GOETHE IN STRASSBURG APRIL, 1770--AUGUST, 1771 Goethe was in his twenty-first year when he entered Strassburg in the beginning of April, 1770.

From his maturer age and the chastening experience of the preceding eighteen months, therefore, it was to be expected that his management of his life in his new home would be more in accordance with his father's wishes than his wild ways in Leipzig.
In sending his son to Strassburg it was the father's intention that he should complete those legal studies of which he had made a jest in Leipzig, and qualify himself for the profession by which he was to make his future living.

During his residence of some sixteen months in Strassburg Goethe did actually fulfil his father's wish, and returned to Frankfort as a full-fledged Licenciate of Laws, but as little as at Leipzig did the interests which engrossed him suggest future eminence in his profession.
What again strikes us is the rapidity with which he caught the tone of his new surroundings.

In Strassburg he found a society whose ways of living and thinking were equally different from those of Frankfort and of Leipzig.

Strassburg had not the bounded intellectual horizon which made him feel himself an alien in his native town, nor, on the other hand, did it offer the opportunities for frivolous distraction which he found in the "little Paris." Strassburg had been a French town for a hundred years, but there was no town in Germany more intensely German in its sympathies and aspirations.