nature, a springtime such as I had not before experienced; and an
unexpected life and life-aim budded and blossomed in my breast. All my
inner life and life-aims had become narrowed to the circle of
self-culture and self-education. The outer life, my profession, I
carried on as a mere means of subsistence, quite apart from my real
inner self, and my sphere of operation was limited. I was driven
perforce from pillar to post till at last I had arrived where the Main
unites herself with the Rhine.[90] Here there budded and opened to my
soul one lovely bright spring morning, when I was surrounded by Nature
at her loveliest and freshest, this thought, as it were by
inspiration:--That there must exist somewhere some beautifully simple
and certain way of freeing human life from contradiction, or, as I then
spake out my thought in words, some means of restoring to man, himself,
at peace internally; and that to seek out this way should be the
vocation of my life. And yet my life, to all appearance, my studies and
my desires, belonged to my purely external vocation,[91] and to its
external citizenlike relations; and by no means to mankind at large,
either regarded in itself or in its educational needs. Therefore this
idea of mine was in such violent contrast with my actual life that it
utterly surprised me. In fact, and perhaps greatly because of this
contrast, the idea would undoubtedly have been quite forgotten, had not
other circumstances occurred to revive it. On myself and on my life at
the time it seemed to have not the slightest effect, and it soon passed
from my memory. But later on in this same journey,[92] as I climbed down
from the Wartburg, and turned round to look at the castle, there rushed
upon me once more this thought of a higher educational vocation as my
proper life-work; and again, being so far removed from my actual
external life, it only flashed upon me with a momentary effulgence an
instant, and then sank. This, unconsciously to me, and therefore quite
disregarded by me, was the real position of my inner life when I arrived