d original critic, he heard the gospel of a literary revolution.
Rules and conventions were to be thrown overboard; the new watchwords
were nature, power, originality, genius, fulness of expression. He
conceived a boundless admiration for Homer, Ossian, and Shakespeare,
in each of whom he saw the mirror of an epoch and a national life. He
became an enthusiastic collector of Alsatian folksongs and was
fascinated by the Strassburg minster--at a time when "Gothic" was
generally regarded as a synonym of barbarous. Withal his gift for
song-making came to a new stage of perfection under the inspiration of
his love for the village maid Friederike Brion. From this time forth
he was the prince of German lyrists.

In the summer of 1771 he returned to Frankfurt once more, this time
with the title of licentiate in law, and began to practise in a
perfunctory way, with his heart in his literary projects. By the end
of the year he had written out the first draft of a play which he
afterwards revised and published anonymously (in 1773) under the title
of _Goetz von Berlichingen_. By its exuberant fulness of life, its
bluff German heartiness, and the freshness and variety of its scenes,
it took the public by storm, notwithstanding its disregard of the
approved rules of play-writing.

[Illustration: JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE _From the Painting by J.
Stieler_]

The next year he published _The Sufferings of Young Werther_, a tragic
tale of a weak-willed sentimental youth of hyperesthetic tendencies,
who commits suicide because of disappointment in love. The story was
the greatest literary triumph that Germany had ever known, and in
point of sheer artistic power it remains to this day the best of
novels in the tragic-sentimental vein. These two works carried the
name of Goethe far and wide and made him the accepted leader of the
literary revolution which long afterwards came to be known, from the
title of a play by Klinger, as the Storm and Stress.

The years 1773-1775 were for Goethe a time of high emotional tension,
from which he sought relief in rapid, desultory, and multifarious
writing. Exquisite songs, musical comedies of a sentimental tinge,
humorous and satiric skits in dramatic form, prose tragedy of
passionate error, and poetic tragedy of titanic revolt--all these and
more welled up from a sub-conscious spring of feeling, taking little
counsel of the sober intellect. Several minor productions were left
unfinished and were a