And, besides these three works of universal interest, there belong to the same period a series of productions--plays, lyrics, essays--which, though at a lower level of inspiration, were sufficient to mark their author as an original genius with a compass of thought and imagination hitherto unexampled in the literature of his country.
Had Goethe died at the age of twenty-six, he would have left behind him a legacy which would have assured him a place with the great creative minds of all time.
This extraordinary productiveness of itself implies an intellectual and spiritual ferment which receives further illustration from the poet's letters written during the same period.

In these letters we have the expression of a mind distracted by contending emotions and conflicting aims, now in sanguine hope, now paralysed with a sense of impotence to adjust itself to the inexorable conditions under which life had to be lived.

Moods of thinking and feeling follow each other with a rapidity of contrast which are bewildering to the reader and hardly permit him to draw any certain inference as to the real import of what is written.

In one effusion we have lachrymose sentiment which suggests morbid self-relaxation; in another, a bitter cynicism equally suggestive of ill-regulated emotions.

We have moods of piety and moods in which the mental attitude towards all human aspirations can only be described as Mephistophelian.
Goethe himself was well aware of a congenital morbid strain in him which all through his life demanded careful control if he were to avert bodily and mental collapse.