ary productiveness of itself implies an intellectual
and spiritual ferment which receives further illustration from the
poet's letters written during the same period. In these letters we
have the expression of a mind distracted by contending emotions and
conflicting aims, now in sanguine hope, now paralysed with a sense of
impotence to adjust itself to the inexorable conditions under which
life had to be lived. Moods of thinking and feeling follow each other
with a rapidity of contrast which are bewildering to the reader and
hardly permit him to draw any certain inference as to the real import
of what is written. In one effusion we have lachrymose sentiment which
suggests morbid self-relaxation; in another, a bitter cynicism equally
suggestive of ill-regulated emotions. We have moods of piety and
moods in which the mental attitude towards all human aspirations can
only be described as Mephistophelian.

Goethe himself was well aware of a congenital morbid strain in him
which all through his life demanded careful control if he were to
avert bodily and mental collapse. And at no period of his life did
external conditions and inward experiences combine to put his
self-control to a severer test than during these last years in
Frankfort. Frankfort itself, as we shall see, had become more
distasteful to him than ever, and his abiding feeling towards it, now
as subsequently, was that he could not breathe freely in its
atmosphere. On his return from Strassburg his father received him with
greater cordiality than on his return from Leipzig, but the lack of
real sympathy between them remained, and was undoubtedly one of the
permanent sources of Goethe's discontent with his native town. With no
interest in his nominal profession, he had at the same time no clear
conception of the function to which his genius called him. Throughout
these years in Frankfort he continued uncertain whether Nature meant
him for a poet or an artist, and we receive the impression that his
ambition was to be artist rather than poet. From the varied literary
forms in which he expressed himself, also, we are led to infer that in
the domain of literature he was still only feeling his way.

If the diversity of his gifts thus distracted him, his emotional
experiences, it will appear, were not more favourable to a settled aim
and purpose. One paroxysm of passion succeeded another, with the
result that he was eventually, in self-preservation, driven to make a
c