There was not a friend, he tells us, whom at one time or another he had not annoyed by his caprice, or offended by his "morbid spirit of contradiction" and sullen avoidance of intercourse.

All through his life Goethe seems to have tried his friends by his variable humours,[47] but it was seldom that he completely alienated them, and he gratefully records how in his present stricken condition they rallied to his side, and put him to shame by their assiduous attentions.

One of these friends, Langer by name, who had succeeded Behrisch as tutor to the young Count, he specially mentions as helping to give a new turn to his thoughts.
Langer was religiously disposed, and found in Goethe, now in a mood to receive them, a sympathetic listener to his theological views.

Under Langer's influence he resumed his youthful study of the Bible--not in the Old Testament, however, but in the New, which he read, he tells us, with "emotion and enthusiasm." It was the beginning of a new phase in his life which was to last for about a year and a half, a phase in which religion, if we are to accept the testimony of his Autobiography, held the uppermost place in his thoughts.
[Footnote 47: When approaching his eightieth year, Goethe remarked to Chancellor von Mueller (March 6th, 1828): "Wer mit mir umgehen will, muss zuweilen auch meine Grobianslaune zugeben, ertragen, wie eines andern Schwachheit oder Steckenpferd."] It was with the feelings of "a shipwrecked seaman," he tells us, that he found himself again under his father's roof, though he characteristically adds that "he had nothing specially to reproach himself with." The atmosphere he found at home was not such as to put him in better spirits.

Father, mother and daughter had been living in mutual misunderstanding during the whole period of the son's absence in Leipzig.