[Illustration: JEAN PAUL]

"One forenoon," he writes, "I was standing, a very young child, by
the house door, looking to the left at the wood-pile, when, all at
once, like a lightning flash from heaven, the inner vision arose
before me: I am an _I_. It has remained ever since radiant. At that
moment my _I_ saw itself for the first time and forever."

It is curious to contrast this childhood, in the almost cloistered
seclusion of the Fichtelgebirge, with Goethe's at cosmopolitan
Frankfurt or even with Schiller's at Marbach. Much that came unsought,
even to Schiller, Richter had a struggle to come by; much he could
never get at all. The place of "Frau Aja" in the development of the
child Goethe's fancy was taken at Joditz by the cow-girl. Eagerness to
learn Fritz showed in pathetic fulness, but the most diligent search
has revealed no trace in these years of that creative imagination with
which he was so richly dowered.

When Fritz was thirteen his father received a long-hoped-for promotion
to Schwarzenbach, a market town near Hof, then counting some 1,500
inhabitants. The boy's horizon was thus widened, though the family
fortunes were far from finding the expected relief. Here Fritz first
participated in the Communion and has left a remarkable record of his
emotional experience at "becoming a citizen in the city of God." About
the same time, as was to be expected, came the boy's earliest strong
emotional attachment. Katharina Bärin's first kiss was, for him, "a
unique pearl of a minute, such as never had been and never was to be."
But, as with the Communion, though the memory remained, the feeling
soon passed away.