. In a long and rhapsodical letter to Herder he depicts the
intellectual and spiritual experiences through which he was now
passing. The Greeks were his one preoccupation. Homer, Xenophon,
Plato, Theocritus, and Anacreon he had read in turn, but it was in
Pindar he was now revelling, and from Pindar he was learning the
lesson that only in laying firm hold of one's subject is the essence
of all mastery. A sentence of Herder to the effect that "thought and
feeling create the expression" had rejoiced his heart as expressing
his own deepest experience. Herder had said of _Goetz_ that its author
had been spoilt by Shakespeare, and he modestly accepted the censure.
_Goetz_, he admits, had been _thought_, not _felt_, and he would be
depressed by his failure, were he not occasionally conscious that some
day he would do better things.[119]

[Footnote 117: The _Praktikanten_ were voluntary attendants on the
Imperial Court, had little or no dependence on the authorities, and
lived on their own resources.]

[Footnote 118: Caroline Flachsland to Herder, May 25th, 1772.]

[Footnote 119: Goethe to Herder, _Werke, Briefe_, Band ii. 15.]

As in Strassburg, it was at a _table d'hote_[120] that Goethe made the
acquaintance of the youths who, like himself, were idling away their
time in Wetzlar. To relieve the tedium of the place[121] they had
formed a fantastic society on a feudal model, with a Grand-master,
Chancellor, and all the other subordinate officials--the point of the
jest being that each associate bore the name and played the part of
his office and title. For frolic of all kinds Goethe was ever ready;
his taste for practical joking, indeed, as we shall see, occasionally
led him to play questionable pranks. Under the name of Goetz von
Berlichingen he became a member of the brotherhood, and, according to
his own account, he contributed to the gaiety of the proceedings.
Among the company, however, there were a few serious persons with
tastes kindred to his own, and he specially names F.W. Gotter,
Secretary of the Gotha Legation at Wetzlar, as one who, like Salzmann
and Schlosser, impressed him by his character and talent. In English
literature they had a common interest, and, as a poem which both
admired, they each made a translation of Goldsmith's _Deserted
Village_--Gotter, according to Goethe, being the more successful in
the attempt. Gotter was thus still another of those grave counsellors
whom Goethe had the good fortune t