. Among the miscellaneous
intellectual interests of his boyhood poetry evidently held the chief
place, and, partly out of his own inspiration and partly at the
suggestion of others, he diligently tried his hand at different forms
of poetical composition. Yet, if we may judge from his most notable
boyish piece--_Poetische Gedanken ueber die Hoellenfahrt Jesu
Christi_--there have been more "timely-happy spirits" than Goethe.
Not, indeed, as we shall see, till his twentieth year, the age when,
according to Kant, the lyric poet is in fullest possession of his
genius, does his verse attain the distinctiveness of original creative
power.[14]

[Footnote 14: All Goethe's boyish productions that have been preserved
will be found in _Der junge Goethe, Neue Ausgabe in sechs Baenden
besorgt von Max Morris_, Leipzig, 1909.]

CHAPTER II

STUDENT IN LEIPZIG

OCTOBER, 1765--SEPTEMBER, 1768

As we follow the life of Byron, it has been said, we seem to hear the
gallop of horses,[15] and we are conscious of a similar tumult as we
follow the career of Goethe from the day he entered Leipzig till the
close of the "mad Weimar times," when he was approaching his thirtieth
year. _Jugend ist Trunkenheit ohne Wein_, he says in his
_West-Ostlicher Divan_, and, when he wrote the words, he may well have
had specially in view the three whirling years he spent in Leipzig.
"If one did not play some mad pranks in youth," he said on another
occasion, "what would one have to think of in old age?" Assuredly
during these Leipzig years Goethe played a sufficient number of pranks
to supply him with materials for edifying retrospection.

[Footnote 15: X. Doudan, _Melanges et Lettres_, i. 524.]

Our difficulty in connection with these three years is to seize the
essential lineaments in a character so full of contradictions that it
eludes us at every turn, and has presented to each of his many
biographers a problem which each has sought to solve after his own
fashion. Of materials for forming our conclusions there is certainly
no lack. In his Autobiography he has related in detail, even to
tediousness, the events and experiences of his life in Leipzig.
Contemporary testimony, also, we have in abundance. We have the
letters of friends who freely wrote their impressions of him, and from
his own hand we have poems which record the passing feelings of the
hour; we have two plays which reveal moods and experiences more or
less permanent; and above a