[Footnote 19:
Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.]
[Footnote 20: In point of fact Goethe retained to the end the
intonation and the idioms of his native speech.]
[Footnote 21: In his Autobiography Goethe states as the reason for his
casting off the home-made suit he had brought with him from Frankfort,
that a person entering the Leipzig theatre in similar costume excited
the ridicule of the audience.]
In his second letter Horn gives a singular reason for the preposterous
airs which Goethe had lately put on. Goethe, wrote Horn, had fallen in
love with a girl "beneath him in rank," and his antics were assumed to
disguise the fact from his friends who might report it to his father.
Goethe's relations to this girl were to be his liveliest experience in
Leipzig, and an experience frequently to be repeated at different
periods of his life. Like his other adventures of the same nature, it
was to supply him with a fund of emotions and reflections which at a
future day were to serve him as literary capital. The tale of his
passion, if passion it was, is, therefore, an essential part of his
biography, both as a man and a literary artist.
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