]
CHAPTER II
STUDENT IN LEIPZIG
OCTOBER, 1765--SEPTEMBER, 1768
As we follow the life of Byron, it has been said, we seem to hear the
gallop of horses,[15] and we are conscious of a similar tumult as we
follow the career of Goethe from the day he entered Leipzig till the
close of the "mad Weimar times," when he was approaching his thirtieth
year. _Jugend ist Trunkenheit ohne Wein_, he says in his
_West-Ostlicher Divan_, and, when he wrote the words, he may well have
had specially in view the three whirling years he spent in Leipzig.
"If one did not play some mad pranks in youth," he said on another
occasion, "what would one have to think of in old age?" Assuredly
during these Leipzig years Goethe played a sufficient number of pranks
to supply him with materials for edifying retrospection.
[Footnote 15: X. Doudan, _Melanges et Lettres_, i. 524.]
Our difficulty in connection with these three years is to seize the
essential lineaments in a character so full of contradictions that it
eludes us at every turn, and has presented to each of his many
biographers a problem which each has sought to solve after his own
fashion.
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