CHAPTER I.

PAGE

Goethe born, August 28, 1749; his grandfather and grandmother; his father, Johann Kaspar Goethe; his mother; his sister Cornelia; a child of an imaginative temperament; his grandmother’s last Christmas gift; his father’s house rebuilt; his knowledge of Frankfort; the Council-house; education; Klopstock’s “Messiah”; folk-books; the Seven Years’ War; Count Thorane and Goethe; lessons interrupted and renewed; early religious ideas; his first love; in 1765 leaves Frankfort to study at the university of Leipsic 11