In the spring of 1770 Goethe entered the University of Strassburg, which was at that time in French territory.  It was a part of his general purpose to better his French, but the actual effect of his sojourn in Alsatia was to put him out of humor with all French standards, especially with the classic French drama, and to excite in him a fervid enthusiasm for the things of the fatherland.  This was due partly to the influence of Herder, with whom he now came into close personal relations.  From Herder, who was six years his senior and already known by his Fragments and Critical Forests as a trenchant and original critic, he heard the gospel of a literary revolution.  Rules and conventions were to be thrown overboard; the new watchwords were nature, power, originality, genius, fulness of expression.  He conceived a boundless admiration for Homer, Ossian, and Shakespeare, in each of whom he saw the mirror of an epoch and a national life.  He became an enthusiastic collector of Alsatian folksongs and was fascinated by the Strassburg minster—­at a time when “Gothic” was generally regarded as a synonym of barbarous.  Withal his gift for song-making came to a new stage of perfection under the inspiration of his love for the village maid Friederike Brion.  From this time forth he was the prince of German lyrists.

In the summer of 1771 he returned to Frankfurt once more, this time with the title of licentiate in law, and began to practise in a perfunctory way, with his heart in his literary projects.  By the end of the year he had written out the first draft of a play which he afterwards revised and published anonymously (in 1773) under the title of Goetz von Berlichingen.  By its exuberant fulness of life, its bluff German heartiness, and the freshness and variety of its scenes, it took the public by storm, notwithstanding its disregard of the approved rules of play-writing.

[Illustration:  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE From the Painting by J.
 Stieler]

The next year he published The Sufferings of Young Werther, a tragic tale of a weak-willed sentimental youth of hyperesthetic tendencies, who commits suicide because of disappointment in love.  The story was the greatest literary triumph that Germany had ever known, and in point of sheer artistic power it remains to this day the best of novels in the tragic-sentimental vein.  These two works carried the name of Goethe far and wide and made him the accepted leader of the literary revolution which long afterwards came to be known, from the title of a play by Klinger, as the Storm and Stress.