From these letters we gather
that he was by no means wholly engrossed in religious or mystical
studies. "During this winter," he wrote to his friend Oeser, about two
months after his arrival in Frankfort, "the company of the muses and
correspondence with friends will bring pleasure into a sickly,
solitary life, which for a youth of twenty years would otherwise be
something of a martyrdom."[54] In spite of the affectionate solicitude
of Fraeulein von Klettenberg and other friends, he found Frankfort a
depressing place after gay Leipzig. "I could go mad when I think of
Leipzig," wrote his sprightly friend Horn, who had also tasted the
pleasures of that place; and Goethe shared his opinion. Both also
agreed that the girls of Frankfort were vastly inferior creatures to
those of Leipzig. "I came here," Goethe wrote in a poetical epistle to
the daughter of Oeser, "and found the girls a little--one does not
quite like to speak it out--as they always were; enough, none has as
yet touched my heart."[55] It would appear, nevertheless, that he did
find certain Frankfort girls to his taste. "I get along tolerably
here," he wrote to another correspondent.
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