Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 5.djvu/109

Rh bring forward their advantages, and to communicate to them a particular interest, they prized higher than I did myself. My slight, and, I may say, my scanty, occupation with the civil law had not remained unobserved by them; they were well enough acquainted with me to know how easily I was to be influenced: I had made no secret of my liking for an academical life ; and they therefore thought to gain me over to history, political law, and rhetoric, at first for a time, but afterward more decidedly. Strasburg itself offered advantages enough. The prospect of the German Chancery at Versailles, the precedent of Schöpflin, whose merits, indeed, seemed to me unattainable, were to incite to emulation, if not to imitation; and perhaps a similar talent was thus to be cultivated, which might be both profitable to him who could boast of it, and useful to others who might choose to employ it on their own account. These, my patrons, and Salzmann with them, set a great value on my memory, and my capacity for apprehending the sense of languages, and chiefly by these sought to further their views and plans.

I now intend to describe at length, how all this came to nothing, and how it happened that I again passed over from the French to the German side. Let me be allowed, as heretofore, to make some general reflections, by way of transition.

There are few biographies which can represent a pure, quiet, steady progress of the individual. Our life, as well as that whole in which we are contained, is, in an incomprehensible manner, composed of freedom and necessity. That which we would do is a prediction of what we shall do, under all circumstances. But these circumstances lay hold on us in their own fashion. The what lies in us, the how seldom depends on us, after the wherefore we dare not ask, and on this account we are rightly referred to the quia.