specially the mortification he had received during his brief official experience. But on the mind of the reader this incidental suggestion of other motives makes little impression; he feels that Werther's helpless abandonment to his passion for Charlotte is the central interest of the author himself, as it is a wholly adequate cause of the final catastrophe. [Footnote 157: "Werther," Goethe remarked to Henry Crabb Robinson, "praised Homer while he retained his senses, and Ossian when he was going mad."] By the fulness of its revelation of himself and by the impression it made on the public mind _Werther_ holds a unique place among the longer productions of Goethe. His own testimony, both at the time when it was written and in his later years, is conclusive proof of the degree to which it was a "general confession," as he himself calls it. "I have lent my emotions to his (Werther's) history," he wrote shortly after the completion of his work; "and so it makes a wonderful whole."[158] In one of the best-known passages of his Autobiography he tells how he morbidly dallied with the idea of suicide, and banished the obsession only by convincing himself that he had not the courage to plunge a dagger into his breast. In a remarkable passage, written in his sixty-third year to his Berlin friend, Zelter, whose son had committed suicide, he recalls with all seriousness the hypochondriacal promptings which in his own case might have driven him to the fate of Werther. "When the _taedium vitae_ takes possession of a man," he wrote, "he is to be pitied and not to be blamed. That all the symptoms of this wonderful, equally natural and unnatural, disease at one time also convulsed my inmost being, _Werther_, indeed, leaves no one in doubt. I know right well what resolves and what efforts it cost me at that time to escape the waves of death, as from many a later shipwreck I painfully rescued myself and with painful struggles recovered my health of mind." At a still later date (1824) Goethe expressed himself with equal emphasis to the same purport. "That is a creation (_Werther_)," he told Eckermann, "which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart. There is in it so much that was deepest in my own experience, so much of my own thoughts and sensations, that, in truth, a romance extending to ten such volumes might be made out of it. Since its appearance, I have read it only once, and have refrained from doing so again. It is nothing but a succession of rockets. I am uneasy when I look at it, and dread the return of the psychological condition out of which it sprang." [Footnote 158: _Werke, Briefe_, ii. 156.]