se at Kottbus,
became a reality to me here; and what a powerful influence a visit to the
ancient cloister exerted on our young souls! The nearest relatives of
mighty sovereigns had dwelt as abbesses within its walls. But two
generations ago Anna Amalie, the hapless sister of Frederick the Great,
died while holding this office.

A strange and lasting impression was wrought upon me by a corpse and a
picture in this convent. Both were in a subterranean chamber which
possessed the property of preserving animal bodies from corruption. In
this room was the body of Countess Aurora von Konigsmark, famed as the
most beautiful woman of her time. After a youth spent in splendour she
had retired to the cloister as superior, and there she now lay unveiled,
rigid, and yellow, although every feature had retained the form it had in
death. Beside the body hung her portrait, taken at the time when a smile
on her lips, a glance from her eyes, was enough to fire the heart of the
coldest man.

A terrible antithesis!

Here the portrait of the blooming, beautiful husk of a soul exulting in
haughty arrogance; yonder that husk itself, transformed by the hand of
death into a rigid, colourless caricature, a mummy without embalming.

Art, too, had a place in Quedlinburg. I still remember with pleasure
Steuerwald's beautiful winter landscapes, into which he so cleverly
introduced the mediaeval ruins of the Hartz region.

Thus, Quedlinburg was well suited to arouse poetic feelings in young
hearts, steep the soul with love for the beautiful, time-honoured region,
and yet fill it with the desire to make distant lands its own. Every one
knows that this was Klopstock's birthplace; but the greatest geographer
of all ages, Karl Ritter, whose mighty mind grasped the whole universe as
if it were the precincts of his home, also first saw the light of the
world here.

Gutsmuths, the founder of the gymnastic system, Bosse, the present
Minister of Public Worship and Instruction, and Julius Wolff, are
children of Quedlinburg and pupils of its gymnasium.

The long vacation came between the written and verbal examinations, and
as I had learned privately that my work had been sufficiently
satisfactory, my mother gave me permission to go to the Black Forest, to
which pleasant memories attracted me. But my friend Hey had seen nothing
of the world, so I chose a goal more easily attained, and took him with
me to the Rhine. I went home by the way of Gottingen, a