with which we
are dealing: "Stiller Rueckblick auf's Leben auf die Verworrenheit
Betriebsamkeit, Wissbegierde der Jugend, wie sie ueberall
herumschweift, um etwas Befriedigendes zu finden. Wie ich besonders in
[Transcriber's Note: corrected error "im"] Geheimnissen, dunklen
imaginativen Verhaeltissen eine Wollust gefunden habe."]

As has been said, Goethe's contemporary letters addressed from
Frankfort to his friends bring a different side of his life before us
from that presented in the Autobiography. From these letters we gather
that he was by no means wholly engrossed in religious or mystical
studies. "During this winter," he wrote to his friend Oeser, about two
months after his arrival in Frankfort, "the company of the muses and
correspondence with friends will bring pleasure into a sickly,
solitary life, which for a youth of twenty years would otherwise be
something of a martyrdom."[54] In spite of the affectionate solicitude
of Fraeulein von Klettenberg and other friends, he found Frankfort a
depressing place after gay Leipzig. "I could go mad when I think of
Leipzig," wrote his sprightly friend Horn, who had also tasted the
pleasures of that place; and Goethe shared his opinion. Both also
agreed that the girls of Frankfort were vastly inferior creatures to
those of Leipzig. "I came here," Goethe wrote in a poetical epistle to
the daughter of Oeser, "and found the girls a little--one does not
quite like to speak it out--as they always were; enough, none has as
yet touched my heart."[55] It would appear, nevertheless, that he did
find certain Frankfort girls to his taste. "I get along tolerably
here," he wrote to another correspondent. "I am contented and quiet; I
have half-a-dozen angels of girls whom I often see, though I have lost
my heart to none of them. They are pleasant creatures, and make my
life uncommonly agreeable. He who has seen no Leipzig might be very
well off here."[56] His life in Frankfort was, in short, what he
himself called it, an exile (_Verbannung_).

[Footnote 54: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 179, November 7th, 1768.]

[Footnote 55: _Ib._ p. 173.]

[Footnote 56: _Ib._ p. 217.]

Among his correspondents was Kaethchen Schoenkopf with whom, as we have
seen, he had come to what he thought a satisfactory arrangement before
leaving Leipzig. In this correspondence it is the Leipzig student, not
the associate of the Fraeulein von Klettenberg, who is before us. There
is the same waywardness, there