III
By nature he was of vigorous constitution. He had been fond as a boy of swimming and skating, and at the University, until his disablement, was an active horseback rider. At Bonn he appeared a "picture of health and strength, broad-shouldered, brown, with rather thick fair hair, and of exactly the same height as Goethe."g He had strong musical tastes and some musical ability. A tender conscience seems to have belonged to him from his earliest years. When a mere child, a missionary visited his father's parish and at a meeting plead movingly for his cause; the little Fritz responded with an offering of his tin soldiers—and afterwards, walking home with his sister, he murmured, "Perhaps I ought to have given my cavalry!" He was clean both in person and in thought. At school the boys called him "the little parson," instinctively repressing coarse language in his presence. He had a taste of dissipation at the University, but soon sickened of it. The delights of drinking and duelling palled on him, and openly expressed dissatisfaction with the "beer-materialism" of his fellow-students, and strained relations ensuing, appear to have had something to do with his leaving Bonn for Leipzig. Once he allowed himself to be taken to a house of questionable character, but became speechless before what he saw there. For a moment he turned to the piano—and then left.h Professor Deussen, who knew him from Schulpforta days on, says of him, "mulierem nunquam attigit"; and though this may be too absolute a claim,j it shows the impression he left on one of his most intimate friends. He was never married.j He had, however, intimate relations with gifted women, like Frau Cosima Wagner and Malwida von Meysenbug, and his family affections were strong and tender; so unwilling was he to give his mother needless pain that he strove to keep his later writings from her. He had at bottom a sympathetic nature. If he warned against pity, it was not from any instinctive lack of it. In personal intercourse he showed marked politeness and, some say, an almost feminine mildness. All his life he was practically a poor man, his yearly income never exceeding a thousand dollars. He called it his happiness that he owned no house, saying, "Who possesses is
