These successive _jeux d'esprit_ were merely the crackling fireworks of exuberant youth, and were regarded as such by their author himself. At the very time he was writing them, he was planning and sketching works, the scope of which reveals the true bent of his genius, and of the ideals that were preoccupying him. "My ideals," he wrote to Kestner (September 15th, 1773), "grow daily in beauty and grandeur"; and when he penned these words he was engaged on a production which, though it remained a mere fragment, has justly been regarded as one of the most striking manifestations of his powers. The subject, the myth of Prometheus, he tells us, attracted him as one in which he could embody his own deepest experience and the conclusions regarding the individual life of man to which that experience had led him. In the crises of his past life, he tells us, he had found that no aid had been forthcoming either from man or any supernal power. "We must tread the wine-press alone." Only in one source had he discovered a stay and stimulus, which brought him the sense of individual self-subsistence--in the exercise of such creative talent as nature had bestowed upon him. Of this consciousness, no external power could deprive him, and it is this consciousness that is the governing idea of the fragment, and not the Titanism of the Prometheus of AEschylus. It was, moreover, an idea which permanently accompanied Goethe throughout life, and to which he frequently gave expression in his later correspondence.[143] [Footnote 143: The following passage from an article in the _Hibbert Journal_, by M. Bergson (October, 1911, pp. 42-3), is an interesting commentary on Goethe's conception: "If, then, in every province the triumph of life is expressed by creation, might we not think that the ultimate reason of human life is a creation which, in distinction from that of the artist or man of science, can be pursued at every moment and by all men alike; I mean the creation of self by self, the continual enrichment of personality, by elements which it does not draw from outside, but causes to spring forth from itself?"]