effect of ending his unwholesome relation to Frau von
Stein, who was getting old and peevish. The character of Christiane
has often been pictured too harshly. She was certainly not her
husband's intellectual peer--he would have looked long for a wife of
that grade--and she became a little too fond of wine. On the other
hand, she was affectionate, devoted, true, and by no means lacking in
mental gifts. She and Goethe were happy together and faithful to
each other.

For several years after his return from Italy Goethe wrote nothing
that is of much importance in the history of his literary life. He
devoted himself largely to scientific studies in plant and animal
morphology and the theory of color. His discovery of the
intermaxillary bone in the human skull, and his theory that the
lateral organs of a plant are but successive phases of the leaf, have
given him an assured if modest place in the history of the development
hypothesis. On the other hand, his long and laborious effort to refute
Newton's theory of the composition of white light is now generally
regarded as a misdirection of energy. In his _Roman Elegies_ (1790) he
struck a note of pagan sensuality. The pensive distichs, telling of
the wanton doings of Amor amid the grandeur that was Rome, were a
little shocking in their frank portraiture of the emancipated flesh.
The outbreak of violence in France seemed to him nothing but madness
and folly, since he did not see the real Revolution, but only the
Paris Terror.

He wrote two or three very ordinary plays to satirize various phases
of the revolutionary excitement--phases that now seem as insignificant
as the plays themselves. In 1792 he accompanied the Duke of Weimar on
the inglorious Austro-Prussian invasion of France, heard the cannonade
at Valmy, and was an interested observer as the allies tumbled back
over the Rhine. Perhaps the best literary achievement of these years
is the fine hexameter version of the medieval _Reynard the Fox_.

The year 1794 marks the beginning of more intimate relations between
Goethe and Schiller. Their memorable friendship lasted until
Schiller's death, in 1805--the richest decade in the whole history of
German letters. The two men became in a sense allies and stood
together in the championship of good taste and humane idealism.
Goethe's literary occupations during this period were very
multifarious; a list of his writings in the various fields of poetry,
drama, prose fiction, cri