The next summer gave a closer opportunity of knowing directly that angry God, of whom the Old Testament records so much.  A sudden hail-storm, accompanied by thunder and lightning, violently broke the new panes at the back of our house, which looked towards the west, damaged the new furniture, destroyed some valuable books and other things of worth, and was the more terrible to the children, as the whole household, quite beside themselves, dragged them into a dark passage, where, on their knees, with frightful groans and cries, they thought to conciliate the wrathful Deity.  Meanwhile, my father, who was the only one self-possessed, forced open and unhinged the window-frames, by which we saved much glass, but made a broader inlet for the rain that followed the hail; so that, after we were finally quieted, we found ourselves in the rooms and on the stairs completely surrounded by floods and streams of water.

These events, startling as they were on the whole, did not greatly interrupt the course of instruction which my father himself had undertaken to give us children.  He had passed his youth in the Coburg Gymnasium, which stood as one of the first among German educational institutions.  He had there laid a good foundation in languages, and other matters reckoned part of a learned education, had subsequently applied himself to jurisprudence at Leipzig, and had at last taken his degree at Giessen.  His dissertation, “Electa de aditione Hereditatis,” which had been earnestly and carefully written, is still cited by jurists with approval.

It is a pious wish of all fathers to see what they have themselves failed to attain realized in their sons, as if in this way they could live their lives over again, and at last make a proper use of their early experience.  Conscious of his acquirements, with the certainty of faithful perseverance, and distrusting the teachers of the day, my father undertook to instruct his own children, allowing them to take particular lessons from particular masters only so far as seemed absolutely necessary.  A pedagogical dilettantism was already beginning to show itself everywhere.  The pedantry and heaviness of the masters appointed in the public schools had probably given rise to this evil.  Something better was sought for, but it was forgotten how defective all instruction must be which is not given by persons who are teachers by profession.

My father had prospered in his own career tolerably according to his wishes:  I was to follow the same course, only more easily, and much farther.  He prized my natural endowments the more, because he was himself wanting in them; for he had acquired every thing only by means of unspeakable diligence, pertinacity, and repetition.  He often assured me, early and late, both in jest and earnest, that with my talents he would have deported himself very differently, and would not have turned them to such small account.