Unlike _La Nouvelle Héloïse, Werther_ is no glorification of the triumph of virtue and deistic piety over natural instincts and passions; it represents passion running its predestined course. In this tragedy of the human heart, the law-defying being and the lawless passion meet their inevitable doom. The termination to the story, however, was not of Goethe's invention; he made use of a manuscript describing the death of young Jerusalem (_vide_ Kestner's book on Goethe and Lotte). In its last lines he only altered a single word, as being too vulgar. The manuscript runs, "Barbiergesellen trugen ihn"; in the book we read, "Handwerker trugen ihn, kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet." This sentence in its cutting brevity intimates that a life is at an end, that a human being at war with himself and society, mortally wounded in his deepest sympathies, has succumbed. Mechanics bore him to the grave, middle-class society held pharisaically aloof; no priest accompanied him, for he was a suicide, and had defied the laws of religion; but he had loved the people and had associated with the uncultured, so they followed him to the grave. It is well known to what an outburst of sentimental literature this work gave rise; how its passionate emotion turned into heavy sentimentality, as in the case of Clauren, Lafontaine, and Rahbek, the Dane, or was diluted into sickly platonism, as in Ingemann's feeble imitation, _Varners Vandringer_, But _Werther_ was not responsible for all this; absorption in feeling and emotions is only one feature of the book. There wells forth from the very midst of this absorption such a healthy love of nature and of life, such a hearty, revolutionary ire at conventional society, its prejudices, its compulsory regulations, its terror of genius, whose stream might possibly overflow its banks and flood the "tulip beds and kitchen-gardens," that the main impression which the work leaves on our minds is that of the impulse towards originality and poetry which it depicts, arouses, and satisfies.