John Wolfgang Goethe was born at Frankfort on the Maine in 1749, ten years before Schiller. "Selectest influences" leagued with nature to produce this wonderful man. To give its complete development to a mighty inward power, outward circumstances were most happily propitious. Upon faculties of the quickest sensibility, and yet of infinitely elastic power, wide convulsions and world-disturbing incidents bore with tempestuous force, dilating the congenial energies of the young genius, who suddenly threw out his fiery voice to swell the tumult round him, and announce the master spirit of the age. For a while, the thrilling melody of that voice mingled in concert with the deep tones of the passionate period whence it drew so much of its power. Soon, however, was it heard, uttering with calmer inspiration the words of wisdom, drawn from a source deeper than passion--passion subdued by the will, and tempered by culture. "It is not the ocean ruffled," says Jean Paul, "that can mirror the heavens, but the ocean becalmed." Goethe's father was a prosperous honored citizen of Frankfort, improved by travel and study--a man of sound heart and sharp temper; his mother, a woman of superior mind and of genial character, to whom in her old age Madam de Stael paid a visit of homage, and who enjoyed the pleasure of introducing herself to her distinguished visiter with the words,--"I am the mother of Goethe." Under the guidance of such parents was Goethe's boyhood passed in the old free city of Frankfort, ever a place of various activity, where he witnessed when a child the coronation of an emperor of Germany, and the stir of a battle, fought in the neighborhood between Frederick the Great and the French--events of rare interest to any boy, and of deep import to one in whose unfolding a great poet was to become manifest. In due season he was sent to the university of Leipsic, famous then by the lectures of Gottsched, Gellert, Ernesti, and others. To the young Frankfort student the admired discourses of these sages of the time were but lessons in skepticism; their magisterial dicta and hollow dogmas being quickly dissolved in the fire of a mind, already in its youth competent to self-defence against error, though with vision too untried yet to pierce to the truth. From Leipsic he went to Strasburg, to complete his studies in the law, his father having destined him for a lawyer. A more imperious parent, however, had laid other commands on him, and while the words of law-professors were falling upon his outward ear, the inward mind was revolving the deeds of _Goetz von Berlichingen_, and shaping the vast fragments of which in after years was built the wondrous world of _Faust_.