BOOK THE SECOND. STUDENT DAYS. 1765 to 1771. 'In grossen Städten lernen früh Fast klüger als sein Vater war • Eser taught me that the Ideal of Beauty is Simplicity and Repose, and thence it follows that no youth can be a Master.' BOOK THE SECOND. CHAPTER I. THE LEIPSIC STUDENT. In the month of October 1765, Goethe, aged sixteen, arrived in Leipsic, to commence his collegiate life, and to lay, as he hoped, the solid foundation of a future professorship. He took lodgings in the Feuerkugel, between the Old and New Markets, and was by the rector of the University inscribed on the 19th as student in the Bavarian nation.' At that period, and until quite recently, the University was classed according to four Nations,' viz., the Meissnisch, the Saxon, the Bavarian, and the Polish. Goethe, as a Frankfurter, was placed in the Bavarian.* If the reader has any vivid recollection of the Leipsic chapters in the Autobiography, let me beg him to dismiss it with all haste from his mind; the calm narrative of his Excellency J. W. von Goethe very inaccurately represents the actual condition of the raw, wild student, just escaped from the paternal roof, with money which seems * Otto Jahn, in the Briefe an Leipziger Freunde, p. 9. unlimited in his purse, with the world before him as an oyster which his genius is to open. His own letters, and the letters of his friends, enable us to read between the lines' of the Autobiography, and to read there a very different account. He first presented himself to Hofrath Böhme, a genuine German professor, shut within the narrow circle of his speciality. To him Literature and the Fine Arts were trivialities; and when the confiding youth confessed his secret ambition of studying belles lettres, in lieu of the jurisprudence commanded by his father, he met with every discouragement. Yet it was not difficult to persuade this impressionable student that to rival Otto and Heineccius was the true ambition of a vigorous mind. He set to work in earnest, at first, as students usually do on arriving at seats of learning. His attendance at the lectures on philosophy, history of law, and jurisprudence, was assiduous enough to have pleased even his father. But this flush of eagerness quickly subsided. Logic was invincibly repugnant to him. He hungered for realities, and could not be satisfied with definitions. To see operations of his mind which, from childhood upwards, had been conducted with perfect ease and unconsciousness, suddenly pulled to pieces, in order that he might gain the superfluous knowledge of what they were, and what they were called, was to him tiresome and frivolous. 'I fancied I knew as much about God and the world as the professor himself, and logic seemed in many places to come to a dead standstill.' We are here on the threshold of that experience which has been immortalized in the scene between Mephistopheles and the Student. Jurisprudence soon became almost equally tiresome. He already knew as much law as the professor thought proper to communicate; and what with the tedium of the lectures, |