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