oor. The boys used to count it a privilege to carry the father's
coffee-cup to him of a Sunday morning, as he sat by the window
meditating his sermon, for then they could carry it back again "and
pick the unmelted remains of sugar-candy from the bottom of it."
Simple pleasures surely, but, as Carlyle says, "there was a bold,
deep, joyful spirit looking through those young eyes, and to such a
spirit the world has nothing poor, but all is rich and full of
loveliness and wonder."

Every book that the boy Fritz could anywise come at was, he tells us,
"a fresh green spring-place," where "rootlets, thirsty for knowledge
pressed and twisted in every direction to seize and absorb." Very
characteristic of the later Jean Paul is one incident of his childhood
which, he says, made him doubt whether he had not been born rather for
philosophy than for imaginative writing. He was witness to the birth
of his own self-consciousness.

[Illustration: JEAN PAUL]

"One forenoon," he writes, "I was standing, a very young child, by
the house door, looking to the left at the wood-pile, when, all at
once, like a lightning flash from heaven, the inner vision arose
before me: I am an _I_. It has remained ever since radiant. At that
moment my _I_ saw itself for the first time and forever."

It is curious to contrast this childhood, in the almost cloistered
seclusion of the Fichtelgebirge, with Goethe's at cosmopolitan
Frankfurt or even with Schiller's at Marbach. Much that came unsought,
even to Schiller, Richter had a struggle to come by; much he could
never get at all. The place of "Frau Aja" in the development of the
child Goethe's fancy was taken at Joditz by the cow-girl. Eagerness to
learn Fritz showed in pathetic fulness, but the most diligent search
has revealed no trace in these years of that creative imagination with
which he was so richly dowered.

When Fritz was thirteen his father received a long-hoped-for promotion
to Schwarzenbach, a market town near Hof, then counting some 1,500
inhabitants. The boy's horizon was thus widened, though the family
fortunes were far from finding the expected relief. Here Fritz first
participated in the Communion and has left a remarkable record of his
emotional experience at "becoming a citizen in the city of God." About
the same time, as was to be expected, came the boy's earliest strong
emotional attachment. Katharina Baerin's first kiss was, for him, "a
unique pearl of a minute, such as never