best thing I have done here is my drawing. The prince has feeling for art and would feel it still more strongly if he were not confined by that nasty scientific manner and the usual terminology. Sometimes I gnash my teeth when I am leading him around nature and art with a warm imagination and he suddenly thinks he is doing very well by stumbling in with some stock technical term.

June 16

Yes, to be sure, I am only a wanderer, a pilgrim on the earth! And are you any more than that?

June 16

Where am I going? Let me tell you in confidence. I have to stay here another two weeks after all, and then I have talked myself into believing that I want to visit the mines in ∗∗∗; but there is really nothing to it; I only want to be nearer Lotte again, that is all. And I laugh at my own heart—and let it have its way.

July 29

No, it is good! Everything is good!—I—her husband! O God, who made me, if you had prepared this bliss for me, my whole life would be one unbroken prayer. I will not argue with you, and forgive me these tears, forgive me my vain wishes!—She, my wife! If I had held the dearest creature under the sun in my arms—a shudder goes through my whole body, Wilhelm, when Albert puts his arm around her 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 fulfill all the wishes of this heart. A certain lack of sensibility, a lack—take it as you will; that his heart does not beat in sympathy at—oh!—at the passage in a beloved book where my heart and Lotte’s meet as one; in a hundred other incidents, when it happens that our feelings about something a third person has done are spoken aloud. Dear Wilhelm!—To be sure, he loves her with his whole soul, and such a love, what does it not deserve!

—An unbearable man has interrupted me. My tears are dried. I am distracted. Adieu, my dear friend!

August 4

It is not only with me. All people are disappointed in their hopes, cheated in their expectations. I visited my good woman under the linden. The eldest boy ran to meet me; his cry of joy brought his mother, who looked very downcast. Her first words were, “Oh, good sir, my Hans has died!”—He was the youngest of her boys. I said nothing. “And my husband,” she said, “is back from Switzerland and has brought nothing home, and if it weren’t for kind people he would have had to beg his way out; he caught a fever on the way.”—I could say nothing to her and gave the little one something; she asked me to take a few apples, which I did, and I left that place of sad memory.

August 21

As quickly as you turn a hand over, things change with me. Sometimes a joyful glimpse of life will dawn again, ah, only for a moment!—When I lose myself in dreams like that, I cannot fend off the thought: what if Albert died? You would! Yes, she would—and then I chase after the phantom until it leads me to the edge of abysses before which I shrink back trembling.

When I go out of the gate, along the road I drove the first time to fetch Lotte for the dance, how utterly different it was then! Everything, everything has passed away! Not a hint of the world that was, not one pulse beat of what I felt then. I feel as a ghost must feel who has come back to the burned-out, ruined castle that he once built as a flourishing prince and furnished with every gift of splendor and, dying, left full of hope to his beloved son.

September 3

Sometimes I cannot understand how another man can love her, can be allowed to love her, when I love her so wholly, so deeply, so fully, and know nothing, understand nothing, have nothing but her!

September 4

Yes, it is so. As nature turns toward autumn, it is becoming autumn in me and around me. My leaves are turning yellow, and already the leaves of the trees nearby have fallen. Didn’t I once write to you about a farmhand, just after I came here? I asked after him again in Wahlheim; they said he had been driven out of his place, and nobody wanted to know anything more about him. Yesterday I met him by chance on the road to another village; I spoke to him, and he told me his story, which moved me twice and three times over, as you will easily understand when I tell it to you in turn. But what is the use of all this? Why don’t I keep to myself what frightens and grieves me? Why do I sadden you as well? Why do I keep giving you occasion to pity me and to scold me? So be it; that too may be part of my fate!

With a quiet sadness, in which I thought I noticed something a little shy, the man at first only answered my questions; but very soon, more openly, as if he had suddenly recognized himself and me again, he confessed his faults to me and lamented his misfortune. If only I could lay every one of his words before you, my friend, as before a court! He admitted, in fact he told me with a kind of pleasure and happiness in remembering, that his passion for the woman of the house had grown in him day by day, that in the end he had not known what he was doing, nor, as he put it, which way to turn his head. He had been unable to eat or drink or sleep; it had stuck in his throat; he had done what he should not have done; what he was told to do, he forgot; he had been as if pursued by an evil spirit, until one day, knowing she was in an upstairs room, he had gone after her, or rather had been drawn after her; when she would not listen to his pleading, he had tried to take her by force; he did not know what had come over him, and he called God to witness that his intentions toward her had always been honest and that he had wished for nothing more ardently than that she would marry him, that she would spend her life with him. When he had talked for a while, he began to falter, like someone who still has something to say and does not dare to say it out; at last, shyly, he confessed to me as well what little intimacies she had allowed him and what closeness she had granted him. He broke off two or three times and repeated the most fervent protestations that he was not saying this to make her out bad, as he put it, that he loved and respected her as before, that such a thing had never crossed his lips, and that he was telling me only to convince me that he was not a wholly perverse and senseless man.

