Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 5.djvu/79

Rh was required to take my degree with some credit. Medicine charmed me, because it showed nature, if it did not unfold it on every side; and to this I was attached by intercourse and habit. To society I was obliged to devote some time and attention; for in many families I had fallen in for much, both of love and honour. All this might have been carried on, had not that which Herder had inculcated pressed upon me with an infinite weight. He had torn down the curtain which concealed from me the poverty of German literature; he had ruthlessly destroyed so many of my prejudices; in the sky of my fatherland there were few stars of importance left when he had treated all the rest as so many transient candle-snuffs; nay, my own hopes and fancies respecting myself he had so spoiled, that I began to doubt my own capabilities. At the same time, however, he dragged me on to the noble broad way which he himself was inclined to tread, drew my attention to his favourite authors, at the head of whom stood Swift and Hamann, and shook me up with more force than he had bound me down. To this manifold confusion was now added an incipient passion, which, while it threatened to absorb me, might indeed draw me from other relations, but could scarcely elevate me above them. Then came besides a bodily ailing, which made me feel after dinner as if my throat was closed up, and of which I did not easily get rid, till afterward, when I abstained from a certain red wine, which I generally and very willingly drank in the boarding-house. This intolerable inconvenience had quitted me at Sesenheim, so that I felt double pleasure in being there; but when I came back to my town-diet it returned, to my great annoyance. All this made me thoughtful and morose, and my outward appearance probably corresponded with my inward feelings.

In a worse humour than ever, because the malady