By means of a ready apprehension, practice, and a good, memory, I very soon outgrew the instructions which my father and the other teachers were able to give, without being thoroughly grounded in anything. Grammar displeased me, because I regarded it as a mere arbitrary law; the rules seemed ridiculous, inasmuch as they were invalidated by so many exceptions, which had all to be learned by themselves. And if the first Latin work had not been in rhyme, I should have got on but badly in that; but as it was, I hummed and sang it to myself readily enough. In the same way we had a Geography in memory-verses, in which the most wretched doggerel best served to fix the recollection of that which was to be retained: e. g.:
Upper-Yssel has many a fen,
Which makes it hateful to all men.
The forms and inflections of language I caught with ease; and I also quickly unravelled what lay in the conception of a thing. In rhetoric, composition, and such matters, no one excelled me, although I was often put back for faults of grammar. Yet these were the attempts that gave my father particular pleasure, and for which he rewarded me with many presents of money, considerable for such a lad.
My father taught my sister Italian in the same room in which I had to commit Cellarius to memory. As I was soon ready with my task, and was yet obliged to sit quiet, I listened with my book before me, and very readily caught the Italian, which struck me as an agreeable softening of Latin.
Other precocities, with respect to memory and the power to combine, I possessed in common with those children who thus acquire an early reputation. For that reason my father could scarcely wait for me to go to college. He very soon declared, that I must study jurisprudence in Leipzig, for which he retained a strong predilection, and I was afterwards to visit some other university and take my degree. As for this second one he was indifferent which I might choose, except that he had for some reason or other a disinclination to Göttingen, to my disappointment, since it was precisely there that I had placed such confidence and high hopes.
He told me further, that I was to go to Wetzlar and Ratisbon as well as to Vienna, and thence towards Italy, although he repeatedly mentioned that Paris should first be seen, because after coming out of Italy nothing else could be pleasing.
These tales of my future youthful travels, often as they were repeated, I listened to eagerly, the more since they always led to accounts of Italy, and at last to a description of Naples. His otherwise serious and dry manner seemed on these occasions to relax and quicken, and thus a passionate wish awoke in us children to participate in the paradise he described.
Private lessons, which now gradually multiplied, were shared with the children of the neighbours. This learning in common did not advance me; the teachers followed their routine; and the rudeness, sometimes the ill-nature, of my companions, interrupted the brief hours of study with tumult, vexation, and disturbance. Chrestomathies, by which learn learning is made pleasant and varied, had not yet reached us. Cornelius Nepos, so dry to young people, the New Testament which was much too easy, and which by preaching and religious instructions had been rendered even common-place, Cellarius and Pasor could impart no kind of interest; on the other hand, a certain rage for rhyme and versification, a consequence of reading the prevalent German poets, took complete possession of us. Me it had seized much earlier, as I had found it agreeable to pass from the rhetorical to the poetical treatment of subjects.
We boys held a Sunday assembly where each of us was to produce original verses. And here I was struck by something strange, which long caused me uneasiness. My poems, whatever they might be, always seemed to me the best. But I soon remarked, that my competitors who brought forth very lame affairs, were in the same condition, and thought no less of themselves. Nay, what appeared yet more suspicious, a good lad (though in such matters altogether unskilful), whom I liked in other respects, but who had his rhymes made by his tutor, not only regarded these as the best, but was thoroughly persuaded they were his own, as he always maintained in our confidential intercourse. Now, as this illusion and error was obvious to me, the question one day forced itself upon me, whether I myself might not be in the same state, whether those poems were not really better than mine, and whether I might not justly appear to those boys as mad as they to me? This disturbed me much and long; for it was altogether impossible for me to find any external criterion of the truth; I even ceased from producing, until at length I was quieted by my own light temperament, and the feeling of my own powers, and lastly by a trial of skill—started on the spur of the moment by our teachers and parents, who had noted our sport—in which I came off well and won general praise.