the language of a devout pietist.

This religious experience of his youth bit deep into Goethe's
character. He soon drifted away from the pietists and their ways, he
came to have a poor opinion of priests and priestcraft, and in time
men called him a heathen. Nevertheless his nature had been so deeply
stirred in his youth by religion's mystic appeal that he never
afterwards lost his reverence for genuine religious feeling. To the
end of his days the aspiration of the human soul for communion with
God found in him a delicate and sympathetic interpreter.

During his convalescence Goethe retouched a score of his Leipzig songs
and published them anonymously, with music by his friend Breitkopf,
under the title of _New Songs_. He regarded them at the time as
trifles that had come into being without art or effort. "Young, in
love, and full of feeling," he had sung them so, while "playing the
old game of youth." To-day they seem to convey little forewarning of
the matchless lyric gift that was soon to awaken, being a shade too
intellectual and sententious. One hears more of the critic's comment
than of the poet's cry. It was at this time also that he rewrote an
earlier Leipzig play, expanding it from one act to three and giving it
the title _Die Mitschuldigen_, or _The Fellow-culprits_. It is a sort
of rogue's comedy in middle-class life, written in the alexandrine
verse, which was soon to be discarded along with other French
fashions. We have a quartet consisting of an inquisitive inn-keeper,
his mismated sentimental daughter, her worthless husband, and her
former lover. They tangle themselves up in a series of low intrigues
and are finally unmasked as one and all poor miserable sinners.
Technically it is a good play--lively, diverting, well put together.
But one can not call it very edifying.