—And here, my dear friend, I begin my old song again, the one I will be singing forever: if only I could show you the man as he stood before me, as he still stands before me! If only I could tell you everything rightly, so that you would feel how I share in his fate, how I must share in it! But enough; since you know my fate too, and know me too, you know only too well what draws me to all the unhappy, and to this unhappy man above all.

As I read this sheet over, I see that I have forgotten to tell the end of the story, though it is easy to supply. She fought him off; her brother came in, who had long hated him and long wished him out of the house, because he fears that if his sister marries again, his own children will lose the inheritance that now, since she is childless, gives them fine hopes; this brother, he said, had thrown him out of the house at once and made such a noise about the matter that the woman, even if she had wanted to, could not have taken him back. Now she had taken on another hired man, and over him too, people said, she had fallen out with her brother, and it was said for certain that she would marry him, but he was firmly resolved not to live to see it.

What I am telling you is not exaggerated, not prettified; in fact I may well say that I have told it weakly, weakly, and that I have coarsened it by putting it in our conventional moral words.

So this love, this faithfulness, this passion is no poet’s invention. It lives; it exists in its greatest purity among the class of people we call uneducated, we call coarse. We educated people—miseducated into nothing! Read the story with reverence, I beg you. I am quiet today as I write this down; you can see from my hand that I am not scrawling and scribbling as I usually do. Read, my beloved friend, and think as you read that it is your friend’s story too. Yes, that is how it went with me, that is how it will go with me, and I am not half so brave, not half so resolute, as the poor unhappy man with whom I hardly dare compare myself.

September 5

She had written a little note to her husband in the country, where he was staying on business. It began: “My best, my dearest, come as soon as you can; I am waiting for you with a thousand joys.”—A friend who came in brought word that, owing to certain circumstances, he would not be back so soon. The note was left lying and fell into my hands in the evening. I read it and smiled; she asked what at.—“What a divine gift imagination is,” I cried. “For a moment I could make myself believe it was written to me.”—She broke off; it seemed to displease her, and I said nothing.

September 6

It was hard to make up my mind to put aside the plain blue tailcoat in which I first danced with Lotte; but in the end it had become quite shabby. So I have had one made exactly like the old one, collar and lapels, and again a yellow waistcoat and breeches to go with it. Still, it does not quite have the same effect. I don’t know—I think in time I will grow fonder of this one too.

September 12

She had been away for a few days to fetch Albert. Today I came into her room; she came to meet me, and I kissed her hand with a thousand joys.

A canary flew from the mirror onto her shoulder.—“A new friend,” she said, and coaxed him onto her hand. “He’s meant for my little ones. He is too sweet! Look at him! When I give him bread, he flutters his wings and pecks so prettily. He kisses me too, look!”

When she held out her mouth to the little creature, it pressed itself so sweetly against her lovely lips, as if it could feel the bliss it was enjoying.

“He shall kiss you too,” she said, and handed the bird across.—The little beak made its way from her mouth to mine, and its pecking touch was like a breath, a presentiment of loving pleasure.

“His kiss,” I said, “is not entirely without desire; he is looking for food and comes back unsatisfied from the empty caress.”

“He eats from my mouth too,” she said.—She gave him a few crumbs with her lips, from which the joys of an innocent, sharing love smiled in all their rapture.

I turned my face away. She should not do it, should not excite my imagination with these images of heavenly innocence and bliss, should not 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

