most adequate definition of the essential characteristic of Goethe's genius as a poet. "Your endeavour, your unswerving aim," he wrote, "is to give poetic form to the real. Others seek to realise the so-called poetic, the imaginative; and the result is nothing but stupid nonsense." Like subsequent critics, also, Merck saw the superiority of the first draft of _Goetz_ to the second, but when the latter was completed, he played a friend's part. "It is rubbish and of no account," was his characteristic remark; "however, let the thing be printed";[108] and published it was, Merck bearing the cost of printing and Goethe supplying the paper. [Footnote 108: Eckermann, _Gespraeche mit Goethe_, November 9th, 1824.] It was towards the close of 1771 that Goethe had made Merck's acquaintance[109] on the occasion of a visit Merck had paid to Frankfort; and in March of the following year, in company with the younger Schlosser, they renewed their intercourse in Darmstadt, where Merck was settled. The visit lasted a few days, and was of some importance, as it introduced Goethe to a society of which he was to see much during the remainder of his stay in Frankfort, and which, according to his own testimony, "invigorated and widened his powers." It was a society in which we are surprised to find the Mephistophelian Merck the leading and most admired member. It consisted of a group of men and women associated with the Court at Darmstadt, whose bond of union was the cult of sensibility as the rising generation of Germany had learned it from Rousseau, Richardson, and Sterne. They went by the name of the _Gemeinschaft der Heiligen_, and the fervours of the community were at least those of genuine votaries. So far as Goethe is concerned, it was in three of the priestesses, one of them Caroline Flachsland, the betrothed of Herder, that he found the attraction of the society. For the youth who two years later was to give classic expression to the cult of sensibility in his _Werther_, his intercourse with these ladies of Darmstadt was an appropriate schooling. For their sensibilities were boundless, and they did not shrink from giving them expression. Caroline relates to her future husband how one night in the woods she fell on her knees at sight of the moon and arranged some glow-worms in her hair so that their loves might not be disturbed. On one occasion when Merck and Goethe met two of the coterie, one of them embraced Merck with kisses and the other fell upon his breast. Goethe was not a youth to be indifferent to such favours, and the attentions of Caroline were such as to disquiet Herder and to occasion an estrangement between the two friends which lasted for nearly two years. [Footnote 109: It was Schlosser who had made Goethe and Merck acquainted. Herder, to whom Merck was known, had been a previous intermediary.]