less hostile to the enlargement of mind than voluminous legends, presented
itself in the indigence of his father, who was compelled to send away the
youth on foot to Berlin, to find labour and bread.

At Berlin, Mendelssohn becomes an amanuensis to another poor rabbin, who
could only still initiate him into the theology, the jurisprudence, and
the scholastic philosophy of his people. Thus, he was as yet no farther
advanced in that philosophy of the mind in which he was one day to be the
rival of Plato and Locke, nor in that knowledge of literature which was
finally to place him among the first polished critics of Germany.

Some unexpected event occurs which gives the first great impulse to the
mind of genius. Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery
and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish
Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated
student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this
vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician.
Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown
together into the same situation, they approached each other by the same
sympathies, and communicating in the only language which Mendelssohn could
speak, the Polander voluntarily undertook his literary education.

Then was seen one of the most extraordinary spectacles in the history of
modern literature. Two houseless Hebrew youths might be discovered, in the
moonlit streets of Berlin, sitting in retired corners, or on the steps of
some porch, the one instructing the other, with a Euclid in his hand; but
what is more extraordinary, it was a Hebrew version, composed by the
master for a pupil who knew no other language. Who could then have
imagined that the future Plato of Germany was sitting on those steps!