It is enough to drive you mad, Wilhelm, that there should be people with no sense or feeling for the little on earth that still has any value. You know the walnut trees under which I sat with Lotte at the honest pastor’s in St., the glorious walnut trees that always, God knows, filled me with the greatest joy of soul! How intimate they made the parsonage yard, how cool! And how glorious the branches were! And the memory, reaching back to the honest clergymen who planted them so many years ago. The schoolmaster often told us one of their names, which he had heard from his grandfather; such a good man he is said to have been, and his memory was always sacred under those trees. I tell you, there were tears in the schoolmaster’s eyes when we spoke yesterday of their having been cut down—cut down! I could go out of my mind; I could murder the dog who struck the first blow. I, who could pine away with grief if a couple of trees like that stood in my yard and one of them died of old age, I have to stand by and watch. My dear, there is one thing about it, though: what human feeling is! The whole village is grumbling, and I hope the pastor’s wife will feel in her butter and eggs and the rest of their goodwill what a wound she has dealt her village. For it is she, the wife of the new pastor (our old one has died too), a gaunt, sickly creature who has every reason to take no interest in the world, since no one takes any interest in her. A fool who sets up to be learned, meddles in the study of the canon, works hard at the new-fashioned moral-critical reformation of Christianity, and shrugs her shoulders at Lavater’s enthusiasms; her health is quite shattered, and so she has no joy on God’s earth. Only a creature like that could have cut down my walnut trees. You see, I cannot get over it! Just imagine: the falling leaves make her yard dirty and dank, the trees take away her daylight, and when the nuts are ripe the boys throw stones at them, and that gets on her nerves, that disturbs her in her deep reflections when she is weighing Kennicot, Semler, and Michaelis against one another. When I saw how discontented the people in the village were, especially the old ones, I said, “Why did you allow it?”—“When the mayor wants something, around here,” they said, “what can you do?”—But one thing turned out right. The mayor and the pastor, who after all wanted to get something out of his wife’s whims too, since they put no fat in his soup anyway, thought they would share the proceeds; then the revenue chamber heard of it and said, “Hand it over!” for it still had old claims to the part of the parsonage yard where the trees stood, and it sold them to the highest bidder. There they lie! Oh, if I were a prince! I would have the pastor’s wife, the mayor, and the revenue chamber—Prince!—yes, if I were a prince, what would the trees in my country matter to me!

October 10

If I only see her black eyes, I am well already! Look, and what vexes me is that Albert does not seem as happy as he—hoped—as I—thought I would be—if—I do not like using dashes, but here I cannot express myself any other way—and it seems to me clear enough.

October 12

Ossian has driven Homer out of my heart. What a world that glorious poet leads me into! To wander over the heath, with the storm wind roaring around me as it leads the spirits of the fathers in steaming mists by the dim light of the moon. To hear from the mountains, in the roar of the forest torrent, the half-blown-away groaning of the spirits from their caves, and the laments of the girl grieving herself to death around the four moss-covered, grass-grown stones of the nobly fallen one, her beloved. When I find him then, the wandering gray bard, who seeks the footprints of his fathers on the wide heath and, ah, finds their gravestones, and then, lamenting, looks toward the dear star of evening that hides itself in the rolling sea, and the times of the past come alive in the hero’s soul, when the friendly beam still lit the dangers of the brave and the moon shone on their garlanded ship returning in victory. When I read the deep grief on his brow, see the last, forsaken, glorious one tottering toward the grave in utter exhaustion, how he drinks in ever new, painfully glowing joys in the powerless presence of the shades of his departed, and looks down at the cold earth, the tall, waving grass, and cries: “The wanderer will come, will come, who knew me in my beauty, and ask, ‘Where is the singer, Fingal’s excellent son?’ His footstep passes over my grave, and he asks for me in vain upon the earth.”—Oh, friend! Like a noble armor-bearer I would draw my sword, free my lord at one stroke from the convulsive torment of a slowly dying life, and send my soul after the liberated demigod.

October 19

Ah, this void! This terrible void I feel here in my breast!—I often think: if you could press her to this heart only once, only once, this whole void would be filled.

October 19

Yes, it is becoming certain to me, my dear friend, certain and ever more certain, that little depends on the existence of any one creature, very little. A friend came to see Lotte, and I went into the next room to get a book, and could not read, and then I took a pen to write. I heard them talking softly; they were telling each other unimportant things, news of the town: how this one is getting married, how that one is ill, very ill.—“She has a dry cough, the bones are sticking out of her face, and she has fainting fits; I wouldn’t give a kreuzer for her life,” said the one.—“N. N. is in a bad way too,” said Lotte.—“He’s already swollen,” said the other.—And my lively imagination carried me to the bedside of these poor people; I saw with what reluctance they turned their backs on life, how they—Wilhelm! And my little women were talking about it just the way people do talk about it—that a stranger is dying.—And when I look around and look at the room, and all around me Lotte’s clothes and Albert’s papers and this furniture I have grown so friendly with, even this inkwell, and think: look what you are to this house now! All in all. Your friends honor you! You often give them joy, and it seems to your heart as if it could not be without them; and yet—if you went now, if you left this circle? Would they, how long would they feel the void your loss would tear in their fate? How long?—Oh, man is so transient that even there where he has the real certainty of his existence, where he makes the one true impression of his presence, in the memory, in the soul of those he loves, even there he must go out, must vanish, and so soon!

