Much as my understanding and my feeling inclined me to this side, there was still no lack of weighty arguments in favour of my new route. My father had laid out for me a fine plan of travel, and had given me a little library, which might prepare me for the scenes I was to visit, and also guide me on the spot. In my leisure hours I had had no other entertainment than to reflect on it, and, indeed, during my last short journey I had thought of nothing else in the coach. Those glorious objects which, from my youth up, I had become acquainted with, histories and all sorts of tales, gathered before my soul, and nothing seemed to me so desirable as to visit them, while I was parting from Lili for ever.
As these thoughts passed through my mind I had dressed myself and was walking up and down my chamber. My anxious hostess entered. "What am I to hope?" she cried. "Dearest madam," I answered;" say no more on the subject; I have made up my mind to return: the grounds of that conclusion I have well weighed, and to repeat them to you would be wasting time. A resolution must be taken sooner or later, and who should take it but the person whom it most concerns?"
I was moved, and so was she; and we had an excited scene, which I cut short by ordering my servant to engage a post-coach. In vain I begged my hostess to calm herself, and to turn the mock-departure which I took of the company the evening before into a real one; to consider that it was only a temporary visit, a postponement for a short time; that my Italian journey was not given up, and my return that way was not precluded. She would listen to nothing, and she disquieted her friend, already deeply excited, still more. The coach was at the door; everything was packed, and the postilion gave the usual signs of impatience; I tore myself away; she would not let me go, and with so much art brought up all the arguments of the present, that finally, impassioned and inspired, I shouted out the words of Egmont:
"Child! child! no more! The coursers of time, lashed, as it were, by invisible spirits, hurry on the light car of our destiny, and all that we can do is in cool self-possession to hold the reins with a firm hand, and to guide the wheels, now to the left, now to the right, avoiding a stone here, or a precipice there. Whither it is hurrying who can tell? and who, indeed, can remember the point from which it started?"
END OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
Götz von Berlichingen
"Götz von Berlichingen bei den Zigeunern" - von Moritz von Beckerath (1868 - Frankfurter Goethehaus, Freies Deutsches Hochstift)