Alide by Emma Lazarus

"When we are man and wife. " These half-dozen words kept ringing in Goethe's ears and haunting persistently his brain. Each one seemed to fall separately upon his sense with its own little shock of surprise, though the idea they conveyed had been long, in a vague way, familiar to his mind. It would be idle to assert that he had drifted blindly to this end and that he now for the first time realized the significance and result of his passion. But it is true that he had never before framed this idea in words, nor imagined it as it now presented itself, an incongruous and inevitable fact.

He who felt conscious of a superabundant vitality that was to expend itself in every phase of experience, he who awoke daily to a keener perception of the capabilities of a worthily-developed soul, he who fancied in his exalted hours that he heard the voices of art, science, and nature invoking him, their darling son, -- in the recklessness of his extravagant youth he had fettered himself for the remainder of his days, he had cramped his wide-soaring flight to keep pace with the halting footsteps of a child; at the threshold of a world that seemed all too narrow for his energies and capacities he had bound himself to tread the accustomed, decorous paths of a commonplace German citizen. For so long a time he had been in the habit of seeing all things through the medium of his passion, that it seemed as if a film or a glamour had been brushed suddenly from before his eyesight.