After I had lived for some years the isolated life I have described, though I was engaged the whole time in ordinary professional pursuits, all at once there broke upon my soul, in harmony with the seasons of nature, a springtime such as I had not before experienced; and an unexpected life and life-aim budded and blossomed in my breast.  All my inner life and life-aims had become narrowed to the circle of self-culture and self-education.  The outer life, my profession, I carried on as a mere means of subsistence, quite apart from my real inner self, and my sphere of operation was limited.  I was driven perforce from pillar to post till at last I had arrived where the Main unites herself with the Rhine.[90] Here there budded and opened to my soul one lovely bright spring morning, when I was surrounded by Nature at her loveliest and freshest, this thought, as it were by inspiration:—­That there must exist somewhere some beautifully simple and certain way of freeing human life from contradiction, or, as I then spake out my thought in words, some means of restoring to man, himself, at peace internally; and that to seek out this way should be the vocation of my life.  And yet my life, to all appearance, my studies and my desires, belonged to my purely external vocation,[91] and to its external citizenlike relations; and by no means to mankind at large, either regarded in itself or in its educational needs.  Therefore this idea of mine was in such violent contrast with my actual life that it utterly surprised me.  In fact, and perhaps greatly because of this contrast, the idea would undoubtedly have been quite forgotten, had not other circumstances occurred to revive it.  On myself and on my life at the time it seemed to have not the slightest effect, and it soon passed from my memory.  But later on in this same journey,[92] as I climbed down from the Wartburg, and turned round to look at the castle, there rushed upon me once more this thought of a higher educational vocation as my proper life-work; and again, being so far removed from my actual external life, it only flashed upon me with a momentary effulgence an instant, and then sank.  This, unconsciously to me, and therefore quite disregarded by me, was the real position of my inner life when I arrived at the goal of my journey, Frankfurt, from whence my life was so soon to develop so largely.  My energies at the moment were devoted towards attaining some definite professional position for myself.[93] But in proportion as I began to examine my profession more closely in its practical aspect, so did it begin to prove insufficient of itself to satisfy me as the occupation of my life.  Then there came to me the definite purpose of living and working at my profession rather to use it as a means to win some high benefit for mankind.[94]