Notwithstanding his love for Lili, the engagement brought with it no happiness to Goethe. Her relatives, whom he disliked, thought he was not socially her equal, and he, to whom free expression was so essential, could not bear the restraints imposed upon him at Frau Schönemann’s fashionable parties. It embittered him, too, to see the readiness with which Lili responded to the courtesies of men who would gladly have supplanted him. He had a suspicion that she could never belong to him absolutely, and that if they became husband and wife her ideas would go on diverging more and more widely from his own. Torn by conflicting motives, Goethe felt at last that he must shake himself free for a while from the circumstances that caused him so much perplexity; and in the middle of May he started with the Counts Stolberg for Strasburg--all three, by the way, dressed in Werther’s style. From Strasburg he visited his sister at Emmendingen, who urged him to break off an engagement that seemed to her wholly unsuitable. He then travelled to Zürich, where he was cordially welcomed by Lavater; and afterwards he went southwards, thinking that he might perhaps go on to Italy. But, now that he was far away from Lili, she became dearer to him than ever. On her seventeenth birthday he was at the Pass of St. Gotthard, and, as he kissed the golden heart she had given him, he was seized by so ardent a longing to be with her again that he immediately turned back and began his homeward journey. On his return all the old difficulties presented themselves, and in the end, to the relief of Lili’s mother and Goethe’s parents, and not much apparently to the regret of the lovers themselves, the engagement was allowed to lapse. His relation to Lili had not moved him as he had been moved by his relation to Frederika and Lotte; nor did it become a source of inspiration in his later work. But to his love for her we owe two exquisite lyrics, “Neue Liebe, Neues Leben” (“New Love, New Life”), and “An Belinden” (“To Belinda”), and the finely humorous poem, “Lili’s Park.”