『我が生涯 第1巻』

I seized upon the first pretext to break with the Kreuz Grammar School altogether. In self-defence against an unjust punishment threatened by the assistant headmaster Baumgarten-Crusius—for whom I otherwise had great respect—I asked to be discharged at once on the plea of a sudden summons to my family in Leipzig. I had already left the Bohme household, and now I lived alone in a tiny garret, waited on by the widow of a court plate-washer who set before me, at every meal, the familiar thin Saxon coffee. In that attic I wrote verses, and there I sketched the first outlines of that stupendous tragedy which was one day to fill my family with such astonishment and dismay.

The irregularities of this premature independence, however, alarmed my mother into consenting to my removal to Leipzig; and so, in the Christmas of 1827, I arrived in that city. What a reunion it was! There was my sister Louisa, now about twenty-two, returned from Breslau, and her hearty manifestations of joy quite won my heart. My mother and my dear Ottilie and Cecilia, my half-sister, were all gathered in, and for a moment I fancied myself in heaven. But the heavens shifted quickly. Louisa was betrothed to Friedrich Brockhaus, a respected and well-to-do bookseller, and her desire to secure an entrance into the higher circles of bourgeois life brought about a marked change in her once-merry manner. I felt the chill of it, and we were estranged for a time. Nor did I help matters, for I gave up my studies entirely once I settled in Leipzig, chafing as I did at the pedantic system of the local schools.

I was entered at St. Nicholas’s School, which enjoyed the better reputation; but the council of teachers, choosing to maintain the dignity of their institution, placed me in the upper third form, whereas at the Kreuz Grammar School in Dresden I had been in the second. To lay aside my beloved Homer—from which I had already made written translations of twelve songs—and take up the lighter Greek prose writers was a humiliation I could not stomach. I never made a friend of any teacher there, and my obstinacy only deepened with every passing day.