His little receptions in the summer months were in his garden. I have him before me this minute, seated under the wide- spreading linden-tree, with his little table before him, holding his coffee and a few books--his long hair, white as snow, escaping beneath his round cap of dark-green velvet, falling loosely on his shoulders, and his large grey eyes, now widely opened with astonishment at some piece of intelligence a boy would have heard without amazement, then twinkling with sly humour at the droll thoughts passing through his mind; while around him sat his brother professors and their families, chatting pleasantly over the little news of their peaceful community -- the good vraus knitting and listening, and the frauleins demurely sitting by, wearing a look of mock attention to some learned dissertation, and ever and anon stealing a sly glance at the handsome youth who was honoured by an invitation to the soirée. How charming, too, to hear them speak of the great men of the land as their old friends and college companions! It was not the author of _Wallenstein_ and _Don Carlos_, but Frederick Schiller, the student of medicine, as they knew him in his boyhood--bold, ardent, and ambitious; toiling along a path he loved not, and feeling within him the working of that great genius which one day was to make him the pride of his Fatherland; and Wieland, strange and eccentric, old in his youth, with the innocence of a child and the wisdom of a sage; and Hoffman, the victim of his gloomy imagination, whose spectral shapes and dark warnings were not the forced efforts of his brain, but the companions of his wanderings, the beings of his sleep. How did they jest with him on his half-crazed notions, and laugh at his eccentricities! It was strange to hear them tell of going home with Hummel, then a mere boy, and how, as the evening closed in, he sat down to the pianoforte, and played and sang, and played again for hours long, now exciting their wonder by passages of brilliant and glittering effect, now knocking at their hearts by tones of plaintive beauty. There was a little melody he played the night they spoke of--some short and touching ballad, the inspiration of the moment--made on the approaching departure of some one amongst them, which many years after in _Fidelio_ called down thunders of applause; mayhap the tribute of his first audience was a sweeter homage after all.