As I have already said, Goethe realised the value of life in good time. Having become an optimist, he experienced the joy of existence and coveted as much of it as possible. When he was an old man, he declared that life, like the Sibylline books, became more valuable the fewer of them were left. There appeared in him a normal phase of human nature. The conditions under which he lived, however, were far from ideal. His health was indifferent. In his youth he suffered from severe hæmorrhage, probably tuberculous, and throughout his life he was subject to various more or less serious maladies, such as gout, colic, nephritis, and intestinal troubles. His habits were unwholesome. He was brought up in a region of vineyards, and in his youth he acquired the habit of drinking wine in quantities certainly harmful. This he himself realised, and when he was thirty-one years old, after he had acquired the instinct of life, he gave it serious attention. “I wish I could abstain from wine,” he wrote in his note-book. Some weeks later he wrote, “I now drink almost no wine.”[194] But he had not the strength of character to remain temperate, and soon after his decision, he had fits of bleeding at the nose, which he attributed to “having taken some glasses of wine.”[195] To his last day, he took wine regularly, and sometimes to excess. J. H. Wolff, who dined with him at Weimar, when he was in his eightieth year, was surprised by his appetite and by the quantity of wine he drank. “In addition to other food, he ate an enormous portion of roast goose, and drank a bottle of red wine.”[196] In Eckermann’s interesting narrative of the last ten years of Goethe’s life (1822-1832) there is repeated mention of wine. Goethe seized every occasion to drink it. Sometimes it was the visit of a stranger, sometimes a present of some famous vintage. It was said that he drank from one to two bottles of wine daily (Moebius). None the less, he was convinced that wine was not good for intellectual work. He had remarked that when his friend Schiller had drunk more than usual, to increase his strength and stimulate his literary activity, the result was deplorable. He said to Eckermann (March 11, 1828), “He will ruin his health and will spoil his work. That is why he has made the faults the critics have pointed out.” In another conversation (March 11, 1828) he stated that what was written under the influence of wine was abnormal and forced, and ought to be deleted. Love was the great stimulus of Goethe’s genius. The love affairs, the histories of which fill his biography, are well known. Many have been shocked by them; others have tried to justify them. It has been suggested that his disposition made it necessary for him to impart his ideas and obtain sympathy for them, and that his love for women was the expression of a purely artistic feeling and had nothing in common with the ordinary passion.