[Illustration: MARKET PLACE GÖTTINGEN]

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It was as yet very early in the morning when I left Göttingen, and the
learned ----, beyond doubt, still lay in bed, dreaming as usual that he
wandered in a fair garden, amid the beds of which grew innumerable white
papers written over with citations. On these the sun shone cheerily, and
he plucked up several here and there and laboriously planted them in new
beds, while the sweetest songs of the nightingales rejoiced his old
heart.

Before the Weender Gate I met two small native schoolboys, one of whom
was saying to the other, "I don't intend to keep company any more with
Theodore; he is a low blackguard, for yesterday he didn't even know the
genitive of _Mensa_." Insignificant as these words may appear, I still
regard them as entitled to be recorded--nay, I would even write them as
town-motto on the gate of Göttingen, for the young birds pipe as the old
ones sing, and the expression accurately indicates the narrow, petty
academic pride so characteristic of the "highly learned" Georgia
Augusta.[51] The fresh morning air blew over the highroad, the birds
sang cheerily, and, little by little, with the breeze and the birds, my
mind also became fresh and cheerful. Such refreshment was sorely needed
by one who had long been confined in the Pandect stable. Roman casuists
had covered my soul with gray cobwebs; my heart was as though jammed
between the iron paragraphs of selfish systems of jurisprudence; there
was an endless ringing in my ears of such sounds as "Tribonian,
Justinian, Hermogenian, and Blockheadian," and a sentimental brace of
lovers seated under a tree appeared to me like an edition of the _Corpus
Juris_ with closed clasps. The road began to take on a more lively