g 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