October 27

I would often like to tear open my breast and dash my brains out, that people can be so little to one another. Ah, the love, joy, warmth, and rapture that I do not bring with me, the other will not give me; and with a whole heart full of bliss I will not make the other happy who stands before me cold and without strength.

I have so much, and my feeling for her swallows everything; I have so much, and without her everything turns to nothing.

October 27, evening

A hundred times I have been on the point of throwing my arms around her neck! The great God knows what it does to you to see so much loveliness moving about in front of you and not be allowed to reach for it; and reaching out is, after all, the most natural impulse of humankind. Don’t children reach for everything that comes into their heads?—And I?

October 30

God knows! So often I go to bed wishing, yes, sometimes hoping, never to wake again; and in the morning I open my eyes, see the sun again, and am wretched. Oh, if only I could be a creature of moods, could put the blame on the weather, on a third person, on an undertaking that failed, then the unbearable burden of discontent would rest only half on me. Woe is me! I feel too truly that all the blame lies with me—not blame! Enough that in me lies hidden the source of all misery, as once the source of all bliss. Am I not still the very same man who once floated about in all the fullness of feeling, whom a paradise followed at every step, who had a heart to embrace a whole world with love? And this heart is dead now; no raptures flow from it any more; my eyes are dry, and my senses, no longer refreshed by reviving tears, draw my brow together in anguish. I suffer much, for I have lost what was the one rapture of my life, the holy, quickening power with which I created worlds around me; it is gone!—When I look out of my window at the distant hill, and see the morning sun break through the mist above it and shine on the quiet meadows of the valley, and the gentle river winds toward me between its leafless willows—oh! when this glorious nature stands before me as stiff as a little varnished picture, and all that rapture cannot pump a single drop of bliss up from my heart into my brain, and the whole fellow stands before the face of God like a well run dry, like a cracked bucket. I have often thrown myself on the ground and begged God for tears, as a farmer begs for rain when the sky is brass above him and the earth around him is dying of thirst.

But ah, I feel it: God does not give rain and sunshine in answer to our impetuous pleading, and those times whose memory torments me, why were they so blissful, if not because I waited for his spirit with patience and received the rapture he poured out over me with a whole and deeply grateful heart!

November 8

She has reproached me for my excesses! Ah, so lovingly! My excesses: that I sometimes let one glass of wine tempt me into drinking a bottle.—“Don’t do it!” she said. “Think of Lotte!”—“Think!” I said. “Do you need to tell me to? I think!—I do not think! You are always before my soul. Today I sat at the spot where you got out of the carriage the other day.”—She talked of something else, so as not to let me get deeper into my subject. Dearest friend, I am done for! She can do with me what she will.

November 15

I thank you, Wilhelm, for your heartfelt sympathy, for your well-meant advice, and I beg you to be calm. Let me endure to the end; for all my weariness I still have strength enough to see it through. I revere religion, you know that; I feel that it is a staff to many who are faint, refreshment to many who are languishing. Only—can it, must it be that to everyone? When you look at the great world, you see thousands for whom it was not that, thousands for whom it will not be, preached or unpreached, and must it be that to me? Does not the Son of God himself say that those would be with him whom the Father has given him? What if I am not given to him? What if the Father wants to keep me for himself, as my heart tells me?—I beg you, do not misread this; do not see mockery in these innocent words; it is my whole soul that I lay before you; otherwise I would rather have kept silent, just as I do not like to waste a word on all those things of which everyone knows as little as I do. What is it but the fate of man to suffer out his measure, to drink his cup to the dregs?—And if the cup was too bitter for the God from heaven on his human lips, why should I boast and pretend it tastes sweet to me? And why should I be ashamed, in the terrible moment when my whole being trembles between being and not-being, when the past flashes like lightning over the dark abyss of the future and everything around me sinks and the world perishes with me? Is it not then the voice of the creature driven wholly in upon itself, failing itself, plunging irresistibly downward, grinding out from the inmost depths of its vainly struggling powers: “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” And should I be ashamed of the words, should I dread that moment, since even he who rolls up the heavens like a cloth did not escape it?

