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 impulse of scientific curiosity prompted him, in spite of warnings and remonstrances, to experiment on what is called the “cannon-fever.”  For this purpose he rode to a place in which he was exposed to a cross-fire of the two armies, and coolly watched the sensations experienced in that place of peril.