The association of Herder and Goethe in these Strassburg days is one of the interesting chapters in European literary history. Goethe himself bears emphatic testimony to Herder's determining influence at once on his mind and character. "The most significant event of that time, he tells us, "and one which was to have the weightiest consequences for me, was my acquaintance with Herder and the closer bond that resulted from it." Bond there was between them, but it was not the bond of genuine friendship. No two men, indeed, could be more essentially antipathetic by nature than Herder and Goethe. Their antagonism was clearly apparent during their intercourse in Strassburg, and in the end, after many years of uneasy relations, their alienation became complete. Be it said that the traits in Herder which estranged Goethe from him were equally recognised and felt by others. Naturally querulous, splenetic, and inconsiderate of others' feelings, the adverse circumstances of his early life had made him something of a Timon among his fellows.[74] His favourite author was Swift, and from this preference and from the peculiarities of his own temper he was known among his acquaintances as the "Dean." But there were sides to his nature which certainly did not exist in the "terrible" Dean. Herder was an enthusiast for his own ideas, and these ideas were of a quality and range that marked him as one of the pioneers of his time. Religion as a primary instinct in man and the principal factor in his development was Herder's lifelong and predominant interest. He identified himself with Christianity, but it was a Christianity understood by him in the most liberal sense, a Christianity free from dogma, a spirit rather than a creed. As kindred to religion, poetry in his conception was inseparable from it in the essential being of man--poetry not as expressed in conventional forms but as the breath of the human spirit, and one of the most precious gifts for the purifying and elevation of humanity. These conceptions he owed, not to Kant, to whom he had listened in Koenigsberg, but to a less systematic teacher, J.G. Hamann, whose eccentric character and visionary speculations had gained for him the designation of the "Magus of the North." Goethe came to be acquainted with the writings of Hamann, and had a genuine admiration of him as a seer struggling with visions to which he was unable to give adequate utterance.[75] It was in his conversations with Herder, however, that he was introduced to those deeper conceptions of man and his possibilities which implied a complete emancipation from the mechanical philosophy which he had hitherto been endeavouring to find in a mystical religion.