spacious out-houses and large gardens to themselves, while a tolerably
high wall shut us out from these adjacent paradises.

On the second floor was a room which was called the garden-room, because
they had there endeavored to supply the want of a garden by means of a
few plants placed before the window. As I grew older, it was there that
I made my favorite, not melancholy, but somewhat sentimental, retreat.
Over these gardens, beyond the city's walls and ramparts, might be seen
a beautiful and fertile plain, the same which stretches towards Hoechst.
In the summer season I commonly learned my lessons there, and watched
the thunderstorms, but could never look my fill at the setting sun,
which went down directly opposite my windows. And when, at the same
time, I saw the neighbors wandering through their gardens, taking care
of their flowers, the children playing, parties of friends enjoying
themselves, and could hear the bowls rolling and the ninepins dropping,
it early excited within me a feeling of solitude, and a sense of vague
longing resulting from it, which, conspiring with the seriousness and
awe implanted in me by nature, exerted its influence at an early age,
and showed itself more distinctly in after-years.

The old, many-cornered, and gloomy arrangement of the house was,
moreover, adapted to awaken dread and terror in childish minds.
Unfortunately, too, the principle of discipline, that young persons
should be early deprived of all fear for the awful and invisible, and
accustomed to the terrible, still prevailed. We children, therefore,
were compelled to sleep alone; and when we found this impossible, and
softly slipped from our beds, to seek the society of the servants and
maids, our father, with his dressing-gown turned inside out, which
disguised him sufficiently for the purpose, placed himself in the way,
and frightened us back to our resting-places. The evil effect of this