Whether the authorities at the gymnasium shared these views or not, we are not in a position to state. One thing, however, is certain,--much attention was paid there to the study of the German language and literature; much of our student's time was passed in the excellent library of German authors provided for the use of the scholars. What an eventful moment that is in which a youth, in the flush of the early vigour of his mind, finds himself for the first time in a library where the treasures of human thought are gathered before him clothed in the language he has learned from his mother's lips! Then begins for him that daily contact of mind with the mind of others, which will infallibly colour for good or evil the history of his future. He who, without an enlightened and friendly guide, adventures inexperienced upon this commerce, "Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone", runs no little risk of being caught unawares by error where his generous ardour looked only for truth. In the world of books as in the world of men, evil lies very close to good, and wears its garb and mien; and how shall the inexperience of youth be able to see through the disguise, or how avoid becoming captive to its snares? And from such captivity, how harassing the toil of escape! Of that toil let him make light who has never had experience of the almost ceaseless influence erroneous principles exercise on the mind with whose growth they have grown. From reading Newton on the Prophecies in 1816, Dr. Newman, then a boy of fifteen, became convinced that the Pope was Antichrist; and his imagination was stained by the effects of this doctrine up to the year 1843.[14] Nor did M. Laemmer come away safe. His random reading brought him both good and evil, so intermingled each with each, that his unripe judgment could no more discern between them than the hand can disjoin the sunshine from the shadow that follows after it. After ransacking the bulk of German literature, he selected from out the rest certain writers to be his prime favourites. The choice he made reveals at once the bent of his mind, and the dangers to which that very bent exposed him. The schools of German poetry and taste are divided in Vilmar's _History of German Literature_ into five classes. First, that which preceded Lessing, subdivided into the Saxon school, and the Swiss school of Wieland in his early manner; to which was akin the Göttingen school of Klopstock and Voss; second, that of Lessing and the writers influenced by him; third, the Weimar school with its three great names, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller; fourth, the later schools, the romantic, represented by the two Schlegels, Novalis, and the patriotic; fifth, the modern school of reaction against absolute government, headed by H. Heine. Of these schools, only the second and third gave M. Laemmer delight. There was a hidden sympathy between the qualities of his own mind and the exquisite