"
Although he had but a few intimate friends, he was liked by all the
students, and even enjoyed the name of "a favorite of the Heidelberg
public." One of his intimate friends was Flechsig, but even of him he
paradoxically complains that he is too sympathetic: "He never cheers
me up; if I am occasionally in a melancholy mood, he ought not to be
the same, and he ought to have sufficient humanity to stir me up.
That I often need cheering up, I know very well." Yet he was as often
in a state of extreme happiness and enjoyment of life and his
talents. He even, on occasion, indulged in students' pranks. On his
journey to Heidelberg he induced the postilion to let him take the
reins: "Thunder! how the horses ran, and how extravagantly happy I
was, and how we stopped at every tavern to get fodder, and how I
entertained the whole company, and how sorry they all were when I
parted from them at Wiesbaden!!" At Frankfort, one morning, he
writes: "I felt an extraordinary longing to play on a piano. So I
calmly went to the nearest dealer, told him I was the tutor of a
young English lord who wished to buy a grand piano, and then I
played, to the wonder and delight of the bystanders, for three hours.
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