of the weak, who wept about nothing and made a vocation of their tears and feelings, as did the hair-brained Leuchsenring. But shortly after this, sentimental nature received a rude shock. Goethe had represented in Werther, the sorrowful fate of a youth who had perished in consequence of these moods; but had himself a far nobler and more sound conception of sentiment than existed in his contemporaries. His narrative was indeed a book for the moulding of finer natures, through which their sentimentality was turned towards the noble and poetic. Immense was the effect; tears flowed in streams; the Werther dress became a favourite costume with sentimental gentlemen, and Lotte the most renowned female character of that year. That same year, 1774, a number of tender souls at Wetzlar, men in high offices and ladies, agreed together to arrange a solemnity at the grave of the poor Jerusalem. They assembled in the evening, read "Werther," and sang the laments and songs on the dead. They wept profusely; at last, at midnight, the procession went to the churchyard. Every one was dressed in black, with a dark veil over the face, and a torch in the hand. Any one who met the procession considered it as a procession of devils. At the churchyard they formed a circle round the grave, and sang, as is reported, the song, "Ausgelitten hast du, ausgerungen;" an orator made a eulogy on the dead, and said that suicide was permitted to love. Finally the grave was strewed with flowers.[31] The repetition of this was prevented by prosaic magistrates. But the tragical conclusion of Goethe's narrative shocked men of sound understanding. It was no longer a question of jest with flowers and doves: it was convulsive earnest. When the respectable son of an official could arrive at such extravagance as suicide, there was an end of jest. Thus this same work gave rise to a reaction in stronger natures, and violent literary polemics, from which the Germans gradually learnt to regard with irony this phase of sentiment, yet without becoming entirely free from it. For it was undoubtedly only a variation of the same fundamental tendency, when souls that had become weary of sighs and tears threw themselves into the sublime. Even the monstrous appeared admirable. To speak in hyperbolies--to express with the utmost strength the commonest things, to give the most insignificant action the air of being something extraordinary--became for a long time the fashionable folly of the literary circle. But even this exaggeration disappeared About 1790, the past was looked back upon with smiles, and the spirits of men were contented with the homely, modest style in which Lafontaine and Iffland produced emotion.