No longer harassed by incessant business, and enjoying to the full his life with Christiane, Goethe had resumed his literary work with enthusiasm. Its first-fruits were his “Römische Elegien” (“Roman Elegies”), in which he gave utterance to the delight he had experienced at Rome. Side by side with the poet stands a beautiful girl, his love for whom is intimately connected with all the other influences under which his heart expands in the great city. In sketching this figure, Goethe was no doubt thinking chiefly of Christiane, whom in imagination he transported to the land where life had seemed to him so full of glory. In these poems there is an occasional warmth of expression that has sometimes given offence, but, judged simply as works of art, they are as near perfection as anything Goethe ever wrote. The passion expressed in them is deep and ardent, yet the forms and scenes with which it is associated stand out as clearly as a landscape under the bright Italian sky. The “Elegies” would have taken an enduring place in literature if they had had nothing to commend them but the splendour of their diction and melody. While working at the “Elegies,” Goethe strove to complete his drama, “Torquato Tasso,” a part of which had been written long before in prose. In Italy he had hoped to be able, before returning to Weimar, to clothe the conception of this play in fitting verse. The task, however, was too hard to be accomplished quickly, and even at Weimar he did not bring it to an end until the summer of 1789. “Tasso” was the last of the series of plays either wholly or in part transformed in Italy. We have seen that even before Goethe went to Italy his conception of the true aim and method of dramatic art had begun to undergo a profound change. In Italy this process of development was completed, partly by the influence of classical literature, but mainly by that of ancient sculpture. Here, following the track marked out by Winckelmann, he had found that the supreme aim of ancient artists was ideal beauty, and that they had sought to attain it by the harmonious combination of parts in a whole, so that the figures created by them should convey in action an impression of noble simplicity, dignity, and calm. This was the ideal he kept steadily before himself in most of the work begun or completed in Rome.