are the same irresponsible sallies
which made him such a difficult lover. If we are to take him
seriously, he still suffered from the pangs of rejected love and
regretted that his former relations to Kaethchen had not continued. "A
lover to whom his love will not listen," he writes, "is by many
degrees not so unfortunate as one who has been cast off; the former
still retains hope and has at least no fear of being hated; the other,
yes, the other, who has once experienced what it is to be cast out of
a heart which once was his, gladly avoids thinking, not to say
speaking, of it."[57] When this passage was written (June, 1769) he
had received the news that Kaethchen was betrothed to another. In a
final letter addressed to her (January 23rd, 1770) occur these
characteristic words: "You are still the same loveable girl, and you
will also be a loveable wife. And I, I shall remain Goethe. You know
what that means. When I mention my name, I mention all; and you know
that, as long as I have known you, I have lived only as part of
you."[58] So closed a relation of which it is difficult to say how
much there was in it of genuine passion, how much of artificial
sentiment. Serious intention in it there was none; from the first
Goethe perfectly realised the fact that he could never make Kaethchen
his wife.[59]

[Footnote 57: _Ib._ p. 211.]

[Footnote 58: _Ib._ p. 224.]

[Footnote 59: Goethe saw Kaethchen as a married woman in Leipzig in
1776, when he wrote to the lady who then held his affections (Frau von
Stein): "Mais ce n'est plus Julie."]

As at Leipzig, his other distractions did not divert him from his
interests in art and literature. When the state of his health
permitted, he assiduously practised drawing and etching. "Now as
formerly," he wrote to Oeser, "art is almost my chief occupation." But
he also found time for wide excursions into the fields of general
literature. Before leaving Leipzig he had exchanged with Langer "whole
baskets-full" of German poets and critics for Greek authors, and these
(though his knowledge of Greek remained to the end elementary) he
must have read in a fashion. Latin authors he read were Cicero,
Quintilian, Seneca, and Pliny. Among the moderns Shakespeare and
Moliere already held the place in his estimation which they always
retained. Shakespeare he as yet knew only from the selections in
Dodd's _Beauties_ and Wieland's translation, but he already felt his
greatness, and, as we have seen,