Under
Langer's influence he resumed his youthful study of the Bible--not in
the Old Testament, however, but in the New, which he read, he tells
us, with "emotion and enthusiasm." It was the beginning of a new phase
in his life which was to last for about a year and a half, a phase in
which religion, if we are to accept the testimony of his
Autobiography, held the uppermost place in his thoughts.
[Footnote 47: When approaching his eightieth year, Goethe remarked to
Chancellor von Mueller (March 6th, 1828): "Wer mit mir umgehen will,
muss zuweilen auch meine Grobianslaune zugeben, ertragen, wie eines
andern Schwachheit oder Steckenpferd."]
It was with the feelings of "a shipwrecked seaman," he tells us, that
he found himself again under his father's roof, though he
characteristically adds that "he had nothing specially to reproach
himself with." The atmosphere he found at home was not such as to put
him in better spirits. Father, mother and daughter had been living in
mutual misunderstanding during the whole period of the son's absence
in Leipzig. Cornelia had been made the sole victim of her father's
pedagogic discipline which had been partially alleviated when it was
shared with her brother, and she had come to regard her over-anxious
parent with a hardness which Goethe describes as having something
dreadful (_fuerchterliches_) in it.
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