The visit lasted a few days, and was of some importance, as it introduced Goethe to a society of which he was to see much during the remainder of his stay in Frankfort, and which, according to his own testimony, "invigorated and widened his powers." It was a society in which we are surprised to find the Mephistophelian Merck the leading and most admired member.

It consisted of a group of men and women associated with the Court at Darmstadt, whose bond of union was the cult of sensibility as the rising generation of Germany had learned it from Rousseau, Richardson, and Sterne.

They went by the name of the _Gemeinschaft der Heiligen_, and the fervours of the community were at least those of genuine votaries.

So far as Goethe is concerned, it was in three of the priestesses, one of them Caroline Flachsland, the betrothed of Herder, that he found the attraction of the society.

For the youth who two years later was to give classic expression to the cult of sensibility in his _Werther_, his intercourse with these ladies of Darmstadt was an appropriate schooling.