Goethe, wrote Horn, had fallen in love with a girl "beneath him in rank," and his antics were assumed to disguise the fact from his friends who might report it to his father.
Goethe's relations to this girl were to be his liveliest experience in Leipzig, and an experience frequently to be repeated at different periods of his life.

Like his other adventures of the same nature, it was to supply him with a fund of emotions and reflections which at a future day were to serve him as literary capital.

The tale of his passion, if passion it was, is, therefore, an essential part of his biography, both as a man and a literary artist.
The girl in question was Kaethchen (or, as Goethe calls her in his Autobiography, Aennchen) Schoenkopf, the daughter of a wineseller and lodging-house keeper in Leipzig, whose wife, we are informed, belonged to a "patrician" family in Frankfort.

As described by Horn, she was "well-grown though not tall, with a round, pleasant face, though not particularly pretty, and with an open, gentle, and engaging air"; and in a letter to his sister Goethe gives the further information that she had a "good heart, not bewildered with too much reading," and that her spelling was dubious.

And it may be noted in passing that Goethe apparently had a preference for women who were not sophisticated with letters, as was notably shown in the case of the woman whom he eventually made his wife.
It was on April 26th, 1766, that he first made the declaration of his passion, so that, when Horn wrote, we are to suppose that its course was in full tide.[22] But now, as always, Goethe had room for two objects in his affections.