[Illustration:  Jean Paul]

“One forenoon,” he writes, “I was standing, a very young child, by the house door, looking to the left at the wood-pile, when, all at once, like a lightning flash from heaven, the inner vision arose before me:  I am an I.  It has remained ever since radiant.  At that moment my I saw itself for the first time and forever.”

It is curious to contrast this childhood, in the almost cloistered seclusion of the Fichtelgebirge, with Goethe’s at cosmopolitan Frankfurt or even with Schiller’s at Marbach.  Much that came unsought, even to Schiller, Richter had a struggle to come by; much he could never get at all.  The place of “Frau Aja” in the development of the child Goethe’s fancy was taken at Joditz by the cow-girl.  Eagerness to learn Fritz showed in pathetic fulness, but the most diligent search has revealed no trace in these years of that creative imagination with which he was so richly dowered.

When Fritz was thirteen his father received a long-hoped-for promotion to Schwarzenbach, a market town near Hof, then counting some 1,500 inhabitants.  The boy’s horizon was thus widened, though the family fortunes were far from finding the expected relief.  Here Fritz first participated in the Communion and has left a remarkable record of his emotional experience at “becoming a citizen in the city of God.”  About the same time, as was to be expected, came the boy’s earliest strong emotional attachment.  Katharina Baerin’s first kiss was, for him, “a unique pearl of a minute, such as never had been and never was to be.”  But, as with the Communion, though the memory remained, the feeling soon passed away.

The father designed Fritz, evidently the most gifted of his sons, for the church, and after some desultory attempts at instruction in Schwarzenbach, sent him in 1779 to the high school at Hof.  His entrance examination was brilliant, a last consolation to the father, who died, worn out with the anxieties of accumulating debt, a few weeks later.  From his fellow pupils the country lad suffered much till his courage and endurance had compelled respect.  His teachers were conscientious but not competent.  In the liberally minded Pastor Vogel of near-by Rehau, however, he found a kindred spirit and a helpful friend.  In this clergyman’s generously opened library the thirsty student made his first acquaintance with the unorthodox thought of his time, with Lessing and Lavater, Goethe and even Helvetius.  When in 1781 he left Hof for the University of Leipzig the pastor took leave of the youth with the prophetic words:  “You will some time be able to render me a greater service than I have rendered you.  Remember this prophecy.”

Under such stimulating encouragement Richter began to write.  Some little essays, two addresses, and a novel, a happy chance has preserved.  The novel is an echo of Goethe’s Werther, the essays are marked by a clear, straightforward style, an absence of sentimentality or mysticism, and an eagerness for reform that shows the influence of Lessing.  Religion is the dominant interest, but the youth is no longer orthodox, indeed he is only conditionally Christian.