years of his early life were devoted, first as a student and then as a
practitioner, to a reluctant and half-hearted grapple with the
intricacies of Holy Roman law.

At the age of sixteen Goethe entered the University of Leipzig, where
he remained about three years. The law lectures bored him and he soon
ceased to attend them. The other studies that he took up, especially
logic and philosophy, seemed to him arid and unprofitable--mere
conventional verbiage without any bed-rock of real knowledge. So he
presently fell into that mood of disgust with academic learning which
was afterwards to form the keynote of _Faust_. Outside the university
he found congenial work in Oeser's drawing-school. Oeser was an artist
of no great power with the brush, but a genial man, a friend of
Winckelmann, and an enthusiast for Greek art. Goethe learned to admire
and love him, and from this time on, for some twenty years, his
constant need of artistic expression found hardly less satisfaction in
drawing from nature than in poetry.

His poetic ambition received little encouragement in university
circles. Those to whom he read his ambitious verses made light of
them. The venerated Gellert, himself a poet of repute, advised the lad
to cultivate a good prose style and look to his handwriting. No wonder
that he despaired of his talent, concluded that he could never be a
poet, and burnt his effusions. A maddening love-affair with his
landlady's daughter, Anna Katharina Schönkopf, revived the dying lyric
flame, and he began to write verses in the gallant erotic vein then
and there fashionable--verses that tell of love-lorn shepherds and
shepherdesses, give sage advice to girls about keeping their
innocence, and moralize on the ways of this wicked world. They show no
signs of lyric genius. His short-lived passion for Annette, as he