Why Did a Literary Superstar Spend a Decade as a Civil Servant?

Goethe became a European star at twenty-five with The Sorrows of Young Werther, but soon moved to the Duchy of Weimar to serve as a minister overseeing mines, roads, and finances. Living through both the solitude of the study and the whirl of real politics, he pondered how people grow.

Worn out by office, in 1786 he slipped away to Italy under an assumed name, telling almost no one, and stayed for nearly two years. One of the works he reshaped and finished from that time was the play Torquato Tasso (1790), where this line appears.