tself," he says,
"implies that two married people are yoked together, and to be thus
yoked cannot be called bliss." And to the same purport Wilhelm von
Humboldt, one of the finest spirits of his time, declared that
"marriage was no bond of souls." It was in a world where such opinions
were entertained by men of the highest character and intelligence that
Goethe made his irresponsible addresses to the successive objects of
his passion.

[Footnote 93: Friederike died in 1815. She was still alive when Goethe
was writing the story of their love.]

[Footnote 94:

Nichts taugt Ungeduld,
Noch weniger Reue;
Jene vermehrt die Schuld,
Diese schafft neue.]

The distractions of Strassburg, no more than the distractions of
Leipzig, diverted Goethe from what were his ruling instincts from the
beginning--to know life and to be master of himself. As in Leipzig,
his professional studies in Strassburg held little place in his
thoughts; his law degree, he tells us, he regarded as a matter of
"secondary importance." The subject he chose as his thesis--the
obligation of magistrates to impose a State religion binding on all
their subjects--was of a nature that had no living interest for him at
any period of his life, and he wrote the thesis "only to satisfy his
father." If his law studies were neglected, however, it was almost
with feverish passion that he coursed through other fields of
knowledge. In the _Ephemerides_--a diary he kept in Strassburg and in
which he noted his random thoughts and the books that happened to be
engaging him--we can see the range of his reading and the scope of his
interests. Occultism, metaphysics, science in many departments,
literature ancient and modern, all in turn absorbed his attention and
suggest a mental state impatient of the limits of the human
faculties--the state of mind which he was afterwards so marvellously
to reproduce in his _Faust_.[95] Inspired by the conversation of the
medical students who met at the common table, as well as by his own
natural bent, he attended the university lectures on chemistry and
anatomy, and thus laid a solid foundation for his subsequent original
investigations in these sciences. Extensive travels in the surrounding
country were among the chief pleasures of his sojourn in Strassburg,
and these travels, as was the case with him always, were voyages of
discovery. Architecture, machinery, works of engineering, Roman
antiquities, the native