"Goethe," wrote one of them from Leipzig, "is as great a philosopher as ever." Here again we see in the boy the father of the man.

Increasingly, as the years went on, his innate tendency to reflection asserted itself, till at length in his latest period it so completely dominated him that the sage proved too much for the artist.
[Footnote 13: So Weislingen (in _Goetz von Berlichingen_), whom Goethe meant to be a double of himself, says: "_Ich bin ein Chamaeleon_."] If the character of the boy foreshadowed that of the man, so did the tendencies of his genius the lines they were afterwards to follow.
"Turn a man whither he will," he remarks in his Autobiography, "he will always return to the path marked out for him by nature," and his own development signally illustrates the truth of the remark.

From his earliest youth, he tells us, he had "a passion for investigating natural things"; and towards middle life his interest in physical science became so absorbing as for many years to stifle his creative faculty.

But in the retrospect of his life as a whole he had no doubt as to the supreme bent of his genius.

The "laurel crown of the poet" was the goal of his youthful ambition, and the last bequest he made to posterity was the Second Part of _Faust_.