Nor was it with material obstacles only that the poet-minister had to contend.  In the exercise of the powers intrusted to him he often encountered the fierce opposition of party interest and stubborn prejudice, and was sometimes driven to heroic and despotic measures in order to accomplish a desired result,—­as when he foiled the machinations of the Jena professors in his determination to save the University library, and when, in spite of the opposition of the leading burghers, he demolished the city wall.

In 1786 Goethe was enabled to realize his cherished dream of a journey to Italy.  There he spent a year and a half in the diligent study and admiring enjoyment of the treasures of art which made that country then, even more than now, the mark and desire of the civilized world.  He came back an altered man.  Intellectually and morally he had made in that brief space, under new influences, a prodigious stride.  His sudden advance while they had remained stationary separated him from his contemporaries.  The old associations of the Weimar world, which still revolved its little round, the much-enlightened traveller had outgrown.  People thought him cold and reserved.  It was only that the gay, impulsive youth had ripened into an earnest, sedate man.  He found Germany jubilant over Schiller’s “Robbers” and other writings representative of the “storm-and-stress” school, which his maturity had left far behind, his own contributions to which he had come to hate.  Schiller, who first made his acquaintance at this time, writes to Koerner:—­

“I doubt that we shall ever become intimate.  Much that to me is still of great interest he has already outlived.  He is so far beyond me, not so much in years as in experience and culture, that we can never come together in one course.”

How greatly Schiller erred in the supposition that they never could become intimate, how close the intimacy which grew up between them, what harmony of sentiment, how friendly and mutually helpful their co-operation, is sufficiently notorious.

But such was the first aspect which Goethe presented to strangers at this period of his life; he rather repelled than attracted, until nearer acquaintance learned rightly to interpret the man, and intellectual or moral affinity bridged the chasm which seemed to divide him from his kind.  In part, too, the distance and reserve of which people complained was a necessary measure of self-defence against the disturbing importunities of social life.  “From Rome,” says Friedrich von Mueller, “from the midst of the richest and grandest life, dates the stern maxim of ‘Renunciation’ which governed his subsequent being and doing, and which furnished his only guarantee of mental equipoise and peace.”