not fit for a fourteen-year-old girl to read. I was not older when the subscription started; but either her literary memory was rather faulty, or the immaculate 'German Classics' were for her something so elevated that such an idea could not enter her mind. At that age I read Oberon. Well, probably you have not read it. After all, I don't think there was much harm done. And these evenings, when I sat and read the great authors, long after mother had gone to sleep, were the first happy hours I experienced. They were more than happy, but also thereby less so, for while they opened out many beautiful visions, they at the same time brought with them the dark shadow of self-recognition. I understood that there existed quite a different world. I do not mean the world of outer circumstances, but of thoughts and feelings, quite different methods of judgment as to what has value and what has not, which had been obscured by the web mother had spun around me of doubtful and elastic rules of life, and to these were added many specious and sentimental phrases which, apparently, only served to cast a sort of veil over them.
"Perhaps you wonder that I had to gain this experience from the authors, as I had received Christian teaching. It was indeed not precepts I needed, but life itself, which in our little circle had nothing which might be called, I will not say elevated, but noble and pure. Of course we saw only mother's relations, sisters, aunts, and cousins, and of them she was the best; they were scarcely tolerated by father, and only came when he was out, or they crept into the kitchen and held a gossiping conclave. Oh, how it disgusts me to think of all this! The fact that the clergyman who confirmed me, and over whose sermons mother cried, had not the best of reputations socially, must also, I suppose, have been a bad influence. Goethe