November 21

She does not see, she does not feel, that she is preparing a poison that will destroy both me and her; and I, with utter voluptuousness, drain the cup she hands me for my ruin. What does it mean, the kind look with which she often—often?—no, not often, but still sometimes looks at me, the graciousness with which she receives an involuntary expression of my feeling, the pity for my endurance that is written on her brow?

Yesterday, as I was leaving, she gave me her hand and said, “Adieu, dear Werther!”—Dear Werther! It was the first time she had called me dear, and it went through me to the marrow. I have repeated it to myself a hundred times, and last night, as I was about to go to bed and was chattering to myself about all sorts of things, I suddenly said, “Good night, dear Werther!” and afterward had to laugh at myself.

November 22

I cannot pray, “Let me keep her!” and yet she often seems to me to be mine. I cannot pray, “Give her to me!” for she belongs to another. I play the wit with my pain; if I let myself go, there would be a whole litany of antitheses.

November 24

She feels what I am suffering. Today her look went deep into my heart. I found her alone; I said nothing, and she looked at me. And I no longer saw in her the lovely beauty, no longer the shining of her excellent mind; all that had vanished before my eyes. A far more glorious look worked on me, full of the expression of the deepest sympathy, the sweetest pity. Why was I not allowed to throw myself at her feet? Why was I not allowed to answer with a thousand kisses on her neck? She took refuge at the clavier and breathed harmonious sounds in a sweet, soft voice to her playing. Never have I seen her lips so enchanting; it was as if they opened thirstily to drink in those sweet tones that welled up from the instrument, and only the secret echo rang back from her pure mouth—if only I could tell you how it was!—I resisted no longer, bowed my head, and swore: never will I dare to press a kiss upon you, lips on which the spirits of heaven hover.—And yet—I will—ha! You see, it stands like a partition wall before my soul—this bliss—and then to perish, to atone for this sin—sin?

November 26

Sometimes I say to myself: your fate is unique; call the others happy—no one has ever been tormented like this.—Then I read a poet of ancient times, and it seems to me as if I were looking into my own heart. I have so much to endure! Ah, have human beings before me ever been so wretched?

November 30

I am not meant, I am not meant to come to myself! Wherever I go, I meet an apparition that throws me out of all composure. Today! O fate! O humanity!

