Richter was born, as we have mentioned, in the little county town of Wunsiedel, in Franconia, and that in the year 1763--about the same time, to use his own words, as the peace of Hubertsburg, which put an end to the famous Seven Years’ War. He was thus four years the junior of Schiller, (born 1759,) and fourteen of Göethe, (born 1749.) He was, like many other famous literary characters, the son of a clergyman, and blesses God frequently both for this, and that he was not born a cockney, (in Berlin or Vienna,) or in a coach-box, like the children of aristocratic parents, driven about over Europe in their early years, and never knowing the pleasure of having a home. A country vicarage amid mountains, forests, village schools and brawling brooks, gave to Richter’s infancy, and through that to his genius, a calm and peaceful background, over which a multiplicity of whimsical figures might, without painful dissipation, be made to play. In early youth the future prose-poet (for he never wrote a line of _metre_) displayed great eagerness to learn, and great aptitude for speculation; he was accordingly, by the fond ambition of a pious mother, dedicated, like so many a bookish youth, to the church. But theology, with its prickly fence of stiff dogmas, had no charms for a youth of his extreme sensibility, mercurial versatility, and sparkling freakishness; besides, speculation and questioning were already abroad in the German church, and amid the loud voices of contending doctors, it was a difficult thing for an active and honest thinker to cut the matter short by help of the devil’s recipe in Faust; “If you will have a certain clue To thread the theologic maze, Hear only one, and swear to every word he says.” Richter, therefore, finding himself without rudder or compass on the wide sea of German theology, much to the grief of his honest mother, was obliged to forswear theology and become author, his genius being stimulated quite as much by poverty as by Apollo, like old Horace. “Philippi then dismiss’d me with my wings Sorrily clipt, without or house or home; And Need, that ventures all, forced me to try The pen, and become poet.” The Philippi which dismissed Richter was the University of Leipsic. He came back to Hof penniless, but not hopeless, to his good mother,--striving with a mind in some respects as narrow as her fortune; and here he studied, and brooded, and dreamed, and began to shoot strange coruscations: let us see how:--