who, by her goodness, her candor, her sweet reasonableness, not only
heals her soul-sick brother, but so works on the barbarian king Thoas,
who would fain have her for his wife, that he wins a notable victory
over himself.

By the end of his first decade in Weimar Goethe began to feel that he
needed and had earned a vacation. His conduct of the public business
had been highly successful, but he had starved his esthetic nature;
for after all Weimar was only a good-sized village that could offer
little to the lover of art. Overwork had so told upon him that he was
unable to hold himself long to any literary project. He had begun half
a dozen important works, but had completed none of them, and the
public was beginning to suspect that the author of _Götz_ and
_Werther_ was lost to literature. The effect of the whole
situation--that inner conflict between the poetic dreamer and the man
of affairs which is the theme of _Tasso_--was to produce a feeling of
depression, as of a bird caught in a net. So acute did the trouble
become that he afterwards spoke of it as a terrible disease. In the
summer of 1786 he contracted with the Leipzig publisher Göschen for a
new edition of his works in eight volumes; and to gain time for this
enterprise he resolved to take a trip to the land upon which he had
already twice looked down with longing--once in 1775 and again in
1779--from the summit of the Gotthard.

[Illustration: GOETHE IN THE CAMPAGNA]

On the 3d of September, at three o'clock in the morning, he stole away
from Karlsbad, where he had been taking the waters, and hurried
southward, alone and incognito, over the Alps.