“They make us at once happy and miserable! They fill our heart with feelings of bliss! What new, unknown feelings and hopes fill our souls, when their stormful passion invades our nerves! How often has everything in me trembled and throbbed, =when, in uncontrollable tears, he has washed away the sorrows of a world on my breast=! I begged him, for God’s sake, to spare himself!--to spare me!--in vain!--=into my inmost marrow he fanned the flames which were devouring himself=. And thus the girl, from head to foot, became all heart, all sentiment.” Here we find clearly described the erotic element in mental pain; and we observe the remarkable =increase= of passion by means of sorrow, tears, and a profound perception of the evil of the world. This Weltschmerz fans the flames of eroticism, increases love, and ultimately gives rise to a peculiar sense of power; it is, indeed, most frequently in the first bloom of love, in the years of puberty, that its relations with sexuality are most distinctly manifested. The celebrated alienist Mendel has described this almost physiological Weltschmerz of the age of puberty as “hypo-melancholia.” An indefinite, passionate longing, which seeks relief in tears, a by no means negligible inclination to suicide--of which Werther is the classical exemplar--characterizes this condition, which is connected with the complete revolutionizing of the spiritual and emotional life by means of the sexual. The Weltschmerz of youth is a latent sexual sense of power. How the nature-sense and love combine to constitute a perception of Weltschmerz has been most beautifully expressed by Byron and Heine in their poetry. With quite exceptional clearness, Heine also describes it in a letter to Friedrich Merckel (written at Nordeney on August 7, 1826), in which he described a nightly recurring scene with a beautiful woman on the seashore: “The sea no longer appeared so romantic as before--and yet on its strand I had lived through the =sweetest= and most mystically dear experience of my life which could ever inspire a poet. The moon seemed to wish to show me that in this world happiness yet remained for me. We did not speak--it was only a long, profound glance, the moonlight supplied the music--as we walked to and fro, I took her hand in mine, I felt the secret pressure--my soul trembled and glowed--=afterwards I wept=.” How different were these tears from the floods of tears in Miller’s “Siegwart,” and in other similar productions of the Werther epoch, which, with their weakly sentimentality, their emotionally happy “sensibility,” had nothing whatever in common with the much more natural Weltschmerz of Goethe and Heine--more natural because based on a physiological foundation.