Loud sounds disturbed him, and to deaden the sensitiveness of his ears he attended the evening tatoo; to cure himself of a tendency to giddiness he practised climbing the cathedral; partly to rid himself of a repugnance to repulsive sights he attended clinical lectures; and by a similar course of discipline he so completely delivered himself from "night fears" that he afterwards found it difficult to realise them even in imagination.
In his old age Goethe said of himself: "I have that in me which, if I allowed it to go unchecked, would ruin both myself and those about me." Was it, as Goethe would have us believe, by sheer purposive will that he kept this dangerous element in him under check and saved himself at critical moments from disaster?
When we regard his life as a whole, the actual facts hardly justify such a conclusion.

Nature had given him two safeguards which, without any effort of will on his own part, assured him deliverance where the risk of wreckage was greatest--a consuming desire to _know_ which grew with every year of his life, and a versatility of temperament which necessitated ever-renewed sensations equally of the mind and heart.

Of the working of these two elements in him we have already had illustration; they will receive further illustration as we proceed.
It would be within the truth to say that the period of Goethe's sojourn in Strassburg was the most memorable epoch of his life.

During the eighteen months he spent there he received an intellectual stimulus from which we may date his dedication to the unique career before him, in which self-culture, the passion for knowledge, and the impulse to produce were all commensurate ends.

Moreover, as has already been said, it was in Strassburg that his genius found its first adequate expression.