eller redeemed his
promise with pride.

Of these visits the father was to all intents and purposes ignorant.
He knew that Friedrich went to see the bookseller, and that the
bookseller was good-natured to him; but he never dreamt that his son
read the books with which his neighbour's shop was lined, and he knew
nothing of the wild visions which that same shop bred and nourished in
the mind of his boy, and which made the life outside its doorstep
seem a dream. The father and son saw that life from different points
of view. The boy felt that he was more talented than other boys, and
designed himself for a poet; the tradesman saw that the boy was more
talented than other boys, and designed him for the business; and the
opposite nature of these determinations was the one great misery of
Friedrich's life.

If, however, this source of the child's sorrows was a secret one, and
not spoken of to his brothers and sisters, or even to his friend the
bookseller, equally secret also were the sources of his happiness. No
eye but his own ever beheld those scraps of paper which he begged from
the bookseller, and covered with childish efforts at verse-making. No
one shared the happiness of those hours, of which perhaps a quarter
was spent in working at the poem, and three-fourths were given to the
day-dreams of the poet; or knew that the wild fancies of his brain
made Friedrich's nights more happy than his days. By day he was a
child (his family, with some reason, said a tiresome one), by night he
was a man, and a great man. He visited the courts of Europe, and
received compliments from Royalty; _his_ plays were acted in the
theatres; _his_ poems stood on the shelves of the booksellers; he made
his family rich (the boy was too young to wish for money for
himself); he made everybody happy, and himself famous.

Fame! that was the word that rang in his ears and danced before his
eyes as the hours of the night wore on, and he lived through a
glorious lifetime. And so, when the mother, candle in hand, came round
like a guardian angel among the sleeping children, to see that "all
was right," he--poor child!--must feign to be sleeping on his face, to
hide the traces of the tears which he had wept as he composed the
epitaph which was to grace the monument of the famous Friedrich ----,
poet, philosopher, etc. Whoever doubts the possibility of such
exaggerated folly, has never known an imaginative childhood, or wept
over those unreal griefs, wh