With Frau von la Roche Goethe established a Platonic relation which he assiduously cultivated during the remainder of his residence in Frankfort, but there was another member of the household to whom he was attracted by a livelier feeling. This was the elder of the two daughters, Maximiliane by name, a girl of seventeen, whose charms were subsequently to be given to the lady of Werther's infatuation. From what we have seen of Goethe's inflammability, we are prepared for the naive remark in which he records his new sensation. "It is a very pleasant sensation," he says, "when a new passion begins to stir in us before the old one is quite extinct. So, as the sun sets, we gladly behold the moon rise on the opposite horizon, and rejoice in the double splendour of the two heavenly lights." Be it said that the atmosphere of the household was provocative of relaxed feelings. Goethe was not the only guest. Besides Merck there was a youth named Leuchsenring whose special line of activity had endeared him to a wide circle. Leuchsenring made it his business to enter into correspondence with susceptible souls whose effusions he carried about with him in dispatch-boxes and was in the habit of reading aloud to sympathetic listeners. The reading of these precious documents was part of the entertainment of the circle in which Goethe now found himself, and he assures us that he enjoyed it. We see, therefore, the world in which he was now moving--a world in which those who belonged to it made it their first concern to titillate their sensibilities, and squandered their emotions with a profusion and abandonment in which self-respecting reserve was forgotten. It was a world wide as the poles apart from that of Sesenheim, where human relations were founded on natural feeling and only the language of the heart was spoken. Once again Goethe had taken on the hue of his surroundings. In Leipzig he had been what we have seen him; now under the influence of Darmstadt he appears in still another phase--to be by no means the last. From Goethe's connection with the family of von la Roche was to come the occasion which immediately prompted the production of _Werther_, but more than a year was to elapse before the occasion came, and in the interval his own mental experiences were to supply him with further materials which were to find expression in that work. In his correspondence of the period we have the fullest revelation of these experiences, and they leave us with the impression that he spoke only the literal truth when he tells us in his Autobiography that, on being delivered of _Werther_, he felt as if he had made a general confession. The same period, moreover, is signalised by a succession of minor productions which, though they did not attain to the celebrity of _Goetz_ and _Werther_, exhibit a range of intellectual interests and a play of varied moods which materially enhance our conceptions of his genius.