You have felt what a rapture it is
to me to be the object of your love. Oh! the joy of believing that one
receives more from others than one gives. Oh, Love, Love! The poverty
of riches--what force works in me when I embrace in him all that is
wanting in myself, and yet give to him what I have.... Believe me, we
might henceforth be dumb to each other, and, meeting again after many
a day, we should feel as if we had all along been walking hand in
hand."[189]
[Footnote 189: _Werke, Briefe_, ii. 182.]
In the first weeks of October Goethe made personal acquaintance with a
more distinguished personage than either Lavater or Basedow or
Jacobi--"the patriarch of German poetry," Klopstock, the author of the
_Messias_.[190] Since his childhood, the name of Klopstock had been
familiar to Goethe. To his conservative father, the _Messias_, as
written in unrhymed verse, was a monstrosity in German literature, and
he refused to give it a place in his library. Surreptitiously
introduced into the house, however, Goethe had read it with enthusiasm
and committed its most striking passages to memory. And he had
retained his admiration throughout all the successive changes in his
own literary ideals.
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