He left school to enter college at Naumburg. There he showed from the first such conspicuous ability that his professors advised his mother to send him to study in a superior institute. The poor woman hesitated. She would have liked to keep her child near her. This was in 1858. Nietzsche's vacation was of rather a serious character. He spent it as usual in the village of Pobles, under the shadow of wooded hills, on the banks of the fresh and lazy Saale, in which each morning he bathed. His maternal grandparents had him and his sister Lisbeth to stay with them. He was happy, with a heaped abundance of life; but his mind was preoccupied with the uncertainty of his future. Adolescence was coming; and perhaps he was about to leave his own people and change his friends and his home. With some anxiety he foresaw the new course which his life was going to follow. He called to mind his boyish past, all the long years of childhood, at which one should not smile--thirteen years filled with the earliest affections and the earliest sorrows, with the first proud hopes of an ambitious soul, with the splendid discovery of music and poetry. Memories came, numerous, vivid, and touching: Nietzsche, who had a lyric soul, suddenly became, as it were, intoxicated with himself. He took up his pen, and in twelve days the history of his childhood was written. He was happy when he had finished. "Now I have brought my first notebook to a proper end," he writes, "and I am content with my work. I have written with the greatest pleasure and without a moment's fatigue. It is a grand thing to pass in review before one the course of one's first years, and to follow there the development of one's soul. I have sincerely recounted all the truth without poetry, without literary ornamentation. That I may write many more like it!" Four little verses followed: "Ein Spiegel ist das Leben In ihm sich zu erkennen, Möcht' ich das erste nennen Wonach wir nur auch streben."[1] [1] "Life is a mirror. I might say that the recognition of ourselves in it is the first object to which we all strive." * * * * * The school of Pforta is situated five miles from Naumburg, on the bank of the Saale. Ever since a Germany has existed there have been teachers and scholars in Pforta. Some Cistercian monks, come in the twelfth century from the Latin West to convert the Slavs, obtained possession of this property, which lies along both banks of the river. They built the high walls which surround it, the houses, the church, and founded a tradition which is not extinct. In the sixteenth century they were expelled by the Saxon princes, but their school was continued, and their methods conserved by the Lutherans who were installed in their place.