It was his boyish ambition to become a great poet.  His favorite amusement was a puppet-show, for which he invented elaborate plays.  From his tenth year on he wrote a great deal of verse, early acquiring technical facility and local renown and coming to regard himself as a “thunderer.”  He attempted a polyglot novel, also a biblical tale on the subject of Joseph, which he destroyed on observing that the hero did nothing but pray and weep.  When he was ready for the university he wished to go to Goettingen to study the old humanities, but his father was bent on making a lawyer of him.  So it came about that some ten years of his early life were devoted, first as a student and then as a practitioner, to a reluctant and half-hearted grapple with the intricacies of Holy Roman law.

At the age of sixteen Goethe entered the University of Leipzig, where he remained about three years.  The law lectures bored him and he soon ceased to attend them.  The other studies that he took up, especially logic and philosophy, seemed to him arid and unprofitable—­mere conventional verbiage without any bed-rock of real knowledge.  So he presently fell into that mood of disgust with academic learning which was afterwards to form the keynote of Faust.  Outside the university he found congenial work in Oeser’s drawing-school.  Oeser was an artist of no great power with the brush, but a genial man, a friend of Winckelmann, and an enthusiast for Greek art.  Goethe learned to admire and love him, and from this time on, for some twenty years, his constant need of artistic expression found hardly less satisfaction in drawing from nature than in poetry.

His poetic ambition received little encouragement in university circles.  Those to whom he read his ambitious verses made light of them.  The venerated Gellert, himself a poet of repute, advised the lad to cultivate a good prose style and look to his handwriting.  No wonder that he despaired of his talent, concluded that he could never be a poet, and burnt his effusions.  A maddening love-affair with his landlady’s daughter, Anna Katharina Schoenkopf, revived the dying lyric flame, and he began to write verses in the gallant erotic vein then and there fashionable—­verses that tell of love-lorn shepherds and shepherdesses, give sage advice to girls about keeping their innocence, and moralize on the ways of this wicked world.  They show no signs of lyric genius.  His short-lived passion for Annette, as he called her, whom he tormented with his jealousy until she lost patience and broke off the intimacy, was also responsible for his first play, Die Laune des Verliebten, or The Lover’s Wayward Humor.  It is a pretty one-act pastoral in alexandrine verse, the theme being the punishment of an over-jealous lover.  What is mainly significant in these Leipzig poetizings is the fact that they grew out of genuine experience.  Goethe had resolved to drop his ambitious projects, such as Belshazzar, and coin his own real thoughts and feelings into verse.  Thus early he was led into the way of poetic “confession.”