Goethe, from his earliest years, was never without a passion, and at Leipsic his passion was Kitty Schoenkopf, the Aennchen of the autobiography, the daughter of the host at whose house he dined.  She often teased him with her inconstant ways, and to this experience is due his first drama, “Die Laune des Verliebten,” “Lovers’ Quarrels,” as it may be styled.  A deeper chord is struck in “Die Mitschuldigen” (The Fellow Sinners), which forms a dismal and forbidding picture both of the time and of the experiences of the youth who wrote it.  He had an opportunity of establishing his principles of taste during a short visit at Dresden, in which he devoted himself to the pictures and the antiques.  The end of Goethe’s stay at Leipsic was saddened by illness.  One morning at the beginning of the summer he was awakened by a violent hemorrhage.  For several days he hung between life and death, and after that his recovery was slow.  He left Leipsic far from well on August 28, 1768.

Goethe made an enforced stay of a year and a half.  It was perhaps the least happy part of his life.  His cure proceeded slowly, and he had several relapses.  His family relations were not pleasant.  His father showed but little sympathy with his aspirations for universal culture, and could imagine no career for him but that of a successful jurist.  His sister had grown somewhat harsh and cold during his absence.  Goethe’s mother was always the same to him—­a bright, genial, sympathetic friend.  Goethe, during his illness, received great attention from Fraeulein von Klettenberg, a friend of his mother’s, a pietist of the Moravian school.  She initiated him into the mystical writings of those abstracted saints, and she engaged him in the study of alchemy, which served at once to prepare him for the conception of Faust and for the scientific researches of his later days.

He arrived at Strasburg April 2,1770.  Goethe stayed in Strasburg till August 28, 1771, his twenty-second birthday, and these sixteen months are perhaps the most important of his life.  During them he came into active contact with most of those impulses of which his after life was a development.  If we would understand his mental growth, we must ask who were his friends.  He took his meals at the house of the Fraeulein Lauth in the Kramergasse.  The table was mainly filled with medical students.  At the head of it sat Salzmann, a grave man of fifty years of age.  His experience and his refined taste were very attractive to Goethe, who made him his intimate friend.  The table of the Fraeulein Lauth received some new guests.  Among these was Jung-Stilling, the self-educated charcoal-burner, who in his memoir has left a graphic account of Goethe’s striking appearance, in his broad brow, his flashing eye, his mastery of the company, and his generosity.  Another was Lerse, a frank, open character, who became Goethe’s favorite, and whose name is immortalized in Goetz von Berlichingen.