ONLY three great poets, Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, before the time of Goethe, exerted an influence like his on the nations from which they were sprung. Goethe is a phenomenon such as rarely appears in the world of letters; a man rising almost at a single bound into high reputation all over Europe, by degrees fixing himself more firmly in the love and reverence of his countrymen, and finally ascending to the highest intellectual pinnacle amongst them. Certainly no one, since the days of Luther, occupies so large a space in the intellectual history of the German people.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born at Frankfort, August 28, 1749. His father, a rich, pedantic, punctilious sort of man, bore the title of privy councillor, a title which he had procured for himself to compensate for his lack of old patrician blood. The mother was descended from a long line of mayors and judges. There was one sister, Cornelia, who up to the time of her death, at the age of twenty-seven, was Goethe's most intimate friend and companion. All the other children had died early. There remained only Johann Wolfgang and his sister, whose lot it was to be the subjects of their father's experiments in education, for which purpose only, the father seemed to live. These two children were brought up with a strictness which would astonish both parents and children of this present day. It was not marked with severity; but the father's unremitting vigilance diffused itself about the children like fine ether, from which there was no way of

escape. Goethe's father seemed to have none of the spiritual elements in him. The mere externals of life were an incessant source of anxiety to him; in everything pertaining to money, he was precise and even captious. At last he even compelled his son to ask for what he desired in a carefully composed letter.

In a little verse in Goethe's Autobiography, which he entitled Dichtung und Wahrheit ("Poetry and Truth"), he gives an explanation of his own nature, attributing to his father his stature and methodical habits; to his mother, the buoyancy of his spirits and his love of story-telling. As far as the understanding of Goethe's nature is concerned, the father may be put to one side; but the mother is inseparable from him, and forms part and parcel of his being. She understood him from beginning to end, inconsistencies and all. The great expectations fulfilled by the son, were only part of still greater expectations cherished by the mother.

At the age of sixteen Goethe went to Leipsic to study law, with his future clearly circumscribed and mapped out for him. He was to take his degree, return home and practice as a lawyer, marry into a patrician family, and perhaps, after rising through various municipal offices, at last arrive at the dignity of Mayor. From the Dichtung und Wahrheit, we learn that he did little more at Leipsic than continue the narrow life he had begun at Frankfort. He made no new acquaintances there who exercised any influence on his after-life. After a course of three years, during which he had lapsed into somewhat irregular habits, he was hurried home on account of a hemorrhage from which he could not recover in Leipsic.

In 1770, when he was just over twenty years of age, he was sent to continue his studies at Strasburg, and here he met with Herder, the man who, of all his contemporaries, exercised the most enduring influence on the life of Goethe. The fundamental idea in Herder's soul, and the basis of all his works, was the development of mankind. Himself a poet and theologian, he first taught Goethe to look at the Bible as a magnificent illustration of the truth, that poetry is the product of a national spirit, not the privilege of a cultured few. From this he was led on to other illustrations of national song,