In the _Ephemerides_--a diary he kept in Strassburg and in which he noted his random thoughts and the books that happened to be engaging him--we can see the range of his reading and the scope of his interests.

Occultism, metaphysics, science in many departments, literature ancient and modern, all in turn absorbed his attention and suggest a mental state impatient of the limits of the human faculties--the state of mind which he was afterwards so marvellously to reproduce in his _Faust_.[95] Inspired by the conversation of the medical students who met at the common table, as well as by his own natural bent, he attended the university lectures on chemistry and anatomy, and thus laid a solid foundation for his subsequent original investigations in these sciences.

Extensive travels in the surrounding country were among the chief pleasures of his sojourn in Strassburg, and these travels, as was the case with him always, were voyages of discovery.

Architecture, machinery, works of engineering, Roman antiquities, the native ballads of the district--on all he turned an equally curious eye, and with such vivid impressions that they remained in his memory after the lapse of half a lifetime.
[Footnote 95: "I, too," Goethe wrote in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_, "had trodden the path of knowledge, and had early been led to see the vanity of it."] In Goethe the instinct for self-mastery was as remarkable as his instinct for knowledge.

As the result of his illness in Frankfort, his organs of sense were in a state of morbid susceptibility which "put him out of harmony with himself, with objects around him, and even with the elements." It throws a curious light on the nature of the man that amid all the preoccupations of his mind and heart in Strassburg he could deliberately turn his thoughts to the cure of his jarred nerves.