Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Author:Helen Zimmern Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE UNIVERSITY. (1746-48. Aged 17-19.) ' Seta personliches Wohl opfert er dem objektivem Zweck ; er kann ebc nicht anders, well dart sein E... more »rnst liegt. Doss er nicht sich und seine Sache sucht, dies macht ihn, unter alien Umstdnden, gross.'—SCHOPENHAUER. LESSING entered the University of Leipzig (September 1746) by the help of one of the hundred stipends annexed to the Fiirstenschule. His parents still expected him to study theology, though he had very decidedly told them, during his short residence at home, that neither his talents nor his inclinations lay in that direction. A new world was opened to the youth. Reared in the seclusion of a monastic school, he was by an abrupt transition plunged into the stirring and many- sided life of a city ; for Leipzig, though small in area, possessed all the characteristics of a capital. Its University took a foremost rank. A mediaeval corporation, the established dogmas only were taught, and new lights were forced to penetrate obliquely. But the town had been for a quarter of a century the scene of Gottsched's literary activity. It was also abusy commercial centre. Moreover, it was the scene of the annual book fair (Jubilate-Messe), that patriarchal form of literary intercourse which railroads and telegraphs have not superseded in our day, and which in Lessing's made it a unique intellectual centre. No wonder it somewhat bewildered Lessing, accustomed to the jog-trot of Meissen and the Little Pedlingtonianisms of Camenz. At St. Afra there had been no distinctions between rich and poor, neither privation nor luxury were known in its cloisters; here both presented themselves with their attendant hardships and temptations, and the youth who had only known the world through books, who had left school in the firm co...« less