My grandfather’s father again was the famous reformer of public education in Germany. He (1723-1790) had to brave the conservative and clerical parties throughout the country. His home at Hamburg was burnt in a riot, and it was then that he migrated to Dessau, to become the founder of the _Philanthropinum_, and at the same time the path-breaker for men such as Pestalozzi (1746-1827) and Froebel (1782-1852). Considering his lifelong struggles, he deserved a better monument at Dessau than he has found there. No doubt he was a passionate and violent man, and his outbreaks are still remembered at Dessau, while his beneficial activity has almost been forgotten. I was often told that I took after my mother’s family, whatever that may mean, and this was certainly the case in outward appearance, though I hope not in temper. My great grandfather, the Pedagogue as he was called, was a friend of Goethe’s, and is mentioned in his poems. My childhood at home was often very sad. My mother, who was left a widow at twenty-eight with two children, my sister and myself, was heart-broken. The few years of her married life had been most bright and brilliant. My father was a rising poet, and such was his popularity that he was able to indulge his tastes as he liked, whether in travelling or in making his house a pleasant centre of social life. Contemporaries and friends of my father, particularly Baron Simolin, a very intimate friend, who spent the Christmas of 1825 in our house, have written of the bright gaiety, the whole-hearted enjoyment of life that reigned there, and have told how, though his income was to say the least of it small, Wilhelm Müller’s home was the rallying-point for all the cultivated, scientific, and artistic society of Dessau, who felt attracted by the simple and unaffected yet truly genial disposition of the master of the house. It would be interesting to know how much an author could make at that time by his pen. Publishers seem to have been far more liberal then than they are now. The circumstances were different. The number of writers was of course much smaller, and the sale of really popular books probably much larger. Anyhow, my father, whose salary was minute, seems to have been able to enjoy the few years of his married life in great comfort. The thought of saving money, however, seems never to have entered his poetical mind, and after his unexpected death, due to paralysis of the heart, it was found that hardly any provision had been made for his family. Even the life insurance, which is obligatory on every civil servant, and the pension granted by the Duke, gave my mother but a very small income, fabulously small, when one considers that she had to bring up two children on it. It has been a riddle to me ever since how she was able to do it.