On the loss of Gretchen he "wept and raved," and, as the result of his morbid sensibility, his constitution, always abnormally influenced by his emotions, was seriously impaired.

Here we have the _Weiblichkeit_, the feminine strain in his nature, which was noted by Schiller, and which explains the shrinking from all forms of pain which he inherited from his mother.
More than once these emotional elements in his nature were to bring him near to moral shipwreck, and it was doubtless the consciousness of such a possibility in his own case that explains his haunting interest in the character and career of Byron.

But underneath his "chameleon" temperament (the expression is his own[13]) there was a solid foundation, the lack of which was the ruin of Byron.

Goethe has himself told us what this saving element in him was.

It was a strenuousness and seriousness implanted in him by nature (_von der Natur in mich gelegter Ernst_), which, he says, "exerted its influence [on him] at an early age, and showed itself more distinctly in after years." This side of his complex nature did not escape the notice even of his youthful contemporaries.