TOWARDS ROME

“On the 3rd of September at three o'clock of the morning, I stole out of Carlsbad; they would not otherwise have let me go.” With the swiftness and secrecy of an escaped prisoner Goethe pursued his journey southward, through Munich and Innsbruck, over the Brenner, down along the shores of Garda to Verona, where for the first time he paused. From there he wrote to the friends in Weimar, but still gave them no hint of where he was. Even in Venice, where he stayed nearly three weeks, he still concealed his whereabouts, as though to reveal it before he had reached Rome might in some way jeopardise his whole plan. At last, two months after leaving Carlsbad, he wrote from Rome to tell his Duke and his other friends where he was and what had been the object of his unaccountable flight. This strange stealth, quite unjustified on rational consideration of the circumstances, is proof enough that Goethe was in no normal state during the summer and autumn of 1786. Suspicions and fears, the product only of his own strained phantasy, hunted him and would not be shaken off. He was in fact in danger of suffering some irremediable catastrophe such as has overtaken many of the noblest minds of German literature.