FRANKFORT--_GOeTZ VON BERLICHINGEN_ AUGUST, 1771--DECEMBER, 1771 Goethe returned to Frankfort at the end of August, 1771, and, with the exception of two memorable intervals, he remained there till November, 1775, when he left it, never again to make it his permanent home. This period of four years and two months is in creative productiveness unparalleled in his own career, and is probably without a parallel in literary history. During these years he produced _Goetz von Berlichingen_ and _Werther_, both of which works, whatever their merits or demerits, are at least landmarks, not only in the history of German, but of European literature. To the same period belong the original scenes of _Faust_, in which he displayed a richness of imagination with a spontaneity of passion, of thought and of feeling, to which he never attained in the subsequent additions he made to the poem. In these scenes are already clearly defined the two figures, Faust and Mephistopheles, which have their place in the world's gallery of imaginative creations beside Ulysses and Don Quixote, Hamlet and Falstaff; and there, too, in all her essential lineaments, we have Gretchen, the most moving of all the births of a poet's mind and heart. And, besides these three works of universal interest, there belong to the same period a series of productions--plays, lyrics, essays--which, though at a lower level of inspiration, were sufficient to mark their author as an original genius with a compass of thought and imagination hitherto unexampled in the literature of his country. Had Goethe died at the age of twenty-six, he would have left behind him a legacy which would have assured him a place with the great creative minds of all time. This extraordinary productiveness of itself implies an intellectual and spiritual ferment which receives further illustration from the poet's letters written during the same period. In these letters we have the expression of a mind distracted by contending emotions and conflicting aims, now in sanguine hope, now paralysed with a sense of impotence to adjust itself to the inexorable conditions under which life had to be lived. Moods of thinking and feeling follow each other with a rapidity of contrast which are bewildering to the reader and hardly permit him to draw any certain inference as to the real import of what is written. In one effusion we have lachrymose sentiment which suggests morbid self-relaxation; in another, a bitter cynicism equally suggestive of ill-regulated emotions. We have moods of piety and moods in which the mental attitude towards all human aspirations can only be described as Mephistophelian.