I was now free, happy, in good mental and bodily health and vigour, and I gained peace within myself and without, through hard work, interrupted only by an indisposition which kept me to my room for a few weeks.  After working all day alone, I used to walk out late in the evening, so that at least I might receive a greeting from the friendly beams of the setting sun.  To invigorate my spirit as well as my bodily frame I would walk on till near midnight in the beautiful neighbourhood which surrounds Goettingen.  The glittering starry sky harmonised well with my thoughts, and a new object which appeared in the heavens at this time, aroused my wonder in an especial degree.  I knew but little of astronomy, and the expected arrival of a large comet[74] was, therefore, quite unknown to me; so that I found out the comet for myself, and that was a source of special attraction.  This object absorbed my contemplation in those silent nights, and the thought of the all-embracing, wide-spreading sphere of law and order above, developed and shaped itself in my mind with especial force during my night-wanderings.  I often turned back home that I might note down in their freshness the results of these musings; and then after a short sleep I rose again to pursue my studies.

In this way the last half of the summer session passed quickly away, and Michaelmas arrived.

The development of my inner life had meanwhile insensibly drawn me little by little quite away from the study of languages, and led me towards the deeper-lying unity of natural objects.  My earlier plan gradually reasserted itself, to study Nature in her first forms and elements.  But the funds which still remained to me were now too small to permit of the longer residence at the university which that plan necessitated.  As I had nothing at all now to depend upon save my own unaided powers, I at first thought to gain my object by turning them to some practical account, such as literary work.  I had already begun to prepare for this, when an unexpected legacy changed my whole position.  Up to now I had had one aunt still living, a sister of my mother’s, who had spent all the best years of her life in my native village, enjoying excellent health and free from care.  By her sudden death I obtained, in a manner I had little expected, the means of pursuing my much-desired studies.  This occurrence made a very deep impression upon me, because this lady was the sister of that uncle of mine whose death had enabled me to travel from Gross Milchow to Frankfurt, and so first set me upon my career as an educator.  And now again the death of a loved one made it possible for me to attain higher culture in the service of this career.  Both brother and sister had loved with the closest affection my own mother, dead so far too soon, and this love they had extended to her children after her.  May these two loving and beloved ones who through their death gave me a higher life and a higher vocation, live for ever through my work and my career.