position. All his best thoughts and expressions, he says, came to him while walking; he could do nothing seated.

Connected with his biblical studies, and his Confirmation which took place in 1763, we catch a glimpse of Fräulein von Klettenberg, whose letters and conversations subsequently furnished him with the Confessions of a Fair Saint' in Wilhelm Meister.* Her influence was avowedly very great, both now and subsequently. It was not so much the effect of religious discussion, as the experience it gave him of a deeply religious nature. She was neither bigot nor prude. Her faith was an inner light which shed mild radiance around her. Moved by her influence, he wrote a series of Religious Odes, after the fashion of that day, and greatly pleased his father by presenting them copied neatly in a quarto volume. His father begged that every year he would present him with such a volume.

A very different sort of female influence has now to be touched on. His heart began to flutter with the emotions of love. He was not quite fifteen, when Gretchen, the sister of one of his disreputable companions, first agitated his imagination with her charms. The story is told in a rambling way in the Autobiography, and may here be very briefly dismissed. He had often turned his poetical talents to practical purposes, namely, writing wedding and funeral verses, the produce of which went in joyous feastings. He was thus almost daily thrown with Gretchen; but she, though kind, treated him as a child, and never permitted the

* In Varnhagen von Ense's Vermischte Schriften (vol. iii. p. 33), the reader will find a few significant details respecting this remarkable person and some of her poems. (I cannot pass this reference to my oldest German friend without a word of acknowledgment for the unwearying kindness he has ever shown me, and the many ways in which he has assisted me in this biography.)

slightest familiarity. A merry life they led, in picnics and pleasure bouts; and the coronation of the Kaiser Joseph II. (so circumstantially narrated by him), was the occasion of increased festivity. One night, after the fatigues of a sight-seeing day, the hours rolled unheeded over these thoughtless, merry heads, and the stroke of midnight startled them. To his dismay, Wolfgang found he had forgotten the door-key with which hitherto he had been able to evade paternal knowledge of his late hours. Gretchen proposed they should all remain together, and pass the night in conversation. This was agreed on. But, as in all such cases, the effort was vain. Fatigue weighed down their eyelids; conversation became feebler and feebler; two strangers already slumbered in corners of the room; one friend sat in a corner with his betrothed, her head reposing on his shoulder; another crossing his arms upon the table, rested his head upon them — and snored. The noisy room had become silent. Gretchen and her lover sat by the window talking in undertones. Fatigue at length conquered her also, and drooping her head upon his shoulder she too slept. With tender pride he supported that delicious burden, till, like the rest, he gave way and slept.

Gretchen was

It was broad day when he awoke. standing before a mirror arranging her cap. She smiled on him more amiably than ever she had smiled before; and pressed his hand tenderly as he departed. But now, while he seemed drawing nearer to her, the dénouement was at hand. Some of the joyous companions had been guilty of nefarious practices, such as forgeries of documents. His friend and Gretchen were involved in the accusation, though falsely. Wolfgang had to undergo a severe investigation, which, as he was perfectly innocent, did not much afflict him; but an affliction came out of the

investigation, for Gretchen in her deposition concerning him said, ' I will not deny that I have often seen him, and seen him with pleasure, but I treated him as a child, and my affection for him was merely that of a sister.' His exasperation may be imagined. A boy aspiring to the dignity of manhood knows few things more galling than to be treated as a boy by the girl whom he has honored with his homage. He suffered greatly at this destruction of his romance; nightly was his pillow wet with tears; food became repugnant to him; life had no more an object.

But pride came to his aid; pride and that volatility of youth which compensates for extra sensitiveness by extra facility in forgetting. He threw himself into study, especially of philosophy, under guidance of a tutor, a sort of Wagner to the young Faust. This tutor, who preferred dusty quartos to all the landscapes in the world, used to banter him upon being a true German, such as Tacitus describes, avid of the emotions excited by solitude and scenery. Laughter weaned him not from the enjoyment. He was enjoying his first sorrow: the luxury of melancholy, the romance of a forlorn existence, drove him into solitude. Like Bellerophon he fed upon his own heart, away from the haunts of men,

Ον θυμον κατεδων, πατον ανθρωπων αλεείνων.

He made frequent walking excursions. Those mountains which from earliest childhood had stood so distant,' haunting him like a passion,' were now his favorite resorts. He visited Homburg, Kronburg, Königstein, Wiesbaden, Schwalbach, Biberich, etc. These filled his mind with lovely images, and became poems.

Severer studies were not neglected. To please his father he was diligent in application to jurisprudence; to

please himself he was still more diligent in literature: Morhof's Polyhistor, Gessner's Isagoge, and Bayle's Dictionary, filled him with a new ambition to become an University Professor! Herein, as indeed throughout his career, we see the strange impressionability of his nature, which, like the fabled chameleon, takes its color from every tree it lies under.

The melancholy fit did not last long. A circle of lively friends, among them Horn, of whom we shall hear more anon, drew him into gayety again. Their opinion of his talents appears to have been enormous; their love for him and interest in all he did, was like that which followed him through life. No matter what his mood in the wildest student-period, in the startling genius-period, and in the diplomatic-period; whatever offence his manner created was soon forgotten in the irresistible fascination of his nature. The secret of that fascination was his own overflowing lovingness, and his genuine interest in every individuality, however opposite to his own.

With these imperfect glances at his early career we close this Book, on his departure from home for the University of Leipsic. Before finally quitting this period, we may take a survey of the characteristics it exhibits, as some guide in our future inquiries.

CHAPTER V.

THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN.

As in the soft round lineaments of childhood we trace features which after years will develope into decisive forms, so in the moral lineaments of the Child may be traced the characteristics of the Man. But I have often thought that an apparent solution of continuity' takes place in the transition period, so that the youth is in many respects unlike what he has been in childhood, and what he will be in maturity. In youth, when the passions begin to stir, the character is made to swerve from the orbit previously traced. Passion, more than Character, rules the hour. Thus we often see the prudent child turn out an extravagant youth; but he crystallizes once more into prudence, as he hardens into age.

This was certainly the case with Goethe, who, if he had died young, like Shelley or Keats, would have left a name among the most genial, not to say enthusiastic, of poets; but who, living to the age of eighty-two, had fifty years of crystallization to form a character which perplexes critics. In his childhood, scanty as the details are which enable us to reconstruct it, we see the main features of the man. Let us glance rapidly at them.

And first of his manysidedness. Seldom has a boy exhibited such completeness of human faculties. The multiplied activity of his life is prefigured in the varied