ture had been
sacrificed to worldly convenience, and the humblest necessities of
life.

Meanwhile the youth was waxing into manhood, and the fetters of
discipline lay heavier on him, as his powers grew stronger, and his
eyes became open to the stirring and variegated interests of the
world, now unfolding itself to him under new and more glowing colours.
As yet he contemplated the scene only from afar, and it seemed but the
more gorgeous on that account. He longed to mingle in its busy
current, and delighted to view the image of its movements in his
favourite poets and historians. Plutarch and Shakspeare;[4] the
writings of Klopstock, Lessing, Garve, Herder, Gerstenberg, Goethe,
and a multitude of others, which marked the dawning literature of
Germany, he had studied with a secret avidity: they gave him vague
ideas of men and life, or awakened in him splendid visions of literary
glory. Klopstock's _Messias_, combined with his own religious
tendencies, had early turned him to sacred poetry: before the end of
his fourteenth year, he had finished what he called an 'epic poem,'
entitled _Moses_. The extraordinary popularity of Gerstenberg's
_Ugolino_, and Goethe's _Goetz von Berlichingen_, next directed his
attention to the drama; and as admiration in a mind like his, full of
blind activity and nameless aspirings, naturally issues in imitation,
he plunged with equal ardour into this new subject, and produced his
first tragedy, _Cosmo von Medicis_, some fragments of which he
retained and inserted in his _Robbers_. A mass of minor performances,
preserved among his papers, or published in the Magazines of the time,
serve sufficiently to show that his mind had already dimly discovered
its destination, and was striving with a restless vehemence to reach
it, in spite of every obstacle.

[Footnote 4: The feeling produced in him by Shakspeare he
described long afterwards: it throws light on the general
state of his temper and tastes. 'When I first, at a very
early age,' he says, 'became acquainted with this poet, I
felt indignant at his coldness, his hardness of heart, which
permitted him in the most melting pathos to utter jests,--to
mar, by the introduction of a fool, the soul-searching scenes
of _Hamlet_, _Lear_, and other pieces; which now kept him
still where my sensibilities hastened forward, now drove him
carelessly, onward where I would so gladly have lingered * *
He was the ob