a fruitful source to the biographer. We will not interrupt the chronological course of our sketch to give extracts from these curious Pauliana. Some of the most characteristic specimens from them will come up in the sequel.

On laying aside the character of a mere editor of autobiographical fragments, and assuming that of biographer, Jean Paul's friend Otto, as if to strengthen himself for the more responsible task, quotes, as motto to the third volume, the following passage from a letter written to him by Richter in 1802"I conjure thee (and dost thou not I will haunt thee) that after my death thou wilt write plainly and freely of every thing, not in the cursed tender style. O! I beg thee;-and take this passage for the motto of thy treatise." So rich, however, are the materials left by Jean Paul himself, in the form of common-place and excerpt books, and especially of letters, that the function of biographer resolves itself into only a higher degree of editorship; and so simple, open, and pure are his life and character, that the pen of venerating friendship I will meet nought to tempt its veracity. The above earnest imploration may stand as simply a token of its author's own truthfulness.

In Schwarzenbach he was fortunate in making acquaintance with two men, who perceived his merits and gave him affection and assistance. The one was Voelkel, his father's chaplain, who volunteered to instruct him two hours a day, in addition to his school lessons, in geography, philosophy, and composition: the other, a clergyman by the name of Vogel, a man of wit and scholarship, who did him the priceless service of giving him free use of a large well-selected library. That he was fortunate also in nearer friends, notwithstanding the paternal by-rote system, we have the following touching testimony from himself:-"When I reflect what a christianly giving hand was my (maternal) grandfather's, and that I never heard of a word or trait of selfishness in my father, what cause have I to thank God." And again: "I constantly heard my father tell of his and other clergymen giving away their clothes to the poor: God! I thank thee for my father."

In his sixteenth year, a few months after he had entered the Gymnasium at Hof, his father died, "leaving five sons and some debts." In 1781, being then eighteen, he entered the University of Leipzig, furnished with a well-authenticated testimonium paupertatis, and carrying with him a letter received on the eve of his departure from his friend Vogel, which begins with these prophetic words :-" Most excellent young German man, through whom I promise in the future much to the

world, my dear friend ;-so you set out to-morrow for Leipzig. Well, go; and come not back until you are that which you ought to be and can be."

What he said with such truth at the end of his life, viz. that "he had made the most of the stuff that was in him," he might have said at the end of his Leipzig course. Not only did he studiously attend the lectures of various professors, but he read omnivorously, and also most profitably, as is shown by his Journal, wherein he registered, almost daily, pages of the independent labors of his mind, besides filling volumes with extracts from the books he went through. Of these extracts he had accumulated, before he went to Leipzig, twelve volumes of about two hundred pages each, furnished with triple indexes to facilitate reference. The Journal, whose contents astonish the reader often with the depth and precision of a matured mind, was a continuation of a similar one begun at the Hof high school, entitled "Exercises in thinking." These were only his ordinary occupations. For delay in answering a letter of his friend Vogel he apologizes as follows:-" But business crowded on business, and such business as interfered with my regular occupations ;"—and which, we add, was to be the business of his life; for he was writing, in the form of moral sketches, his first book, the first volume of which, having been previously sent in manuscript to a Leipzig professor, who gave the author faint encouragement, and to his discriminating friend Vogel, who returned it with frank strictures and hearty praise, was published in his nineteenth year under the title of Greenland Processes, and which brought him both fame and money, the first volume yielding him about sixty dollars, and the second one hundred. Neither the fame nor the money, however, reached far; for of the former there was not enough to obtain a purchaser of his after-attempts, and the latter did not suffice to relieve his wants, moderate as they were; so that on leaving Leipzig in 1784, he was obliged to depart secretly, in order to elude some small creditors.

Now was the crisis of his life. Frustrated in his scheme for a livelihood, for it was hunger that made him publish so early; the hopes of the ardent devotee to letters crushed by accumulated disappointment,-every bookseller or author to whom he applied for several years giving him disheartening answers or none; his widowed mother's inheritance consumed, and she working hard for her daily bread, while himself went often, not supperless merely, but dinnerless to bed;-what, under this appalling pressure from without, this seeming persecution of Destiny, does Richter? despair or take to brandy, or, stifling

his aspirations, even subdue himself down to the routine of professional drudgery? Nothing of all this; but, resolute and cheerful, yielding to the spiritual impulse within him, and stinting to the utmost his bodily wants so to yield the more freely, undiscouraged by the world's rebuffs, and unseduced by its temptations, on he went, zealously unfolding his deeprooted faculties, studying and writing in the same room in which his mother washed, and cooked, and spun,-shedding sometimes, doubtless, tears, not bitter ones, but rather the calm. refreshing tears which a strong honest man struggling with adversity will shed.

In the latter part of his stay at Leipzig, when hope was fast giving way to fear, he kept by him a little book which he called his Andachtbuch, literally, book of devotion, wherein, under different heads, as Sorrow, Virtue, Ambition, Anger, General Rules, he wrote down, for the becalming and fortifying of himself, a number of short sentences, of which the following are samples :

"Every evil is an exercise, and a teacher of steadfastness. "Epictetus was not unhappy.

"Wilt thou be free, cheerful, and calm; take the only means of being so not in the hands of chance,-Virtue.

