The Life and Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
by Adolf Wilhelm Theodor Stahr (9781458924544)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE UNIVERSITY. AFTER a short sojourn in his father's house, Lessing at the age of seventeen, entered the University of Leipsic, in September, 1746. A stipend from the municipality of Kamenz, and a contribution from the same relative who had prepared him for the grammar-school of Meissen, helped the parents to defray his expenses, which, on account of their increasing family and limited means, remained sufficiently oppressive. His admission as academical citizen took place on the same day on which, twenty years later, another youth, for whom he was destined by his intellectual labors to prepare the way, was matriculated as a Leipsic student, namely, John Wolfgang Goethe, the son of a Frankfort patrician. Both were of the same age, for Goethe had just finished his seventeenth year when he entered the university, and both came there with the same secret purpose ? to devote their studies to the acquirement of a liberal culture, contrary to the wishes of their parents, who expected them to pursue the technicalities of an exclusive profession. This culture then seemed attainable only through the knowledge of classical antiquity, then recently revived in Germany; and from that source the intellect of the youthful generation sought to derive its stimulus for independent creation and poetical activity. But with this similarity in the position of the two youths who were to found entirely new epochs in the moral and intellectual development of their nation, and bring about revolutions in thought which were scarcely imagined at that time, there was, nevertheless, a marked contrast between the mental conditions with which they began their self-appointed task. The thorough and systematical preparation which the pupil of the Meissen grammar-school had enjoyed in one of the...

USD $26.16

   Dispatch: 3 to 7 business days, stock levels permitting