The Youth of Goethe

he speaks with the feelings of a grateful son, conscious of the deep debt he owed to her.1 His relations to her in his later years have exposed him to severe animadversion, but their mutual relations in these early years present the most attractive chapter in the record of his private life. Married at the age of seventeen to a husband approaching forty, the mother, as she herself said, stood rather as an elder sister than as a parent to her children. And her own character made this relation a natural one. An overflowing vitality, a lively and never-failing interest in all the details of daily life, and a temperament responsive to every call, kept her perennially young, and fitted her to be the companion of her children rather than the sober helpmate of such a husband as Herr Goethe.2 How, by her faculty of story-telling, she ministered to the side of her son's nature which he had inherited from herself Goethe has related with grateful appreciation. But he owed her a larger debt. It 1 Writing to her grandchild, Goethe's mother says: " Dein lieber Vater hat mir nie Kummer oder Verdruss verursacht." J When the son of Frau von Stein was about to visit her, Goethe wrote : " Da sie nicht so ernsthaft ist wie ich, so wirst du dich besser bei ihr bcfinden." INFLUENCE OF HIS MOTHER 9 was her spirit pervading the household that brought such happiness into his early home life as fell to his lot. A commonplace mother and a prosaic father would have created an atmosphere...