"Soften thyself by painting the sufferings of thy enemy: think of him as one spiritually lame, who should be pitied.

"The angry man chains himself, his friends, his virtue and his peace, to the will of another.

"Fear not to find a proposition proved, but love truth.” Goethe, in his Autobiography, says: "Our wishes are presentiments of the capabilities that are in us, harbingers of what we shall be able to furnish. What we can do, presents itself to our imagination out of us and in the future: we feel a longing for that which already we secretly possess. Thus a passionate forward-grasping transforms the really possible into a dreamed reality."

This view, which we suspect is sound only of superior natures, finds a striking illustration in Richter. The steadfast adherence to his literary plan, of itself betokens capabilities for success: such unquenchable zeal implies inexhaustible fuel. From the annexed passage it appears, that his dream, if it be so called, of the future, was realized with almost minute accuracy. A communication to Foerster from one of Jean Paul's youthful female friends, relating to the year 1789, when he was living with his mother in Hof, is to the following effect:

"Often, when we collected round him in the evening twilight,

and he, by his fantasies on the piano, had wrought us and himself into such a mood that tears streamed down our cheeks, and he from emotion could play no more, he would break off suddenly, sit down among us, and in a playful tone tell us of his futurity, his travels, his wife, his children, (who were mostly three,) and of his perfect domestic happiness: then he would prophecy also what a great man he would yet be, and how every body would come to him and would ask about him, after he had passed through one more period of pressure in addition to the present one in Hof; and he would be the talk of the whole country, and the people of Hof would one day stare at their now insignificant townsman, and princesses would envy us the happiness of his society,-what to us indeed seemed very unlikely."

As the jesting tone was but a mask from behind which he could freely vent his feelings and cherished presentiments, so were the worldly signs and accompaniments of greatness enumerated with the same self-protecting purpose. Scarcely did a man ever gain the stare of the multitude and the condescension of the great, who valued them less than Richter.

From his journal in 1790, an entry is copied describing a vivid foreboding of his death which possessed him on the 15th of November; when, over a period of thirty years, he had a vision of himself on his death-bed. He died on the 15th of November 1825. The coincidence we leave to be valued and interpreted by the curious in such matters, only stating, that of the fact of his feelings as described by him in his journal there cannot be a doubt.

For several years after his return from Leipzig he earned a scanty maintainance by giving up a portion of his time, first to the duties of a private tutor to a nobleman's son, and afterwards, the interval being spent at Hof with his mother,-to those of a teacher of a small school. In 1791, being then in his twenty-ninth year, he determined to apply his mind,-now cultured by experience, multifarious reading and laborious study, to the production of a fiction; and accordingly, twelve months afterwards, he sent to his friend Otto the manuscript of his first novel, entitled The Invisible Lodge. So often defeated in his applications to authors and publishers, with timidity he transmitted the manuscript, accompanied by a modest letter signed only with his initials, to Moritz in Berlin, an author then of some repute, with whom Richter had no personal acquaintance, but who, he inferred from the character of one of Moritz's own works, would be likely to appreciate his and befriend him. What was his joy, on returning from a short journey he had taken to recruit himself after the year's labor, to find the two following letters.

"Berlin, June 16th. 1792. "I will write to you by the next post. But let me, my dear friend, to-day, out of the fulness of my feelings, tell you, that what I have read in your work has delighted me.

"Yours, MORITZ."

“Berlin, June 19th. 1792.

"Were you at the end of the earth, and had I to go through a hundred storms to reach you, I would nevertheless fly to you. Where do you live? What is your name? Who are you? Your work is a jewel. It shall be a pledge with me until its author reveals himself.

"Yours, MORITZ."

"Thus," says his biographer, "was the port gained, and with it the glad, steady prospect into the future."

To Moritz he wrote in answer such a letter as was to be looked for at such a moment from a nature like his. In it he says: "I would not know that I am poor, had I not an aged mother who should not know it." Shortly after, Moritz wrote to him:-"Your book is to us beyond price; but we beg you, as a small token of our esteem, to accept one hundred ducats, whereof thirty are herewith sent. The other seventy will follow as soon as the printing is finished." With a swelling heart he hastened in the evening from his school-room in Schwartzenbach to Hof, and entering late the poorly lighted apartment where his mother sat earning her daily pittance at the spinning-wheel, he poured into her lap the thirty golden ducats.

Henceforth his life is one of manifold enjoyment. Within a year or two he published his second novel, Hesperus, which confirmed his fame. Correspondents of both sexes from various quarters thanked him for the consoling views of life he opened to them. Instances are mentioned of individuals being lifted by the spiritual power of his writings out of mental despondency. He received a note with a factitious signature, bringing with it fifty dollars, as a grateful return from a reader, who some time afterwards he discovered to be no less a person than the poet Gleim. From Weimar, towards which he looked with yearning, a letter was written him in the Spring of 1796, by a lady of high rank, (and as her letters show, of high talent too,) who tells him of the impression there made by his works, particularly upon Herder and Wieland, the latter calling him "Our Yorick, our Rabelais." Upon the urgent invitation of his enthusiastic correspondent, his own desires responding warmly to the promised welcome, he set out in June for