Private lessons, which now gradually multiplied, were shared with the children of the neighbors.  This learning in common did not advance me:  the teachers followed their routine; and the rudeness, sometimes the ill nature, of my companions, interrupted the brief hours of study with tumult, vexation, and disturbance.  Chrestomathies, by which learning is made pleasant and varied, had not yet reached us.  Cornelius Nepos, so dry to young people; the New Testament, which was much too easy, and which by preaching and religious instructions had been rendered even common-place; Cellarius and Pasor,—­could impart no kind of interest:  on the other hand, a certain rage for rhyme and versification, a consequence of reading the prevalent German poets, took complete possession of us.  Me it had seized much earlier, as I had found it agreeable to pass from the rhetorical to the poetical treatment of subjects.

We boys held a Sunday assembly where each of us was to produce original verses.  And here I was struck by something strange, which long caused me uneasiness.  My poems, whatever they might be, always seemed to me the best.  But I soon remarked that my competitors, who brought forth very lame affairs, were in the same condition, and thought no less of themselves.  Nay, what appeared yet more suspicious, a good lad (though in such matters altogether unskilful), whom I liked in other respects, but who had his rhymes made by his tutor, not only regarded these as the best, but was thoroughly persuaded they were his own, as he always maintained in our confidential intercourse.  Now, as this illusion and error was obvious to me, the question one day forced itself upon me, whether I myself might not be in the same state, whether those poems were not really better than mine, and whether I might not justly appear to those boys as mad as they to me?  This disturbed me much and long, for it was altogether impossible for me to find any external criterion of the truth:  I even ceased from producing, until at length I was quieted by my own light temperament, and the feeling of my own powers, and lastly by a trial of skill,—­started on the spur of the moment by our teachers and parents, who had noted our sport,—­in which I came off well, and won general praise.

No libraries for children had at that time been established.  The old had themselves still childish notions, and found it convenient to impart their own education to their successors.  Except the “Orbis Pictus” of Amos Comenius, no book of the sort fell into our hands; but the large folio Bible, with copperplates by Merian, was diligently gone over leaf by leaf; Gottfried’s “Chronicles,” with plates by the same master, taught us the most notable events of universal history; the “Acerra Philologica” added thereto all sorts of fables, mythologies, and wonders; and, as I soon became familiar with Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the first books of which in particular I studied carefully, my young brain was rapidly furnished with a mass of images and events, of significant and wonderful shapes and occurrences; and I never felt time hang upon my hands, as I always occupied myself in working over, repeating, and reproducing these acquisitions.