The same period, moreover, is signalised by a succession
of minor productions which, though they did not attain to the
celebrity of _Goetz_ and _Werther_, exhibit a range of intellectual
interests and a play of varied moods which materially enhance our
conceptions of his genius.
The circumstances in which Goethe had left Friederike had precluded
subsequent communications with her and her family; in the case of the
Wetzlar circle there was no such impediment to future epistolary
intercourse. He had left Lotte Buff, as he tells us, with a clearer
conscience than he had left Friederike, and on the part of Lotte and
Kestner there was apparently no feeling that prompted a breach of
their relations with him. For more than a year he kept up assiduous
communications with Wetzlar; then his letters became less frequent and
finally ceased when changes in the circumstances of both parties
effaced their mutual interests. While the correspondence was in full
flood, however, Goethe's letters leave us in no doubt as to the real
nature of his passion for Lotte; if words mean anything, his memories
of her were a cause of mental unrest to which other distractions of
the time gave a morbid direction, and which threatened to end in moral
collapse.
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