[212]
[Footnote 211: To this period probably belongs _Lilis Park_, the most
playfully humorous of Goethe's poems, in which he banters Lili on her
capricious treatment of himself (represented as a bear) as one of her
menagerie--the motley crowd of her suitors.]
[Footnote 212: Certain pranks played by Goethe during his stay in
Offenbach show that he was not wholly given up to "lover's
melancholy." On a moonlight night, robed in a white sheet, and mounted
on stilts (a form of exercise to which he was addicted), he went
through the town and created a panic among the inhabitants by looking
into their windows. On another occasion, at a baptism, he secretly
deposited the baby in a dish, and covering it with a towel, placed the
dish on a table where the company were assembled. It was only after
some time that the contents of the dish were revealed.]
On their return to Frankfort, however, his former griefs were renewed,
and a new distraction was added to them. "I am delighted that you are
so enamoured of my _Stella_," he writes to Fritz Jacobi on March 21st,
immediately after his return; "my heart and mind are now turned in
such entirely different directions that my own flesh and blood is
almost indifferent to me.
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