Dr. Wollweide was a mathematician and a physicist, and I found him freely communicative.  He was so kind as to mention and explain to me the many various problems he had set before himself to work out.  This caused my long slumbering and suppressed love for mathematics as a science, and for physics, to spring up again, fully awake.  For some time past my tendency had leaned more and more towards architecture, and, indeed, I had now firmly determined to choose that as my profession, and to study it henceforth with all earnestness.  My intellectual cravings and the choice of a profession seemed at last to run together, and I felt continually bright and happy at the thought.  I seized the opportunity of the presence of the scholar whom I have named to learn from him what were the best books on those subjects which promised to be useful to me, and my first care was to become possessed of them.  Architecture was now vigorously studied, and other books, too, were not suffered to lie idle.

The following books took great hold upon me:  Proeschke’s “Fragments on Anthropology” (a small unpretending book), Novalis’ Works, and Arndt’s “Germany” and “Europe."[31] The first of these at one stroke drew together, so that I could recognise in them myself as a connected whole, my outer existence, my inner character, my disposition, and the course of my life.  I for the first time realised myself and my life as a single entity in contrast to the whole world outside of me.[32] The second book lay before me the most secret emotions, perceptions, and intentions of my inmost soul, clear, open, and vivid.  If I parted with that book it seemed as if I had parted with myself; if anything happened to the book I felt as though it had happened to me, only more deeply and with greater pain.  The third book taught me of man in his broad historical relations, set before me the general life of my kind as one great whole, and showed me how I was bound to my own nation, both to my ancestors and my contemporaries.  Yet the service this last book had done me was hardly recognised at this time; for my thoughts were bent on a definite outward aim, that of becoming an architect.  But I could at all events recognise the new eager life which had seized me, and to mark this change to myself, I now began to use as a Christian name the last instead of the first of my baptismal names.[33] Other circumstances also impelled me to make this change; and, further, it freed me from the memory of the many disagreeable impressions of my boyhood which clustered round the name I was then called.

The time had come when I could no longer remain satisfied with my present occupation; and I therefore sent in my resignation.  The immediate outward circumstance which decided me was this.  I had kept up a correspondence with the young man whom I had known as a private tutor when I held a Government clerkship in Bamberg, and who left his situation to go to Frankfurt, and then on into France.[34] He had afterwards lived some time