company of his only sister Cornelia, to whom he was passionately attached. Before he was ten years of age he wrote several languages, meditated poems, invented stories, and had a considerable familiarity with works of art. Frankfort was a mediæval city, full of old associations and the remains of antique customs, but just beginning to stir with the quick movements of a more modern trade and industry. None of its influences, old or new, were lost upon the child, whose position in middle life, while it brought him in contact with the most cultivated men of society, did not exempt him from occasional mixture with the lower orders, or from the ruder experiences of life. His first love for Gretchen, a girl in the humblest ranks, began amid a circle of forgers and delinquents. In October, 1765, at the age of 16, he was sent to Leipsic to begin his collegiate studies. His autobiography passes over this part of his life with a few words, but other evidences show that it was a time not of hard and varied study merely, but of much wild and frolicsome adventure. While he mastered with an easy grace the manifold sciences and arts of a German university, jurisprudence, medicine, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, morals, drawing, &c., he was no less at home in those wayward and capricious sports, in the love-makings and the merry-makings, which are natural to this period of life. No criminal indulgences are charged upon him, but he lived freely and buoyantly, preferring often the society of jovial companions, free thinkers and actors, to that of the more accepted respectabilities of a staid literary metropolis. He had already fallen into the habit of turning his inward feelings into verse, and two dramas, Die Laune des Verliebten and Die Mitschuldigen, grew out of his more erratic impulses. After a brief interval passed in sickness at home, during which he read the books of the alchemists, he was transferred in 1770 to the university of Strasburg, where he renewed his studies of jurisprudence and the natural sciences, enlarged the number of his acquaintances, including Herder and Jung-Stilling, and fell in love with the daughter of a dancing master. Herder's friendship was of the greatest use to him, as it introduced him reading of Shakespeare, Goldsmith, and other English classics, and awakened within him a profounder sense of the grand poetry of the Hebrew Scriptures. He had fallen in with the family of a clergyman at Sesenheim, where there were two daughters, with one of whom, Frederika, he became enamored, and they were finally betrothed; but in leaving the university in 1771, he tore himself away from the bond and the attachment. Impetuous and headlong as he was, there was already a tendency in him to value external objects, human and others, as they assisted in that deep and varied culture which he began to make the principal aim of his existence. In 1772 he went to Wetzlar to practise law, and in the following year published a play destined to attract public atten- tion toward him, and to give the world its earliest glimpses of his extraordinary genius. This was Götz von Berlichingen, a dramatic version of the story of Götz of the Iron Hand, an old predatory burgrave of the 16th century, who made war upon his fellow barons, sometimes to increase his own store, and sometimes defence of the poor. His lawless career represented the sturdy struggle of feudalism against an advancing civilization, and Goethe seized the incidents to present them in a clear, powerful, picturesque, and dramatic whole. This work was the outbreak of a genius as rude and stalwart almost as Götz himself, asserting ts freedom against the fetters of an artificial literary spirit; one of the earliest throes in that period of intellectual convulsion in Germany which has taken the name of the Sturm-und Drangperiode, or storm and pressure period. It excited the greatest enthusiasm in the literary world, and romantic dramas for a time became the fashion. In the interval Goethe had passed the time in wandering through the Rhine country. At Wetzlar he again fell in love, but as the object of his love, Charlotte Buff, was betrothed to one Kestner, to whom she was soon after married, the affection was not returned. A young student named Jerusalem, with whom Goethe was intimate, having committed suicide because of a similar unhappy passion for the wife of one of his friends, Goethe wove the incidents of the two cases into a novel, which he called Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774), known in English as “The Sorrows of Werther.” The sensation produced by it was prodigious. The most distinguished literary men praised it as a profoundly philosophic romance, while the common people were carried away by its eloquence and pathos. Its chief success, however, arose from the fact that it expressed a certain sad longing and discontent which was then a characteristic of the age. The same year he wrote Clavigo, a drama founded on Beaumarchais's memoir on Clavijo, projected a drama on Mohammed, another on Prometheus, only a few lines of either of which wore written, and already revolved in his mind the drama of Faust. Two love engagements, one with Anna Sibylla Münch, and the other with Anna Elisabeth Schönemann, immortalized in his works under the name of Lili, diversified the experiences of this period. The fame acquired by Werther brought Goethe under the notice of Charles Augustus, grand duke of Saxe-Weimar, who in 1775 invited the poet to spend a few weeks at his court. Goethe went there, and the result of the friendship thus contracted was that Goethe thereafter made Weimar his permanent residence. He was created a Geheimer Legationsrath, or privy councillor of legation, at a salary of 1,200 thalers per annum; but his principal public occupation seems to have been to superintend the artistic pleasures of the court. Weimar was a small city, without trade or manufactures, but made up for its want of
