ow
passing. She lived in the same world of sentiment as the ladies of the
Darmstadt circle, and she had the gift of effusive utterance, as she
had shown in a novel in the manner of Richardson which had brought her
some celebrity.

[Footnote 128: In point of fact, Goethe announced himself. Merck
arrived after him.]

[Footnote 129: In a letter to Schiller (July 24th, 1799) Goethe gives
a much less favourable estimate of Frau von la Roche, whom he had just
met: "Sie gehoert zu den nivellierenden Naturen, sie hebt das Gemeine
herauf und zieht das Vorzuegliche herunter...."]

With Frau von la Roche Goethe established a Platonic relation which he
assiduously cultivated during the remainder of his residence in
Frankfort, but there was another member of the household to whom he
was attracted by a livelier feeling. This was the elder of the two
daughters, Maximiliane by name, a girl of seventeen, whose charms were
subsequently to be given to the lady of Werther's infatuation. From
what we have seen of Goethe's inflammability, we are prepared for the
naive remark in which he records his new sensation. "It is a very
pleasant sensation," he says, "when a new passion begins to stir in us
before the old one is quite extinct. So, as the sun sets, we gladly
behold the moon rise on the opposite horizon, and rejoice in the
double splendour of the two heavenly lights." Be it said that the
atmosphere of the household was provocative of relaxed feelings.
Goethe was not the only guest. Besides Merck there was a youth named
Leuchsenring whose special line of activity had endeared him to a wide
circle. Leuchsenring made it his business to enter into correspondence
with susceptible souls whose effusions he carried about with him in
dispatch-boxes and was in the habit of reading aloud to sympathetic
listeners. The reading of these precious documents was part of the
entertainment of the circle in which Goethe now found himself, and he
assures us that he enjoyed it. We see, therefore, the world in which
he was now moving--a world in which those who belonged to it made it
their first concern to titillate their sensibilities, and squandered
their emotions with a profusion and abandonment in which
self-respecting reserve was forgotten. It was a world wide as the
poles apart from that of Sesenheim, where human relations were founded
on natural feeling and only the language of the heart was spoken. Once
again Goethe had taken on the hue of his surr