It was not a circle into which his own affinities would have led him, but being in it, he, as was his invariable habit, drew from it to the full all that it could give for his own building-up.

And in enriching his own nature and widening his outlook, the experience enlarged the scope of his creative productiveness.

But for his intercourse with these pious enthusiasts the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul would not have found a place in _Wilhelm Meister_, and from the general picture of human life and its activities which it is the object of that book to present, there would have been lacking one conception of life and its responsibilities, not the least interesting in the history of the human spirit.

Most specific and important of all his gains from his association with the Frankfort community, however, was that from it directly emerged what is universally regarded as his greatest creative effort--the First Part of Faust.

The conception of that work was closely associated with the chemical experiments and cabbalistic studies suggested by his intercourse with Fraeulein von Klettenberg and her circle, and not only suggested but carried out on the foundation that had thus been laid.[53] [Footnote 53: Yet at a later date he would seem to have regarded his mystical studies as among the errors of his youth.