As I have said, it was long before I became aware that I lacked anything, especially any blessing so great as a father’s faithful love and care; and when life showed to me also a stern face and imposed heavy burdens, my courage was strengthened by my happy confidence that I was one of Fortune’s favorites, as others are buoyed up by their firm faith in their “star.”

When the time at last came that I longed to express the emotions of my soul in verse, I embodied my mother’s prediction in the lines: 

        The child who first beholds the light of day
        After his father’s eyes are closed for aye,
        Fortune will guard from every threatening ill,
        For God himself a father’s place will fill.

People often told me that as the youngest, the nestling, I was my mother’s “spoiled child”; but if anything spoiled me it certainly was not that.  No child ever yet received too many tokens of love from a sensible mother; and, thank Heaven, the word applied to mine.  Fate had summoned her to be both father and mother to me and my four brothers and sisters-one little brother, her second child, had died in infancy—­and she proved equal to the task.  Everything good which was and is ours we owe to her, and her influence over us all, and especially over me, who was afterward permitted to live longest in close relations with her, was so great and so decisive, that strangers would only half understand these stories of my childhood unless I gave a fuller description of her.

These details are intended particularly for my children, my brothers and sisters, and the dear ones connected with our family by ties of blood and friendship, but I see no reason for not making them also accessible to wider circles.  There has been no lack of requests from friends that I should write them, and many of those who listen willingly when I tell romances will doubtless also be glad to learn something concerning the life of the fabulist, who, however, in these records intends to silence imagination and adhere rigidly to the motto of his later life, “To be truthful in love.”

My mother’s likeness as a young woman accompanies these pages, and must spare me the task of describing her appearance.  It was copied from the life-size portrait completed for the young husband by Schadow just prior to his appointment as head of the Dusseldorf Academy of Art, and now in the possession of my brother, Dr. Martin Ebers of Berlin.  Unfortunately, our copy lacks the colouring; and the dress of the original, which shows the whole figure, confirms the experience of the error committed in faithfully reproducing the fashion of the day in portraits intended for future generations.  It never fully satisfied me; for it very inadequately reproduces what was especially precious to us in our mother and lent her so great a charm—­her feminine grace, and the tenderness of heart so winningly expressed in her soft blue eyes.