STUDENT IN LEIPZIG OCTOBER, 1765--SEPTEMBER, 1768 As we follow the life of Byron, it has been said, we seem to hear the gallop of horses,[15] and we are conscious of a similar tumult as we follow the career of Goethe from the day he entered Leipzig till the close of the "mad Weimar times," when he was approaching his thirtieth year.

_Jugend ist Trunkenheit ohne Wein_, he says in his _West-Ostlicher Divan_, and, when he wrote the words, he may well have had specially in view the three whirling years he spent in Leipzig.
"If one did not play some mad pranks in youth," he said on another occasion, "what would one have to think of in old age ?" Assuredly during these Leipzig years Goethe played a sufficient number of pranks to supply him with materials for edifying retrospection.
[Footnote 15: X.Doudan, _Melanges et Lettres_, i.

524.] Our difficulty in connection with these three years is to seize the essential lineaments in a character so full of contradictions that it eludes us at every turn, and has presented to each of his many biographers a problem which each has sought to solve after his own fashion.

Of materials for forming our conclusions there is certainly no lack.

In his Autobiography he has related in detail, even to tediousness, the events and experiences of his life in Leipzig.
Contemporary testimony, also, we have in abundance.