nn in Strassburg his sense of oppression in his present
surroundings. Arduous intellectual effort is necessary to him, he
writes, "for it is dreary to live in a place where one's whole
activity must simmer within itself.... For the rest, everything around
me is dead.... Frankfort remains the nest it was--_nidus_, if you
will. Good enough for hatching birds; to use another figure,
_spelunca_, a wretched hole. God help us out of this misery.
Amen."[98]

[Footnote 98: _Werke, Briefe_, Band 2, pp. 7-8.]

In himself, also, there was a turmoil of thoughts and emotions which,
apart from depressing surroundings, was sufficient to occasion
alternating moods of exaltation and despair. The upbraiding memory of
Friederike pursued him, and we may take it that in his Autobiography
he faithfully records his continued self-reproach for his abrupt
desertion of her. "Friederike's reply to a written adieu lacerated my
heart. It was the same hand, the same mind, the same feeling that had
been educed in her to me and through me. For the first time I now
realised the loss she suffered, and saw no way of redressing or even
of alleviating it. Her whole being was before me; I continually felt
the want of her; and, which is worse, I could not forgive myself my
own unhappiness." We may ascribe it either to delicacy of feeling or
to the consideration that their further intercourse was undesirable,
that he ceased to communicate directly with her. A drawing by his own
hand, which he thought would give her pleasure, he sends to her
through Salzmann, who is requested to accompany it with or without a
note, as he thinks best. Through the same hands he sends to her a play
(_Goetz von Berlichingen_), in which a lover plays a sorry part, and
adds the comment that "Friederike will find herself to some extent
consoled if the faithless one is poisoned."

But the profoundest source of his unrest was neither the
distastefulness of Frankfort society nor his remorse for his conduct
to Friederike. It was his concern with his own life and what he was to
make of it. It is this concern that gives interest to his letters of
the period which otherwise possess little intrinsic value, either in
substance or form. What we find in them, and what is hardly to be
found elsewhere, is a mirror of one of the world's greatest spirits in
the process of attaining self-knowledge and self-mastery in the
direction of powers which are not yet fully revealed to him. At times,
it a