eer was abandoned.

Wordsworth's saying, "the child is the father of the man,"--a saying
which owes its vitality more to its form than its substance,--is not
always verified, or its truth is not always apparent in the lives of
distinguished men. I find not much in Goethe the child prophetic of
Goethe the man. But the singer and the seeker, the two main tendencies
of his being, are already apparent in early life. Of moral traits, the
most conspicuous in the child is a power of self-control,--a moral
heroism, which secured to him in after life a natural leadership
unattainable by mere intellectual supremacy. An instance of this
self-control is recorded among the anecdotes of his boyhood. At one of
the lessons which he shared with other boys, the teacher failed to
appear. The young people awaited his coming for a while, but toward the
close of the hour most of them departed, leaving behind three who were
especially hostile to Goethe. "These," he says, "thought to torment, to
mortify, and to drive me away. They left me a moment, and returned with
rods taken from a broom which they had cut to pieces. I perceived their
intention, and, supposing the expiration of the hour to be near, I
immediately determined to make no resistance until the clock should
strike. Unmercifully, thereupon, they began to scourge in the cruellest
manner my legs and calves. I did not stir, but soon felt that I had
miscalculated the time, and that such pain greatly lengthens the
minutes." When the hour expired, his superior activity enabled him to
master all three, and to pin them to the ground.

In later years the same zeal of self-discipline which prompted the child
to exercise himself in bearing pain, impelled the man to resist and
overcome constitutional weaknesses by force of will. A student of
architecture, he conquered a tendency to giddiness by standing on
pinnacles and walking on narrow rafters over perilous abysses. In like
manner he overcame the ghostly terrors instilled in the nursery, by
midnight visits to churchyards and uncanny places.

To real peril, to fear of death, he seems to have had that native
insensibility so notable always in men of genius, in whom the conviction
of a higher destiny begets the feeling of a charmed life,--such as
Plutarch records of the first Caesar in peril of shipwreck on the river
Anio. In the French campaign (1793), in which Goethe accompanied the
Duke of Weimar against the armies of the Republic, a sudden