He was received in a friendly way by Böhme, the professor of history,
whose wife, a cultivated and pleasant woman, liked to talk with him. She
offended him a little, however, by laughing rather too freely at some of
his Frankfort modes of expression, and by disparaging the writings of
his favourite poets. Every day he dined at the house of one of the
medical professors, where he met chiefly students of medicine and
natural science. When the novelty of his position at Leipsic wore off,
he began to miss the pleasures to which he had been accustomed at home,
and, above all, he longed for some friend to whom he might confide his
inmost thoughts and aspirations. Gradually he fell into a dejected and
forlorn state of mind, and so keenly did he suffer that in the spring of
1766 one of his Frankfort friends, Horn, who came to study law at
Leipsic, could not find in him a trace of his old liveliness and good
humour. The presence of Horn, who remained for some years one of his
most intimate comrades, did much to revive Goethe; and soon afterwards
the process was completed by another friend, Schlosser, who took Leipsic
on his way from Frankfort to Treptow, where he was to act as private
secretary to Duke Frederick Eugene of Würtemberg. Schlosser, who
ultimately married Goethe’s sister, was a man of vigorous and
independent character, somewhat stern in manner, but essentially kind
and sympathetic, and he quickly succeeded in restoring Goethe to all his
former cheerfulness and self-confidence.
Schlosser put up at the house of a vintner called Schönkopf, who, his
wife having come from Frankfort, always welcomed visitors from her
native place. Goethe was so much pleased with the company at Schönkopf’s
table that he determined to dine and sup there daily, and this
resolution he acted upon during the remainder of his time at Leipsic.
Schönkopf had a pretty, coquettish daughter, Anne Catharine, and,
needless to say, she no sooner saw the susceptible Goethe than she made
a conquest of him. Like Gretchen, she was his senior by two or three
years, but that, he felt, only made her the more worthy to be loved.
Annette, as he usually called her, accepted his devotion with pleasure,
and was sincerely fond of him; but, having a shrewd suspicion that she
could never be his wife, she gave him no marks of favour that she was
not equally ready to give to other admirers. Many a time Goethe was
thrown into a fever of jealousy by her kindness to his rivals, but she
had only to smile on him to exalt him to a heaven of enchantment and
delight. Upon the whole, his relation to Annette, which went on for
years, seems to have brought him more misery than happiness. It was
impossible for him to claim her love as exclusively his own, yet he
could not bear to think of it as a treasure that might pass into the
possession of some one else.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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