the one who evokes it in the North, at any rate one who will contribute
greatly towards it."

One of the first books I had read as a student was Goethe's _Dichtung
und Wahrheit_, and this career had extraordinarily impressed me. In
my childlike enthusiasm I determined to read all the books that Goethe
says that he read as a boy, and thus commenced and finished
Winckelmann's collected works, Lessing's _Laocoon_ and other books
of artistic and archaeological research; in other words, studied the
history and philosophy of Art in the first instance under aspects which,
from the point of view of subsequent research, were altogether
antiquated, though in themselves, and in their day, valuable enough.

Goethe's life fascinated me for a time to such an extent that I found
duplicates of the characters in the book everywhere. An old language
master, to whom I went early in the morning, in order to acquire from
him the knowledge of English which had not been taught me at school,
reminded me vividly, for instance, of the old dancing master in Goethe,
and my impression was borne out when I discovered that he, too, had two
pretty daughters. A more important point was that the book awoke in me a
restless thirst for knowledge, at the same time that I conceived a
mental picture of Goethe's monumental personality and began to be
influenced by the universality of his genius.

Meanwhile, circumstances at home forced me, without further vacillation,
to take up some special branch of study. The prospects literature
presented were too remote. For Physics I had no talent; the logical bent
of my abilities seemed to point in the direction of the Law; so
Jurisprudentia was selected and my studies commenced.