In my first seven years I was a delicate boy, for long confined to my room, and often even to bed; but, nevertheless, I had a strong inclination towards occupation and mental activity. My parents busied themselves a good deal with me; picture books and games, especially with wooden blocks, filled up the rest of the time. Reading came pretty early, which, of course, greatly increased the range of my occupations. But a defect of my mental organisation showed itself almost as early, in that I had a bad memory for disconnected things. The first indication of this I consider to be the difficulty I had in distinguishing between left and right; afterwards, when at school I began with languages, I had greater difficulties than others in learning words, irregular grammatical forms, and peculiar terms of expression. History as then taught to us I could scarcely master. To learn prose by heart was martyrdom. This defect has, of course, only increased, and is a vexation of my mature age. But when I possessed small mnemotechnical methods, or merely such as are afforded by the metre and rhyme of poetry, learning by heart, and the retention of what I had learnt, went on better. I easily remembered poems by great authors, but by no means so easily the somewhat artificial verses of authors of the second rank. I think that is probably due to the natural flow of thought in good poems, and I am inclined to think that in this connection is to be found an essential basis of æsthetic beauty. In the higher classes of the Gymnasium I could repeat some books of the Odyssey, a considerable number of the odes of Horace, and large stores of German poetry. In other directions I was just in the position of our older ancestors, who were not able to write, and hence expressed their laws and their history in verse, so as to learn them by heart. That which a man does easily he usually does willingly; hence I was first of all a great admirer and lover of poetry. This inclination was encouraged by my father, who, while he had a strict sense of duty, was also of an enthusiastic disposition, impassioned for poetry, and particularly for the classic period of German Literature. He taught German in the upper classes of the Gymnasium, and read Homer with us. Under his guidance we did, alternately, themes in German prose and metrical exercises--poems as we called them. But even if most of us remained indifferent poets, we learned better in this way, than in any other I know of, how to express what we had to say in the most varied manner.