and connections made him a desirable
acquaintance. In the strained and morbid condition of his body and
mind, which was the result of his disillusion, we see an experience
which was often to be repeated in his maturer years, and which points
to elements in his nature which were ever ready to pass beyond his
control. As in the case of all his subsequent experiences of the same
nature, he finally regained self-mastery, but a revolution had been
accomplished in him as the result of the struggle. His boyhood was at
an end, and it is with the consciousness of awakened manhood that he
now looks out upon life. More than once in his future career a similar
transformation was to be repeated--a great passion followed by a new
direction of his activities, involving a saving breach with the past.

Goethe's father had determined from the beginning that his only son
should follow the profession of law, in which, as we have seen, he had
himself failed owing to his peculiarities of mind and temper. In this
determination there was no consideration of the predilections of his
son, and in this fact lay the permanent cause of their estrangement.
The father's choice of a university for his son was another
illustration of their divergent sympathies and interests. Left to his
own choice, the son would have preferred the university of Goettingen
as his place of study, but his father ruled that Leipzig, his own
university, was the proper school for the future civilian. In
connection with his departure for Leipzig Goethe makes two confessions
which are a striking commentary on the conditions of his home life in
Frankfort. He left Frankfort, he tells us, with joy as intense as that
of a prisoner who has broken through his gaol window, and finds
himself a free man. And this repugnance to his native city, as a place
where he could not expand freely, remained an abiding feeling with
him. The burgher life of Frankfort, he wrote to his mother during his
first years at Weimar, was intolerable to him, and to have made his
permanent home there would have been fatal to the fulfilment of every
ideal that gave life its value. His other confession is a still more
significant illustration of the vital lack of sympathy between father
and son. He left Frankfort, he says, with the deliberate intention of
following his own predilections and of disregarding the express wish
of his father that he should apply himself specifically to the study
of law. Only his sist