and exhorted me to be patient, telling me to comfort myself with
the Spanish proverb, un rey no puede morir, which he explained as
meaning that the ruler of a school must of necessity always be in
the right.

He could not, of course, help noticing, to his alarm, the effect
upon me of this kind of conversation, which I was far too young
to appreciate. Although it annoyed me one day, when I wanted to
begin reading Goethe's Faust, to hear him say quietly that I was
too young to understand it, yet, according to my thinking, his
other conversations about our own great poets, and even about
Shakespeare and Dante, had made me so familiar with these sublime
figures that I had now for some time been secretly busy working
out the great tragedy I had already conceived in Dresden. Since
my trouble at school I had devoted all my energies, which ought
by rights to have been exclusively directed to my school duties,
to the accomplishment of this task. In this secret work I had
only one confidante, my sister Ottilie, who now lived with me at
my mother's. I can remember the misgivings and alarm which the
first confidential communication of my great poetic enterprise
aroused in my good sister; yet she affectionately suffered the
tortures I sometimes inflicted on her by reciting to her in
secret, but not without emotion, portions of my work as it
progressed. Once, when I was reciting to her one of the most
gruesome scenes, a heavy thunderstorm came on. When the lightning
flashed quite close to us, and the thunder rolled, my sister felt
bound to implore me to stop; but she soon found it was hopeless,
and continued to endure it with touching devotion.

But a more significant storm was brewing on the horizon of my