at once the reason why my system of education feels itself to be, and in
fact claims to be, an education after the true spirit, and following the
precepts of Jesus Christ.

Through love, mutual faith, and a common aim towards acquiring,
manifesting, and acting out knowledge, there has grown up round me a
little company of men bound together by beautiful human bonds, the like
of which you would with difficulty find elsewhere. In your last letter
you desired to have some account of these friends and members of my
household. I will describe them for you.

But if my account is to be anything more than a lifeless list of names,
and if, though it cannot be the closely-branched tree of life which
actually exists, it is at least to come as near it as a garland or a
nosegay to the tree, you must permit me to go back a little into my past
life; for out of the self-same spirit, whence arose my own endeavours
and which gave its direction to my own life, arose also the circle of
those friends who are now so closely united with me.

The German war of 1813, in which so much seed-corn was sowed that
perhaps only the smaller part of it has yet sprung up, to say nothing of
blossoming and fruitage, sowed also the seed whence sprang the first
beginnings of our association, and of our harmonious circle. In April
1813 Jahn led me and other Berlin students to meet my future comrades in
arms, Luetzow's "Black Troop;" we went from Berlin to Dresden, and thence
for the most part to Leipzig. On this march Jahn made me acquainted
before we reached Meissen with another Berlin student, Heinrich
Langethal, of Erfurt, as a fellow-countryman of mine; and Langethal
introduced me to his friend and fellow-student in theology, Middendorff,
of Brechten, near Dortmund.[108]

A wonderfully lovely spring evening spent together by the friendly
shores of Elbe, and a visit to the magnificent Cathedral of Meissen,
brought me nearer to these and other comrades; but it was the pleasant
banks of Havel at Havelberg, the charming situation of the grand
cathedral, the "Rhine Travels" of Georg Forster, a common love for
nature, and above all a common eager yearning for higher culture that
bound us three for ever together.[109]

The war in all its exhilaration and depression, its privation and
pleasure, its transient and its permanent aspects, flowed on; sometimes
nearer to us, sometimes further away. In August 1814 I was released from
service, and returned to Berl