"I have lent my emotions to his (Werther's) history," he wrote shortly
after the completion of his work; "and so it makes a wonderful
whole."[158] In one of the best-known passages of his Autobiography he
tells how he morbidly dallied with the idea of suicide, and banished
the obsession only by convincing himself that he had not the courage
to plunge a dagger into his breast. In a remarkable passage, written
in his sixty-third year to his Berlin friend, Zelter, whose son had
committed suicide, he recalls with all seriousness the hypochondriacal
promptings which in his own case might have driven him to the fate of
Werther. "When the _taedium vitae_ takes possession of a man," he wrote,
"he is to be pitied and not to be blamed. That all the symptoms of
this wonderful, equally natural and unnatural, disease at one time
also convulsed my inmost being, _Werther_, indeed, leaves no one in
doubt. I know right well what resolves and what efforts it cost me at
that time to escape the waves of death, as from many a later shipwreck
I painfully rescued myself and with painful struggles recovered my
health of mind." At a still later date (1824) Goethe expressed himself
with equal emphasis to the same purport.
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