Recollections of My Childhood and Youth by Georg Morris Cohen Brandes
page 80 of 495 (16%)
page 80 of 495 (16%)
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and bring about great changes in the intellectual world; of what kind,
was uncertain. Meanwhile, as the time drew near for us to enter the University, and I approached the years of manhood which the other, in spite of his modest position as schoolboy, had already long attained, Sebastian grew utterly miserable. He had, as he expressed it, made up his mind to be my _Melanchthon_. But through an inward collapse which I could not understand he now felt that the time in which he could be anything to me had gone by; it seemed to him that he had neglected to acquire the knowledge and the education necessary, and he reproached himself bitterly. "I have not been in the least what I might have been to you," he exclaimed one day, and without betraying it he endured torments of jealousy, and thought with vexation and anxiety of the time when a larger circle would be opened to me in the University, and he himself would become superfluous. His fear was thus far unfounded, that, naive in my selfishness, as in my reliance on him, I still continued to tell him everything, and in return constantly sought his help when philological or mathematical difficulties which I could not solve alone presented themselves to me. But I had scarcely returned to Copenhagen, after my first journey abroad (a very enjoyable four weeks' visit to Goeteborg), I had scarcely been a month a freshman, attending philosophical lectures and taking part in student life than the dreaded separation between us two so differently constituted friends came to pass. The provocation was trifling, in fact paltry. One day I was standing in the lecture-room with a few fellow- students before a lecture began, when a freshman hurried up to us and asked: "Is it true, what Sebastian says, that he is the person you think |
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