them.[82] Nevertheless the collision for the first time with
a mind that revealed to him his own immaturity was for Goethe, as for
every youth, a formative influence of the highest import and an epoch
in his mental history. Yet in his association with Herder one fact has
to be noted: Goethe was not subjugated by him. He frankly recognised
Herder's superiority to himself in knowledge and experience, but he
retained his mental independence. In his letters to Herder, as in
those to Salzmann, he writes in terms of equality. In such words as
the following, for example, we have not the attitude of the
unquestioning disciple to his master. "Pray let us try to see each
other oftener. You feel how you would embrace one who could be to you
what you are to me. Don't let us be frightened like weaklings because
we must often disagree: should our passions collide, can we not
endure the collision?"[83] Might we not infer from this passage that
not Herder but Goethe was the dominating spirit in their
intercourse?[84]

[Footnote 81: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. p. 264. He adds that he would
prefer to be Mercury, the least of the seven planets that revolve
round the sun, than first among the five that revolve round Saturn.]

[Footnote 82: Herder himself says of his influence on Goethe: "Ich
glaube ihm, ohne Lobrednerei, einige gute Eindruecke gegeben zu haben,
die einmal wirksam werden koennen."--Haym, _op. cit._ i. 392.]

[Footnote 83: _Ib._ Band ii. p. 18.]

[Footnote 84: Schiller, in a letter to C.G. Koerner, the father of the
poet, writes (July, 1787): "He [Herder] said that Goethe had greatly
influenced his intellectual development."]

Goethe found another source of inspiration in Strassburg besides
Herder, and one which, as he describes it both in his Autobiography
and in a contemporary effusion, moved him even more powerfully. His
first act on his arrival in Strassburg, he tells us, was to visit its
cathedral whose towers had caught his eye long before he reached the
town. He had been taught by his old master Oeser, who only represented
the general opinion of the time in Germany, that Gothic architecture
was the product of a barbarous age and could be regarded only with
amazed disgust by every person of educated taste. But Goethe's
mystical studies and religious experiences in Frankfort had not left
him what he was in his Leipzig days, and had given him an insight into
movements of the human spirit which did not come within the