Thus begins his account of his first years of school:—
"My earliest recollections begin with the autumn of the year 1776, when I was two years and a half old. We travelled to the family property; I sat on my mother's lap, and the soft bloom on her face gave me great pleasure. I was amused with looking at the trees which appeared to pass the carriage so quickly. Still do the same trees stand on the other side of the bridge; still, when I look at them, does this recollection of the pure world rise before me.
"Already have four-and-forty years passed over the resting-place of your holy dust, dear departed! So early torn away from us! Gentle as thy friendly face, must thy soul have been! I knew thee not; only faint recollections remain to me. I have no picture of thee, not even a sweet token of remembrance. Yet shortly before they sent me, not seventeen years of age, to Leipzig, I stood on the holy spot that contains thy ashes, and sobbing vowed to thee that I would be good!
"Well do I remember the Sunday morning on which my sister Rieckhen was born. Running hurriedly—I had got up sooner than my brother—and, unasked for, had run into my mother's room. I announced it to every one that I found. Some days after, all around me wept 'Mamma is going away!' called out our old nurse, wringing her hands. 'Away! where, then?' I inquired with astonishment 'To heaven!' was the answer, which I did not understand.
"My mother had collected us children once more round her, to kiss and bless us. My half-sister Jettchen, then almost ten years old, and my brother Ernst, who was four, had wept. I—as I have often been told, to my great sorrow—scarcely waited for the kiss, and hid myself playfully behind my sister, 'Fritz! Fritz!' said my mother, smiling, 'you are and will remain a giddy boy; well, run away!'
"What I heard of heaven and the resurrection confused my thoughts; it seemed to me as if my mother would soon awake and be with us again. Some time after, my brother, who was much more sensible than I, said, as we were kneeling on a stool, looking at the floating evening clouds, and talking of our mother: 'No, the resurrection is something quite different!' But soon after her burial—it was Sunday—when I was playing in the evening in front of our back door, and a beggar spoke to me, I exclaimed, 'Mamma is dead!' and ran away from the nurse through both courts, in order to seek my father, whom I found sitting sorrowfully in his room. He took me and my brother by the hand and wept. This appeared strange to me, and I thought, 'So, my father also can weep, who is so old.' For my father, who was then scarcely forty-seven years of age, appeared old to me,—far older, for example, than I now believe myself to look, at almost the same age. But children look upon things differently to others; besides which, my father had dark eyebrows, in which respect I have become partly like him.
"Six months after my mother's death, my father took his sister to live with him, which altered our manner of life in many ways. Our life was no longer so quiet as before. Still sweet to me is the remembrance of the tales with which our aunt—who was always called by us and all the world, Frau Muhme—entertained us in the evening. As soon as it was twilight we dragged her by force into her chair, and we children sat round her and listened. Stories were hundreds of times repeated of our father's home, of Leipzig, and of grandfathers and great-grandfathers; and I longed to see myself at Leipzig, and to see the great fair, which I represented to myself, strangely enough, as an immense staircase hung with paper.
"We enjoyed indescribable pleasure when we watched in the evening, by moonlight, the motion of the clouds. The view from one window was of the hill and woods. In the forms of those clouds we discovered the figures of men or animals. There was a solemnity about them which enhanced the charm, and when, in my sixteenth year, I for the first time read Ossian, and his gloomy world of spirits and misty forms passed before me, then did I return in spirit to that window. Equally so, when I read the poem, 'Jetzt zieh'n die Wolken, Lotte, Lotte!'
"Visitors also, as was formerly the case in almost every nursery, related stories of spirits and ghosts, which we were never tired of hearing. Yet, although many who related them believed in them, at no time did my brother and I give a moment's credence to these tales. Never did we believe in the supernatural; even as boys of fifteen, we struggled against superstition. We have to thank our half-sister Jettchen for this: a maiden of rare gifts of mind. She pointed out to us in simple words the laughable side of these tales. But the awful had not the less great power over us, and we were often in fear when we were obliged to wander in the dark through the long passage to the front drawing-room.
"At the age of three years and a half old, I received my first instruction. My brother could already almost read, and I soon advanced enough to keep pace with him.