"[151] He had now gone the round of all the
experiences embodied in _Werther_; on February 1st he resumed the
discontinued work, and, writing "almost in a state of somnambulism,"
finished it in a few weeks.
[Footnote 151: _Werke, Briefe_, ii. 140.]
But besides his own immediate personal experience, there went other
influences to the production of _Werther_ which affected alike its
form and its contents. In his Autobiography Goethe has minutely
analysed these influences, and the most potent of them he traces to
the impression made by English literature on himself and his
contemporaries. What impressed them as the prevailing note of that
literature was a melancholy disillusion which regarded life as a sorry
business at the best, and Goethe specifies Young, Gray, and Ossian as
representative interpreters of this mood. In verses like these, he
says, we have the precise expression of the moral disease which he has
depicted in _Werther_:--
To griefs congenial prone,
More wounds than nature gave he knew;
While misery's form his fancy drew
In dark ideal hues and horrors not its own![152]
[Footnote 152: These lines are by the Earl of Rochester.
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