His thirst for knowledge and worth, his pride, which bade him stand in a glorious light with his father and his two friends, impelled him onward in his career. With all his native fire he threw himself upon jurisprudence, and took no longer any other walks than between the lecture-room and his study-chamber. To this zeal he was driven by a characteristic passion for completeness; everything imperfect was to him almost a physical horror; he was shocked at defective collections, broken sets of monthly magazines, lawsuits left to sleep, libraries, because he could never read them out, people who died as aspirants for office, or in the midst of building-plans, or without a rounded system of thought, or as journeymen clothiers' boys or shoemakers' apprentices, and even Augusti's flute-playing, which he only took up _by the way_. It was the same energy which made him hold the bridle of Psyche's winged horse tight, and stick the rowel of the spur into him; even when a child he had experimented on this kind of force, in the holding of his breath, or in the painful pressure of a sore spot,--and, by Heaven! he now, figuratively, did both again. There dwelt in him a mighty will, which merely said to the serving-company of impulses, Let it be! Such a will is not stoicism, which rules merely over internal _malefactors_, or _knaves_, or _prisoners of war_, or _children_, but it is that genially energetic spirit, which conditions and binds the healthy _savages_ of our bosoms, and which says more royally to itself, than the Spanish regent to others, I, the king! Ah, of course (how could his warm soul do otherwise?) he often stood, at midnight, before the breezy window, and looked tearfully at the white Madonna of the ministerial palace, silvered by the pure moon. Yes, in the daytime, he often sketched in his souvenir (it happened to be a fountain and a form behind it, nothing more), or he read in the Messiah (naturally going on with the canto which he had already begun at the house of the Minister's lady), or he informed himself about nervous maladies, (was he, perhaps, with all his studying, guarded against them?) or he let the fire of his fingers run over the strings,--nay, he would have plucked nothing but roses, although with thorns, had this been their blooming season.