whose jokes and fooleries were incessant. His disposition fluctuated between
gaiety and melancholy, and Rousseau attracted him. Meanwhile his health
declined until a long illness, which began with a hemorrhage, caused him to
oscillate for days between life and death; and convalescence, generally so
delightful, was marred by a serious tumor. His father's disposition was stern, and
he could become passionate and bitter, and his mother's domesticity made her
turn to religion, so that on coming home he formed the acquaintance of a
religious circle. Again Goethe was told by a hostile child that he was not the true
son of his father. This inoculated him with a disease that long lurked in his
system and prompted various indirect investigations to get at the truth, during
which he compared all distinguished guests with his own physiognomy to detect
his own likeness.
Up to the Leipzig period he had great joy in wandering unknown, unconscious of
self; but he soon began to torment himself with an almost hypertrophied fancy
that he was attracting much attention, that others' eyes were turned on his person
to fix it in their memories, that he was scanned and found fault with; and hence
he developed a love of the country, of the woods and solitary places, where he
could be hedged in and separated from all the world. Here he began to throw off
his former habit of looking at things from the art standpoint and to take pleasure
in natural objects for their own sake. His mother had almost grownup to
consciousness in her two oldest children, and his first disappointment in love
turned his thought all the more affectionately toward her and his sister, a year
younger. He was long consumed with amazement over the newly awakening
sense impulse that took intellectual forms and the mental needs that clothed
themselves in sense images. He fell to building air castles of opposition lecture
courses and gave himself up to many dreams of ideal university conditions. He
first attended lectures diligently, but suffered much harm from being too
advanced; learned a great deal that he could not regulate, and was thereby made
uncomfortable; grew interested in the fit of his clothes, of which hitherto he had
been careless. He was in despair at the uncertainty of his own taste and
judgment, and almost feared he must make a complete change of mind,
renouncing what he had hitherto learned, and so one day in great contempt for
his past burned up his poetry, sketches, etc.
He had learned to value and love the Bible, and owed his moral culture to it. Its
events and symbols were deeply stamped upon him, so without being a pietist he
was greatly moved at the scoffing spirit toward it which he met at the university.
From youth he had stood on good terms with God, and at times he had felt that