Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 13.djvu/85

Rh ment and dissatisfaction at the disadvantageous change. In October of the same year, he received from Horn the following explanation:

"But, dear Moors! how glad you will be to learn that we have lost no friend in our Goethe, as we falsely supposed. He had so travestied himself as to deceive not only me but a great many others, and we should never have discovered the real truth of the matter, if your letter had not threatened him with the loss of a friend. I must tell you the whole story as he himself told it to me, for he has commissioned me to do so in order to save him the trouble. He is in love it is true—he has confessed it to me, and will confess it to you; but his love, though his circumstances are sad, is not culpable, as I formerly supposed. He loves. But not that young lady whom I suspected him of loving. He loves a girl beneath him in rank, but a girl whom—I think I do not say too much—you would yourself love if you saw her. I am no lover, so I shall write entirely without passion. Imagine to yourself a woman, well-grown though not very tall; a round, agreeable, though not extraordinarily beautiful face; open, gentle, engaging manners; a very pretty understanding, without having had any great education. He loves her very tenderly, with the perfect, honest intentions of a virtuous man, though he knows that she can never be his. Whether she loves him in return I know not. You know, dear Moors, that is a point about which one cannot well ask; but this much I can say to you, that they seem to be born for each other. Now observe his cunning! That no one may suspect him of such an attachment, he undertakes to persuade the world of precisely the opposite, and hitherto he has been extraordinarily successful. He makes a great parade and seems to be paying court to a certain young lady of whom I have told you before. He can see his beloved and converse with her at certain