In Gottfried Kelley's "Der grüne Heinrich,"[50] the author, whom R.M. Meyer calls "the most eminent literary German of the nineteenth century," reviews the memories of his early life. This autobiography is a plain and very realistic story of a normal child, and not adulterated with fiction like Goethe's or with psychoses like Rousseau or Bashkirtseff. He seems a boy like all other boys, and his childhood and youth were in no wise extraordinary. The first part of this work, which describes his youth up to the age of eighteen, is the most important, and everything is given with remarkable fidelity and minuteness. It is a tale of little things. All the friendships and loves and impulses are there, and he is fundamentally selfish and utilitarian; God and nature were one, and only when his beloved Army died did he wish to believe in immortality. He, too, as a child, found two kinds of love in his heart--the idea and the sensual, very independent--the one for a young and innocent girl and the other for a superb young woman years older than he, pure, although the personification of sense. He gives a rich harvest of minute and sagacious observations about his strange simultaneous loves; the peculiar tastes of food; his day-dream period; and his rather prolonged habit of lying, the latter because he had no other vent for invention. He describes with great regret his leaving school at so early an age; his volcanic passion of anger; his self-distrust; his periods of abandon; his passion to make a success of art though he did not of life; his spells of self-despair and cynicism; his periods of desolation in his single life; his habit of story-telling; his wrestling with the problem of theology and God; the conflict between his philosophy and his love of the girls, etc.