But the most notable experience of these early years under his
father's roof still remains to be mentioned. When he was in his
fourteenth year, Goethe fell in love--the first of the many similar
experiences which were to form the successive crises of his future
life. There can be little doubt that in his narrative of this his
first love there is to the full as much "poetry" as "truth"; but there
also can be as little doubt that all the circumstances attending it
made his first love a turning-point in his life. It is a peculiarity
of all Goethe's love adventures that between him and the successive
objects of his affections there was always some bar which made a
regular union impossible or undesirable. So it was in the case of the
girl whom he calls Gretchen, and of whom we know nothing except what
he chose to tell us. He made her acquaintance through his association
with a set of youths of questionable character whom we are surprised
to find as the chosen companions of the son of an Imperial Councillor.
Of all Goethe's loves this was the one that was accompanied by the
least pleasant complications and the most painful of disillusions.
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