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ical perspective. I should not say that my father was one of the great poets of Germany, though Heine, no mean critic, declared that he placed his lyric poetry next to that of Goethe. Besides, he was barely thirty-three when he died. He had been a favourite pupil of F. A. Wolf, and had proved his classical scholarship by his _Homerische Vorschule_, and other publications. His poems became popular in the true sense of the word, and there are some which the people in the street sing even now without being aware of the name of their author. Schubert's compositions also have contributed much to the wide popularity of his _Schoene Muellerin_ and his _Winterreise_, so that though it might truly be said of him that he wanted no monument in bronze or stone, it seemed but natural that a small town like Dessau should wish to honour itself by honouring the memory of one of its sons. In the company of Mendelssohn, the philosopher, and of F. Schneider, the composer, a monument of my father in the principal street of his native town, and before the school in which he had been a pupil and a teacher, could hardly seem out of place. That the Greek Parliament voted the Pentelican marble for the poet of the _Griechenlieder_, as it had done for Lord Byron, was another inducement for his fellow citizens to do honour to their honoured poet. He died when I was hardly four years old, so that my recollection of him is very faint and vague, made up, I believe, to a great extent, of pictures, and things that my mother told me. I seem to remember him as a bright, sunny, and thoroughly joyful man, delighted with our little naughtinesses. One book I still possess which he bought for me and which was to be the first book of my library. It was a small volume of Horace, printed by Pickering in 1820. It has now almost vanished among the 12,000 big volumes that form my library, but I am delighted that I am still able, at seventy-six, to read it without spectacles. I think I remember my father taking my sister and me on his knees, and telling us the most delightful stories, that set us wondering and laughing and crying till we could laugh and cry no longer. He had been a fellow worker with the brothers Grimm, and the stories he told were mostly from their collection, though he knew how to embellish them with anything that could make a child cry and laugh. People have little idea how great and how lasting an influence such popular stories about kings an
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