The Storms were not rich, but their home was permeated with that sense of solid comfort, based on the consciousness of efficiency and pride of ancestry, so often found in the burgher circles of Germany. Of particular importance to the children was the presence in the family of their maternal grandmother. She was full of overflowing kindness toward her grandchildren, and hence to them the home possessed the magic of a spot where, as in fairy tales, all wishes might be fulfilled, a veritable refuge in all times of need. She succeeded, moreover, in awakening in them strong family feeling; for she loved to tell about her own youth, her parents and brothers and sisters whose portraits and silhouettes, in old-fashioned costumes and with quaint cues, hung on the walls. It was owing mainly to his mother's family that the poet, even in his early youth, was brought into somewhat close touch in his native place with all the different classes of people and many kinds of characters; for on the vessels, in the factories, and in the houses of the Woldsens and Feddersens--Storm's maternal grandmother was a Feddersen--numbers of the inhabitants of the little town had employment, and their relations with these families were not entirely of a business nature but were rooted in mutual confidence. Of equal importance for his development were the scenes with which the boy became familiar through his father's family. His paternal relatives were settled on considerable estates in the neighborhood, the family mill in Westermühlen being managed by his father's eldest brother. There the boy found an Eldorado in the holidays. There, while wandering through the woods and over the heath, he first held converse with nature; there, where another spirit rested on house and garden than in the town, he first vaguely felt the atmosphere peculiar to certain places; there, where he saw men now favored, now threatened, by external powers and always dependent upon them, his eyes were first opened to the relations between man and nature in all their many-sidedness. Compared with what his home and family offered him, all that school could give the future poet was of no significance. Until the autumn of 1835 he attended the preparatory school of the town and was then sent to the Gymnasium in Lübeck for a year and a half. After leaving there he devoted himself to the study of law, first in Kiel, which he left only to return after three terms spent in Berlin; and it was in the former place that he concluded his studies and passed his final juristic examination in the autumn of 1842.