Interest in medieval Catholicism and in folk-lore is one of the most prominent traits in the Romantic movement, which reached its culmination during the boyhood of Heine. The history of Heine's connection with this movement is foreshadowed by the circumstances of his first contact with it. He tells us that the first book he ever read was _Don Quixote_ (in the translation by Tieck). At about the same time he read _Gulliver's Travels_, the tales of noble robbers written by Goethe's brother-in-law, Vulpius, the wildly fantastic stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Schiller's _Robbers_; but also Uhland's ballads, and the songs collected by Arnim and Brentano in _The Boy's Magic Horn_. That is to say: At the time when in school a critical and skeptical mind was being developed in him by descendants of the age of enlightenment, his private reading led him for the most part into the region of romanticism in its most exaggerated form. At the time, furthermore, when he took healthy romantic interest in the picturesque Dusseldorf life, his imagination was morbidly stimulated by furtive visits to a woman reputed to be a witch, and to her niece, the daughter of a hangman. His earliest poems, the _Dream Pictures_, belong in an atmosphere charged with witchery, crime, and the irresponsibility of nightmare. This coincidence of incompatible tendencies will later be seen to account for much of the mystery in Heine's problematic character. It having been decided, perhaps because the downfall of Napoleon shut the door of all other opportunity, that Heine should embark upon a mercantile career, he was given a brief apprenticeship, in 1815 at Frankfurt, in the following years at Hamburg, under the immediate patronage of his uncle Salomon who, in 1818, even established the young poet in a dry goods business of his own. The only result of these experiments was the demonstration of Heine's total inaptitude for commercial pursuits. But the uncle was magnanimous and offered his nephew the means necessary for a university course in law, with a view to subsequent practice in Hamburg. Accordingly, after some brushing up of Latin at home, Heine in the fall of 1819 was matriculated as a student at the University of Bonn.