"What I heard of heaven and the resurrection confused my thoughts; it seemed to me as if my mother would soon awake and be with us again. Some time after, my brother, who was much more sensible than I, said, as we were kneeling on a stool, looking at the floating evening clouds, and talking of our mother: 'No, the resurrection is something quite different!' But soon after her burial--it was Sunday--when I was playing in the evening in front of our back door, and a beggar spoke to me, I exclaimed, 'Mamma is dead!' and ran away from the nurse through both courts, in order to seek my father, whom I found sitting sorrowfully in his room. He took me and my brother by the hand and wept. This appeared strange to me, and I thought, 'So, my father also can weep, who is so old.' For my father, who was then scarcely forty-seven years of age, appeared old to me,--far older, for example, than I now believe myself to look, at almost the same age. But children look upon things differently to others; besides which, my father had dark eyebrows, in which respect I have become partly like him. "Six months after my mother's death, my father took his sister to live with him, which altered our manner of life in many ways. Our life was no longer so quiet as before. Still sweet to me is the remembrance of the tales with which our aunt--who was always called by us and all the world, _Frau Muhme_--entertained us in the evening. As soon as it was twilight we dragged her by force into her chair, and we children sat round her and listened. Stories were hundreds of times repeated of our father's home, of Leipzig, and of grandfathers and great-grandfathers; and I longed to see myself at Leipzig, and to see the great fair, which I represented to myself, strangely enough, as an immense staircase hung with paper. "We enjoyed indescribable pleasure when we watched in the evening, by moonlight, the motion of the clouds. The view from one window was of the hill and woods. In the forms of those clouds we discovered the figures of men or animals. There was a solemnity about them which enhanced the charm, and when, in my sixteenth year, I for the first time read Ossian, and his gloomy world of spirits and misty forms passed before me, then did I return in spirit to that window. Equally so, when I read the poem, 'Jetzt zieh'n die Wolken, Lotte, Lotte!'