In order to meet this crisis with dignity I at length decided to surprise my family by disclosing to them the secret of my tragedy, which was now completed.  They were to be informed of this great event by my uncle.  I thought I could rely upon his hearty recognition of my vocation as a great poet on account of the deep harmony between us on all other questions of life, science, and art.  I therefore sent him my voluminous manuscript, with a long letter which I thought would please him immensely.  In this I communicated to him first my ideas with regard to the St. Nicholas’s School, and then my firm determination from that time forward not to allow any mere school pedantry to check my free development.  But the event turned out very different from what I had expected.  It was a great shock to them.  My uncle, quite conscious that he had been indiscreet, paid a visit to my mother and brother-in-law, in order to report the misfortune that had befallen the family, reproaching himself for the fact that his influence over me had not always, perhaps, been for my good.  To me he wrote a serious letter of discouragement; and to this day I cannot understand why he showed so small a sense of humour in understanding my bad behaviour.  To my surprise he merely said that he reproached himself for having corrupted me by conversations unsuited to my years, but he made no attempt to explain to me good-naturedly the error of my ways.

The crime this boy of fifteen had committed was, as I said before, to have written a great tragedy, entitled Leubald und Adelaide.

The manuscript of this drama has unfortunately been lost, but I can still see it clearly in my mind’s eye.  The handwriting was most affected, and the backward-sloping tall letters with which I had aimed at giving it an air of distinction had already been compared by one of my teachers to Persian hieroglyphics.  In this composition I had constructed a drama in which I had drawn largely upon Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and Goethe’s Gotz van Berlichingen.  The plot was really based on a modification of Hamlet, the difference consisting in the fact that my hero is so completely carried away by the appearance of the ghost of his father, who has been murdered under similar circumstances, and demands vengeance, that he is driven to fearful deeds of violence; and, with a series of murders on his conscience, he eventually goes mad.  Leubald, whose character is a mixture of Hamlet and Harry Hotspur, had promised his father’s ghost to wipe from the face of the earth the whole race of Roderick, as the ruthless murderer of the best of fathers was named.  After having slain Roderick himself in mortal combat, and subsequently all his sons and other relations who supported him, there was only one obstacle that prevented Leubald from fulfilling the dearest wish of his heart, which was to be united in death with the shade of his father:  a child of Roderick’s was still alive.  During the storming of his castle