Instead of the spectacle of an august tribunal administering
prompt and even justice, what he saw was a multitude of corrupt
officials, deluded litigants, and endless delays of law. Wetzlar, in
fact, he gives us to understand, destroyed any respect he may ever
have had alike for judges and the law they professed to administer. He
duly enrolled himself as a "Praktikant,"[117] but, as was the case
with the majority of that class who haunted the town, his legal
activity was confined to this step. "Solitary, depressed, aimless," so
he described himself to his friends during his first weeks in
Wetzlar.[118] Disgusted with law, he found refuge in the study of
literature. In a long and rhapsodical letter to Herder he depicts the
intellectual and spiritual experiences through which he was now
passing. The Greeks were his one preoccupation. Homer, Xenophon,
Plato, Theocritus, and Anacreon he had read in turn, but it was in
Pindar he was now revelling, and from Pindar he was learning the
lesson that only in laying firm hold of one's subject is the essence
of all mastery. A sentence of Herder to the effect that "thought and
feeling create the expression" had rejoiced his heart as expressing
his own deepest experience.
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