now so far lost his veneration for the clergyman, whose preparatory confirmation classes he attended, as to be quite ready to make fun of him, and even to join with his comrades in withholding part of his class fees, and spending the money in sweets.  How matters stood with me spiritually was revealed to me, almost to my horror, at the Communion service, when I walked in procession with my fellow-communicants to the altar to the sound of organ and choir.  The shudder with which I received the Bread and Wine was so ineffaceably stamped on my memory, that I never again partook of the Communion, lest I should do so with levity.  To avoid this was all the easier for me, seeing that among Protestants such participation is not compulsory.

I soon, however, seized, or rather created, an opportunity of forcing a breach with the Kreuz Grammar School, and thus compelled my family to let me go to Leipzig.  In self-defence against what I considered an unjust punishment with which I was threatened by the assistant headmaster, Baumgarten-Crusius, for whom I otherwise had great respect, I asked to be discharged immediately from the school on the ground of sudden summons to join my family in Leipzig.  I had already left the Bohme household three months before, and now lived alone in a small garret, where I was waited on by the widow of a court plate-washer, who at every meal served up the familiar thin Saxon coffee as almost my sole nourishment.  In this attic I did little else but write verses.  Here, too, I formed the first outlines of that stupendous tragedy which afterwards filled my family with such consternation.  The irregular habits I acquired through this premature domestic independence induced my anxious mother to consent very readily to my removal to Leipzig, the more so as a part of our scattered family had already migrated there.

My longing for Leipzig, originally aroused by the fantastic impressions I had gained there, and later by my enthusiasm for a student’s life, had recently been still further stimulated.  I had seen scarcely anything of my sister Louisa, at that time a girl of about twenty-two, as she had gone to the theatre of Breslau shortly after our stepfather’s death.  Quite recently she had been in Dresden for a few days on her way to Leipzig, having accepted an engagement at the theatre there.  This meeting with my almost unknown sister, her hearty manifestations of joy at seeing me again, as well as her sprightly, merry disposition, quite won my heart.  To live with her seemed an alluring prospect, especially as my mother and Ottilie had joined her for a while.  For the first time a sister had treated me with some tenderness.  When at last I reached Leipzig at Christmas in the same year (1827), and there found my mother with Ottilie and Cecilia (my half-sister), I fancied myself in heaven.  Great changes, however, had already taken place.  Louisa was betrothed to a respected and well-to-do bookseller, Friedrich Brockhaus.  This