Without knowing it, Professor Morus came to strengthen her instructions.  He was an uncommonly gentle and friendly man, with whom I became acquainted at the table of Hofrath Ludwig, and who received me very pleasantly when I begged the privilege of visiting him.  Now, while making inquiries of him concerning antiquity, I did not conceal from him what delighted me among the moderns; when he spoke about such things with more calmness, but, what was still worse, with more profundity than Madame Boehme; and he thus opened my eyes, at first to my greatest chagrin, but afterwards to my surprise, and at last to my edification.

Besides this, there came the Jeremiads, with which Gellert, in his course, was wont to warn us against poetry.  He wished only for prose essays, and always criticised these first.  Verses he treated as a sorry addition:  and, what was the worst of all, even my prose found little favor in his eyes; for, after my old fashion, I used always to lay, as the foundation, a little romance, which I loved to work out in the epistolary form.  The subjects were impassioned, the style went beyond ordinary prose, and the contents probably did not display any very deep knowledge of mankind in the author; and so I stood in very little favor with our professor, although he carefully looked over my labors as well as those of the others, corrected them with red ink, and here and there added a moral remark.  Many leaves of this kind, which I kept for a long time with satisfaction, have unfortunately, in the course of years, at last disappeared from among my papers.

If elderly persons wish to play the pedagogue properly, they should neither prohibit nor render disagreeable to a young man any thing which gives him pleasure, of whatever kind it may be, unless, at the same time, they have something else to put in its place, or can contrive a substitute.  Everybody protested against my tastes and inclinations; and, on the other hand, what they commended to me lay either so far from me that I could not perceive its excellencies, or stood so near me that I thought it not a whit better than what they inveighed against.  I thus became thoroughly perplexed on the subject, and promised myself the best results from a lecture of Ernesti’s on “Cicero de Oratore.”  I learned something, indeed, from this lecture, but was not enlightened on the subject which particularly concerned me.  What I demanded was a standard of opinion, and thought I perceived that nobody possessed it; for no one agreed with another, even when they brought forward examples:  and where were we to get a settled judgment, when they managed to reckon up against a man like Wieland so many faults in his amiable writings, which so completely captivated us younger folks?