'When young Schiller, after the completion of his course at the Latin School, 1777, was to be confirmed, his Mother and her Husband came across to Ludwigsburg the day before that solemn ceremony. Just on their arrival, she saw her Son wandering idle and unconcerned about the streets; and impressively represented to him how greatly his indifference to the highest and most solemn transaction of his young life troubled her. Struck and affected hereby, the Boy withdrew; and, after a few hours, handed to his Parents a German Poem, expressive of his feelings over the approaching renewal of his baptismal covenant. The Father, who either hadn't known the occasion of this, or had looked upon his Son's idling on the street with less severe eyes, was highly astonished, and received him mockingly with the question, "Hast thou lost thy senses, Fritz?" The Mother, on the other hand, was visibly rejoiced at that poetic outpouring, and with good cause. For, apart from all other views of the matter, she recognised in it how firmly her Son's inclination was fixed on the study of Theology.'—(This anecdote, if it were of any moment whatever, appears to be a little doubtful.) 'The painfuler, therefore, was it to the Mother's heart when her Son, at the inevitable entrance into the Karl's School, had to give-up Theology; and renounce withal, for a long time, if not forever, her farther guidance and influence. But she was too pious not to recognise by degrees, in this change also, a Higher Hand; and could trustfully expect the workings of the same. Besides, her Son clung so tenderly to her, that at least there was no separation of him from the Mother's heart to be dreaded. The heart-warm attachment of childish years to the creed taught him by his Mother might, and did, vanish; but not the attachment to his Mother herself whose dear image often enough charmed back the pious sounds and forms of early days, and for a time scared away doubts and unbelief. 'Years came and went; and Schiller, at last, about the end of 1780, stept out of the Academy, into the actual world, which he as yet knew only by hearsay. Delivered from that long unnatural constraint of body and spirit, he gave free course to his fettered inclinations; and sought, as in Poetry so also in Life, unlimited freedom! The tumults of passion and youthful buoyancy, after so long an imprisonment, had their sway; and embarrassments in money, their natural consequence, often brought him into very sad moods.