FRANKFORT--_GOeTZ VON BERLICHINGEN_ AUGUST, 1771--DECEMBER, 1771 Goethe returned to Frankfort at the end of August, 1771, and, with the exception of two memorable intervals, he remained there till November, 1775, when he left it, never again to make it his permanent home.

This period of four years and two months is in creative productiveness unparalleled in his own career, and is probably without a parallel in literary history.

During these years he produced _Goetz von Berlichingen_ and _Werther_, both of which works, whatever their merits or demerits, are at least landmarks, not only in the history of German, but of European literature.

To the same period belong the original scenes of _Faust_, in which he displayed a richness of imagination with a spontaneity of passion, of thought and of feeling, to which he never attained in the subsequent additions he made to the poem.

In these scenes are already clearly defined the two figures, Faust and Mephistopheles, which have their place in the world's gallery of imaginative creations beside Ulysses and Don Quixote, Hamlet and Falstaff; and there, too, in all her essential lineaments, we have Gretchen, the most moving of all the births of a poet's mind and heart.