"I always remained aloof from the noisy amusements of my companions. I loved solitude; a walk in the company of others was disagreeable to me; all their conversations and songs seemed like desecration of nature, which only reveals its beauty, its secrets to silent appreciation. But when I wandered alone through meadows, even if only the cornfields of my paternal estates, or lost myself in the woods--above me the rustling oaks, beside me the roaring sea--a sensation often overcame me, of which I was unable to give any account, which would not allow itself to be put into words, without wiping away its mysterious magic as if it were the coloured down of a butterfly's wings. I was persuaded that this feeling was shared and understood by none; it was a kind of religion of nature, but so fervent, that in it I believed to lose my identity, that I felt as if my soul went forth into the vast universe, as if the lisping breeze which stirred the branches and tops of the trees were the spirit of the Divinity, the same spirit which also animated the respirations of my bosom, and the feelings of my heart. The evening crimson, when its glow faded away behind the summits, could fill me with infinite emotion; a hot day which unfettered the spicy breeze in field and forest, and which with darkening fragrance hovered over the blue distance, could transport me into an ecstacy, as though the fire of external nature glowed within my own veins.
"I studied the works of poets; I found nothing that would entirely have expressed my sensations, and even in ancient religious writings and the works of a later period, I found the indication of this feeling rather than itself in its peculiarity.
"I might gather it from ambiguous symbols, but the language of my heart it was not.
"I visited the university, nevertheless I remained faithful to my solitary, dreamy tendency. I was never to be seen at the drinking parties of our duelling clubs, although I attended their fencing school; I learned to wield the blade bravely, and if any one disturbed or ridiculed me, I demanded satisfaction of him. Dry knowledge imprinted itself on my memory, yet it remained a stranger to my own mental life. The philosophy of the lecture-room gave me no reply to those questions of my soul; I followed their mathematical problems with interest, but they did not touch that which laid hold of my inmost feelings. The lecturer at that time was a highly esteemed master of the art of thinking, yet he confined himself to the tangible, the palpable, and my mind was devoted to the unfathomable.
"Would the world's secret let itself be put into set forms? Would it not much rather disclose itself to inexpressible feelings? A nameless longing took possession of me, to fathom the secret connection between the world's spirit and my own, which at those moments of inspired views had illumined my soul as with flashes of lightning, only to take refuge again in the unattainable.
"It was the same supreme feeling that was peculiar to religious fervour, and yet it lay so far removed from the ordinary circle of conceptions in which believers moved. The daring idea of founding a new religion, or at least of expounding in a new manner that which for thousands of years had been the tradition of faith, often rose within my soul; then--I started at this daring; was it not a lesser venture to emigrate to Madagascar, than to discover a new world of religion?
"The ecstacies which Nature granted me, even as she appeared in the Baltic country mostly void of charms, remained the same; I felt inwardly related to her. On the other hand, Nature stood before me in lofty estrangement in another form in woman. While stormy youth around me had long since in daily pleasures denuded of its leaves that which appeared to me the sacred crowning work of creation, I still experienced a dread of and longing for it, as though for me it were something unapproachable. I felt that for me one half of the world lay in obscurity; like that hemisphere from which the sun is averted, it lay as if bedded in the lap of sacred night, and an ambrosial magical light seemed to flow from it. I shuddered, as through me passed a nervous dread of that moment in which this dark world should move with me into the bright sunshine of knowledge.
"Meanwhile I had terminated my studies. I had been industrious; dry law released me from my internal struggles, from all disturbing trains of thought. Even the most subtle distinctions of the Roman jurists in the most difficult law questions, were enigmas which could be solved, and my mind felt especial satisfaction when it had been successful in such a solution. How totally different were those non-transparent secrets in which neither thought nor feeling were ever entirely consumed.
"I passed my legal examination, and commenced my first employment in the service of the State. With an adventure which had befallen me as student a fatal complication in my life now became connected.
"One evening I had been walking along the Pregel. The light of the declining sun swept the hollow-eyed warehouses, which were crowded together in large quarters of the town, and hovered, dream-like, behind the sails and masts of the ships which lay at anchor in that part of the river where greater depth of water allowed them to do so. Farther up, lay the heavily-freighted 'Wittinen,' and rafts which had come up from Masuren, with their wooden huts. All were merry upon those bast-covers, for these 'Dschimken,' who at home lived in mud hovels, had been long enough sailing past pasturage and meadows on the river bank to rejoice in their life here, at the end of their journey.