And my heart seems as if it could not bear without them; and yet--if I were to die; if I were to leave this circle--would they feel--or how long would they feel--the void which my loss would make in their lives? How long? Yes, such is the frailty of man that even where he has the greatest certainty of his own being, where he makes the truest and most forcible impression in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish--vanish--and that so soon!
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, October 26, Book II