At the noon hour I walk along by the water; I had no desire to eat. Everything was desolate; a raw, damp west wind was blowing from the mountain, and the gray rain clouds were moving into the valley. From far off I see a man in a shabby green coat, clambering about among the rocks and seemingly looking for herbs. When I came closer and he turned around at the noise I made, I saw a most interesting face, whose chief feature was a quiet sorrow, but which otherwise expressed nothing but plain good sense; his black hair was pinned up in two rolls, and the rest braided into a thick queue that hung down his back. Since his clothes seemed to me to mark a man of humble station, I thought he would not take it amiss if I paid attention to what he was doing, and so I asked him what he was looking for.—“I am looking,” he answered with a deep sigh, “for flowers—and I find none.”—“But this is not the season for them,” I said, smiling.—“There are so many flowers,” he said, coming down toward me. “In my garden there are roses and honeysuckle, two kinds, one my father gave me; they grow like weeds; I have been looking for them for two days now and can’t find them. Out here there are always flowers too, yellow and blue and red, and the centaury has a pretty little flower. I can’t find any of them.”—I sensed something uncanny, and so I asked in a roundabout way, “And what do you want with the flowers?”—A strange, twitching smile twisted his face. “If you won’t give me away,” he said, pressing his finger to his lips, “I have promised my sweetheart a nosegay.”—“That is good of you,” I said.—“Oh!” he said, “she has lots of other things, she is rich.”—“And still she will be fond of your nosegay,” I replied.—“Oh!” he went on, “she has jewels and a crown.”—“And what is her name?”—“If the States General would pay me,” he replied, “I would be a different man! Yes, there was a time once when I was so well! Now it’s all over with me. Now I am …” A wet look toward heaven said everything.—“So you were happy?” I asked.—“Ah, I wish I were like that again!” he said. “I was so well then, so merry, so light, like a fish in water!”—“Heinrich!” called an old woman who was coming along the road, “Heinrich, where have you got to? We’ve looked for you everywhere; come and eat.”—“Is that your son?” I asked, going up to her.—“Yes, my poor son!” she replied. “God has laid a heavy cross on me.”—“How long has he been like this?” I asked.—“This quiet,” she said, “he has been for half a year now. Thank God he is only this far gone; before that he was raving for a whole year, and they had him in chains in the madhouse. Now he does no harm to anyone; only he is always busy with kings and emperors. He was such a good, quiet man, who helped me make a living and wrote a beautiful hand, and all of a sudden he turns melancholy, falls into a burning fever, and from that into madness, and now he is as you see him. If I were to tell you everything, sir.”—I interrupted the stream of her words with the question, “What time is that, then, that he boasts of, when he was so happy, so well?”—“The foolish man!” she cried with a pitying smile. “He means the time when he was out of his mind; he always boasts about it; that is the time he was in the madhouse, when he knew nothing of himself.”—That struck me like a thunderclap; I pressed a coin into her hand and left her in haste. When you were happy! I cried out, walking quickly toward the town, when you were as well as a fish in water!—God in heaven! Have you made it the fate of men that they are happy only before they come to their reason and after they lose it again!—Poor wretch! And yet how I envy your melancholy, the confusion of your senses, in which you are wasting away! You go out full of hope to pick flowers for your queen—in winter—and grieve when you find none, and do not understand why you cannot find any. And I—and I go out without hope, without purpose, and come home again as I went.—You imagine what a man you would be if the States General paid you. Blessed creature, who can put down the lack of his happiness to an earthly obstacle! You do not feel, you do not feel that your misery lies in your ruined heart, in your shattered brain, and that all the kings on earth cannot help you. May he perish without comfort who mocks a sick man for traveling to the most distant spring, though it will only increase his sickness and make the rest of his life more painful! Who looks down on the oppressed heart that, to be rid of its remorse and put away the sufferings of its soul, makes a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher. Every footstep that cuts through his soles on the untrodden way is a drop of balm for the anguished soul, and with every day’s journey endured the heart lies down lighter by many afflictions.—And dare you call that delusion, you word-peddlers on your cushions?—Delusion!—O God! You see my tears! Did you, who created man poor enough, have to give him brothers as well, to rob him even of his bit of poverty, his bit of trust in you, in you, the All-loving! For trust in a healing root, in the tears of the vine, what is it but trust in you, that you have put healing and soothing power into everything around us, which we need so hour by hour? Father, whom I do not know! Father, who once filled my whole soul and has now turned his face away from me, call me to you! Be silent no longer! Your silence will not hold back this thirsting soul—and could a man, a father, be angry if his son, coming home unexpectedly, fell on his neck and cried, “I am back, my father! Do not be angry that I break off the journey that by your will I was to endure longer. The world is the same everywhere: for toil and labor, reward and joy; but what is that to me? I am well only where you are, and before your face I want to suffer and enjoy.”—And you, dear heavenly Father, would you turn him away?

December 1

Wilhelm! The man I wrote you about, that happy unhappy man, was a clerk in the service of Lotte’s father, and a passion for her, which he nourished, concealed, revealed, and for which he was dismissed from his post, drove him mad. Feel, as you read these dry words, with what frenzy the story seized me when Albert told it to me as calmly as you will perhaps read it.

December 4

I beg you—you see, it is all over with me, I cannot bear it any longer! Today I sat beside her—sat, she was playing on her clavier, all sorts of melodies, and all that expression! All!—All!—What more do you want?—Her little sister was dressing her doll on my knee. Tears came into my eyes. I bent my head, and her wedding ring caught my eye—my tears flowed—and all at once she struck up the old, heavenly sweet melody, all at once, and through my soul there went a feeling of comfort and a memory of the past, of the times when I had heard that song, of the dark intervals of vexation, of the failed hopes, and then—I walked up and down the room; my heart was suffocating under the onrush.—“For God’s sake,” I said, turning on her in a violent outburst, “for God’s sake, stop!”—She stopped and looked at me fixedly. “Werther,” she said with a smile that went through my soul, “Werther, you are very ill; your favorite dishes disgust you. Go! I beg you, calm yourself.”—I tore myself away from her and—God! You see my misery, and you will end it.

December 6

How her image pursues me! Waking and dreaming, it fills my whole soul! Here, when I close my eyes, here in my forehead, where the inner power of sight comes together, stand her black eyes. Here! I cannot express it to you. If I close my eyes, they are there; like a sea, like an abyss they lie before me, in me, and fill the senses of my brow.

What is man, that much-praised demigod! Do his powers not fail him just where he needs them most? And when he soars up in joy or sinks down in suffering, is he not stopped in both just there, brought back just there to dull, cold consciousness, at the very moment he was longing to lose himself in the fullness of the infinite?