In two pieces belonging to the same period, however, is revealed in fullest measure the true self of the poet, with all the emotional and intellectual preoccupations which he had brought with him from Strassburg. Of the one, _Wanderers Sturmlied_, he has given in his Autobiography an account which is fully borne out by the character of the poem itself. It was composed, he tells us, in a terrific storm on one of his restless journeys between Frankfort and Darmstadt, and at a time when the memory of Friederike was still haunting him. Of Friederike, however, there is no direct suggestion in the poem; from first to last it is a paean of the _Sturm und Drang_, composed in a form directly imitated from Pindar, whom he had been ardently studying since his return to Frankfort. The theme is the glorification of genius--genius in its upwelling and original force as manifest in Pindar, not as in poets like Anacreon and Theocritus. He who is in possession of this genius is armed against all the powers of nature and fate, and his end can only be crowned with victory. Goethe himself calls the poem a _Halbunsinn_, and one of his most sympathetic critics--Viktor Hehn--admits that to follow its drift requires some labour and some creative phantasy on the part of the reader.[113] But it is not its poetical merit that gives the poem its chief interest; it is to be taken, as it was meant, as a profession of the poet's literary faith at the period when it was written, and as such it is a historic document of the _Sturm und Drang_--at once an illustration and an exposition of its motives and ideals. "All this," is Goethe's mature comment on this and other productions of the same period, "was deeply and genuinely felt, but often expressed in a one-sided and unbalanced way." [Footnote 113: _Ueber Goethe's Gedichte_ (1911), p. 157.]