Beyond all other of Goethe's productions previous to his settling in Weimar, these original scenes of _Faust_ bring before us his deepest and truest self. In all the other longer works of that period, in _Goetz_, in _Werther_, in _Clavigo_, and the rest, one side--the emotional side--of his nature had been predominantly represented; but in what he wrote of _Faust_ we have all his mind and heart as he had them from nature, and as they had been schooled by time. It is one of the fortunate incidents in literary history that we now possess these fragments in which the genius of Goethe expressed itself with an intensity of imaginative force which he never again exemplified in the same degree. The original text was unknown till 1887, when Erich Schmidt found it in the possession of a grandnephew of a lady of the Court of Weimar,[240] who had copied it from the manuscript received by her from Goethe. It is uncertain whether the manuscript thus discovered exactly corresponds to the manuscript which Goethe took with him to Weimar, but the probability is that their contents are virtually identical. [Footnote 240: Fraeulein Luise von Goechhausen.] As in the case of _Der Ewige Jude_, _Prometheus_, and other fragments of the Frankfort period, the successive scenes of the _Urfaust_ were thrown off at different times on the inspiration of the moment, and the exact date of their production can only be a matter of conjecture. What we do know is that the figure of the legendary Faust had early attracted his attention. As a boy he had read at least one of the chap-books which recorded the wondrous history of the scholar who had sold himself to the devil, and, as a common spectacle in Germany, he must have seen the puppet-show in which the story of Faust was dramatised for the people. According to his own statement, it was in 1769 that the conception of a poem, based on the Faust legend, first suggested itself to him, but it was during the years 1774 and 1775 that most of the scenes of the _Urfaust_ were written. Both by himself and others there are references during these years to his work on _Faust_, and as late as the middle of September, 1775, he tells the Countess Stolberg that, while at Offenbach with Lili, he had composed another scene.