d professions;
and that I must be sent to the Gymnasium, and one day to the
University. Meanwhile, what printed thing soever I could meet with I
read. My very copper pocket-money I laid-out on stall-literature;
which, as it accumulated, I with my own hands sewed into volumes. By
this means was the young head furnished with a considerable miscellany
of things and shadows of things: History in authentic fragments lay
mingled with Fabulous chimeras, wherein also was reality; and the
whole not as dead stuff, but as living pabulum, tolerably nutritive
for a mind as yet so peptic.'

That the Entepfuhl Schoolmaster judged well, we now know. Indeed,
already in the youthful Gneschen, with all his outward stillness,
there may have been manifest an inward vivacity that promised much;
symptoms of a spirit singularly open, thoughtful, almost poetical.
Thus, to say nothing of his Suppers on the Orchard-wall, and other
phenomena of that earlier period, have many readers of these pages
stumbled, in their twelfth year, on such reflections as the following?
'It struck me much, as I sat by the Kuhbach, one silent noontide, and
watched it flowing, gurgling, to think how this same streamlet had
flowed and gurgled, through all changes of weather and of fortune,
from beyond the earliest date of History. Yes, probably on the morning
when Joshua forded Jordan; even as at the midday when Caesar, doubtless
with difficulty, swam the Nile, yet kept his _Commentaries_ dry,--this
little Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas or Siloa, was murmuring on
across the wilderness, as yet unnamed, unseen: here, too, as in the
Euphrates and the Ganges, is a vein or veinlet of the grand
World-circulation of Waters, which, with its atmospheric arteries, has
lasted and lasts simply with the World. Thou fool! Nature alone is
antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on
is six-thousand years of age.' In which little thought, as in a little
fountain, may there not lie the beginning of those well-nigh
unutterable meditations on the grandeur and mystery of TIME, and its
relation to ETERNITY, which play such a part in this Philosophy of
Clothes?

Over his Gymnasic and Academic years the Professor by no means lingers
so lyrical and joyful as over his childhood. Green sunny tracts there
are still; but intersected by bitter rivulets of tears, here and there
stagnating into sour marshes of discontent. 'With my first view of the
Hinterschlag Gymn