young heart.  In that work, a right-minded man of business, and courtier, arrives at high honors through manifold tribulations; and the piety for which they threatened to destroy him became, early and late, his sword and buckler.  It had long seemed to me desirable to work out the history of Joseph; but I could not get on with the form, particularly as I was conversant with no kind of versification which would have been adapted to such a work.  But now I found a treatment of it in prose very suitable, and I applied all my strength to its execution.  I now endeavored to discriminate and paint the characters, and, by the interpolation of incidents and episodes, to make the old simple history a new and independent work.  I did not consider, what, indeed, youth cannot consider, that subject-matter was necessary to such a design, and that this could only arise by the perceptions of experience.  Suffice it to say, that I represented to myself all the incidents down to the minutest details, and narrated them accurately to myself in their succession.

What greatly lightened this labor was a circumstance which threatened to render this work, and my authorship in general, exceedingly voluminous.  A well-gifted young man, who, however, had become imbecile from over-exertion and conceit, resided as a ward in my father’s house, lived quietly with the family, and, if allowed to go on in his usual way, was contented and agreeable.  He had, with great care, written out notes of his academical course, and acquired a rapid, legible hand.  He liked to employ himself in writing better than in any thing else, and was pleased when something was given him to copy; but still more when he was dictated to, because he then felt carried back to his happy academical years.  To my father, who was not expeditious in writing, and whose German letters were small and tremulous, nothing could be more desirable; and he was consequently accustomed, in the conduct of his own and other business, to dictate for some hours a day to this young man.  I found it no less convenient, during the intervals, to see all that passed through my head fixed upon paper by the hand of another; and my natural gift of feeling and imitation grew with the facility of catching up and preserving.

As yet, I had not undertaken any work so large as that biblical prose-epic.  The times were tolerably quiet, and nothing recalled my imagination from Palestine and Egypt.  Thus my manuscripts swelled more and more every day, as the poem, which I recited to myself, as it were, in the air, stretched along the paper; and only a few pages from time to time needed to be re-written.