Reflections are very light wares, but prayer is a profitable business; a single welling-up of the heart to Him whom we call _a_ God till we can name Him _our_ God, and we are overwhelmed by the multitude of our mercies."[67] [Footnote 67: _Ib._ pp.

240, 241.] This mood, we cannot help feeling, sits ill on Goethe; pious as are his expressions, they have not the ring of the genuine believer.

Yet it would be unjust to charge him with deliberate hypocrisy.

The truth is that at this time, and indeed throughout all his sojourn in Strassburg, he was in a state of nervous irritability of which both himself and his friends were aware.[68] Other expressions in letters of the same date reveal a variability of moods, the only explanation of which is that he had not fully recovered from the depressed mental condition consequent on his long illness in Frankfort.

But his unnatural mood of piety did not long withstand the new influences to which he was now subjected, and it is in a letter to Fraeulein von Klettenberg herself, written towards the end of August, that he intimates his growing distaste for the religious set to whom she had introduced him in Strassburg.