vere
and domineering man; his mother, imaginative and over-indulgent. Karl's
childhood and early youth were uneventful. After passing through the
regular course of preparatory education in a "Gymnasium," he entered, in
1813, the University of Halle. During his first year there, Germany rose
up to throw off the yoke of Napoleon, and the King of Prussia issued a
proclamation calling the nation to arms, to which the people responded
with unprecedented unanimity and enthusiasm. Schoolboys and bearded men,
laborers and professional men, merchants and soldiers, united in one
patriotic purpose. The regular army was everywhere supplemented by
volunteer organizations. An epoch began which in its enthusiasm, its
idealism, the force and richness of its inspiration, and its
overwhelming impetus deserved, more than any other in modern history,
its title: "The Spring of Nations."

Immermann's sensitive and responsive nature thrilled with the general
impulse, and he asked his father to let him join the army, but was told,
peremptorily, not to interrupt the first year of his studies. He
submitted, and plunged into the study of the literature of the
Romanticists, which, in its remoteness from actuality, offered
distraction from his disappointment. During this time he fell ill of
typhoid fever, from which he did not fully recover until the campaign
had victoriously ended in the battle of Leipzig. He joined, however,
after Napoleon's escape from Elba, the second campaign, in which he took
part in two battles. At the end of the war, having retired as an officer
of the reserves, he returned to Halle to finish his study of the law.

He found a new spirit dominant among the students. This spirit,
characterized by a strongly democratic desire for national unity, pride
of race, and impatience with external and conventional restraints, had a
rich network of roots in the immediate past: in the individualism and
the humanism of the Storm and Stress Movement and the Classic Era of the
eighteenth century; in the subjective idealism of the Romantic school;
in the nationalism of Klopstock, Herder, Schiller, and Fichte, and in
the self-reliant transcendentalism of Kant's philosophy and
Schleiermacher's theology. This spirit had received its political
direction principally through the genius of the Baron von Stein, the
Prussian statesman, whose aim was the restoration of German national
unity. He believed that the political unity of Germany must rest o