THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
that canto to translate, which I could do without looking at the book. In addition to this, the result of my examination in history and my compositions in German and Latin were sufficiently satisfactory to move the examiners to overlook my weakness in other branches. Upon the conclusion of the ordeal the government commissioner, who had before seemed to me the personification of grim fate, handed me my graduation papers with an especially cordial handshake, and he gave me many good wishes for future success on my way. I returned to Bonn in triumph.
Now at last, as a regularly matriculated student, I could take equal rank with my university friends. With ardor and with a feeling of assurance I threw myself into philological and historical studies, looking with greater calmness into the future, in which I pictured myself as a professor of history at some German university, devoting some of my time to literary work. I hoped that now the severest storms of life were behind me, and that I might look forward to a smooth career which would satisfy all my ambitions. How little did I dream of the strange vicissitudes of fortune which were soon to scatter all these plans and to hurl me into currents of life entirely different from those which I had anticipated!
The cheerfulness of temperament with which benign nature had endowed me and the capacity of frugal enjoyment which the conditions of my early youth had developed in me, rendered me highly susceptible to the fascination of free student-life. Again fortune had greatly favored me in opening to me at the very entrance into the academic world access to a most stimulating circle of young men.
Friedrich Spielhagen, in his memoirs, says that the Burschenschaft Franconia was in a sense the most distinguished among the student societies of that day. And this it was indeed. To
[ 93 ]
