I have to thank your dear father for these conceptions; he it was who prepared my mind to receive them; time will give its blessing to my diligence which may complete the work he began."[63] In point of fact, partly owing to the depressing conditions in which he found himself, and partly, it may be, out of his own deliberate purpose, Goethe produced no work of importance during the year and a half he spent in Frankfort.

It was a period of incubation, and the stimulus to production was to come to him in another environment.
[Footnote 63: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i.

200.] In the spring of 1770 Goethe recovered his normal health and spirits, and, in accordance with his father's wish, he proceeded to Strassburg to complete his legal studies.

He left home with as intense a feeling of relief as he had left it on the previous occasion.

Between him and his father there had been growing estrangement, and the estrangement had ended in an open quarrel when he ventured to criticise the architecture of the paternal house, which had been constructed under his father's own directions.