In the summer of 1768 he was suddenly prostrated by a grave illness—­an internal hemorrhage which was at first thought to portend consumption.  Pale and languid he returned to his father’s house, and for several months it was uncertain whether he was to live or die.  During this period of seclusion he became deeply interested in magic, alchemy, astrology, cabalism, and all that sort of thing.  He even set up a kind of alchemist’s laboratory to search experimentally for the panacea.  Out of these abstruse studies grew Faust’s wonderful dream of an ecstatic spirit-life to be attained by natural magic.  Of course the menace of impending death drew his thoughts in the direction of religion.  Among the intimate friends of the family was the devout Susanna von Klettenberg, one of the leading spirits in a local conventicle of the Moravian Brethren.  This lady—­afterwards immortalized as the “beautiful soul” of Wilhelm Meister—­tried to have the sick youth make his peace with God in her way, that is, by accepting Christ as an ever-present personal saviour.  While he never would admit a conviction of sin he envied the calm of the saintly maiden and was so far converted that he attended the meetings of the Brethren, took part in their communion service, and for a while spoke the language of a devout pietist.

This religious experience of his youth bit deep into Goethe’s character.  He soon drifted away from the pietists and their ways, he came to have a poor opinion of priests and priestcraft, and in time men called him a heathen.  Nevertheless his nature had been so deeply stirred in his youth by religion’s mystic appeal that he never afterwards lost his reverence for genuine religious feeling.  To the end of his days the aspiration of the human soul for communion with God found in him a delicate and sympathetic interpreter.

During his convalescence Goethe retouched a score of his Leipzig songs and published them anonymously, with music by his friend Breitkopf, under the title of New Songs.  He regarded them at the time as trifles that had come into being without art or effort.  “Young, in love, and full of feeling,” he had sung them so, while “playing the old game of youth.”  To-day they seem to convey little forewarning of the matchless lyric gift that was soon to awaken, being a shade too intellectual and sententious.  One hears more of the critic’s comment than of the poet’s cry.  It was at this time also that he rewrote an earlier Leipzig play, expanding it from one act to three and giving it the title Die Mitschuldigen, or The Fellow-culprits.  It is a sort of rogue’s comedy in middle-class life, written in the alexandrine verse, which was soon to be discarded along with other French fashions.  We have a quartet consisting of an inquisitive inn-keeper, his mismated sentimental daughter, her worthless husband, and her former lover.  They tangle themselves up in a series of low intrigues and are finally unmasked as one and all poor miserable sinners.  Technically it is a good play—­lively, diverting, well put together.  But one can not call it very edifying.