[The Youth of Goethe by Peter Hume Brown]@TWC D-Link bookThe Youth of Goethe CHAPTER I 26/34
When he was in his fourteenth year, Goethe fell in love--the first of the many similar experiences which were to form the successive crises of his future life.
There can be little doubt that in his narrative of this his first love there is to the full as much "poetry" as "truth"; but there also can be as little doubt that all the circumstances attending it made his first love a turning-point in his life.
It is a peculiarity of all Goethe's love adventures that between him and the successive objects of his affections there was always some bar which made a regular union impossible or undesirable.
So it was in the case of the girl whom he calls Gretchen, and of whom we know nothing except what he chose to tell us.
He made her acquaintance through his association with a set of youths of questionable character whom we are surprised to find as the chosen companions of the son of an Imperial Councillor. Of all Goethe's loves this was the one that was accompanied by the least pleasant complications and the most painful of disillusions. Through his intercourse with Gretchen's intimates he was led to recommend one of them for a municipal post in Frankfort--a post which he did not hold long before he was found guilty of embezzlement and defalcation.
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