His term of apprenticeship was not marked by anything brilliant.  He went from one school to another without being kept long anywhere.  And yet he was not a worthless lad; but he was always very reserved, little caring to be intimate with others, and passionately devoted to music.  His father naturally did not want him to take up music as a profession; and he had the same struggles that Berlioz had.  Finally he succeeded in getting permission from his family to go to Vienna, and he entered the Conservatoire there in 1875.  But he was not any the happier for it, and at the end of two years he was sent away for being unruly.

What was to be done?  His family was ruined, for a fire had demolished their little possessions.  He felt the silent reproaches of his father already weighing upon him—­for he loved his father dearly, and remembered the sacrifices he had made for him.  He did not wish to return to his own province; indeed he could not return—­that would have been death.  It was necessary that this boy of seventeen should find some means of earning a livelihood and be able to instruct himself at the same time.  After his expulsion from the Conservatoire he attended no other school; he taught himself.  And he taught himself wonderfully; but at what a cost!  The suffering he went through from that time until he was thirty, the enormous amount of energy he had to expend in order to live and cultivate the fine spirit of poetry that was within him—­all this effort and toil was, without doubt, the cause of his unhappy death.  He had a burning thirst for knowledge and a fever for work which made him sometimes forget the necessity for eating and drinking.

He had a great admiration for Goethe, and was infatuated by Heinrich von Kleist, whom he rather resembles both in his gifts and in his life; he was an enthusiast about Grillparzer and Hebbel at a time when they were but little appreciated; and he was one of the first Germans to discover the worth of Moerike, whom, later on, he made popular in Germany.  Besides this, he read English and French writers.  He liked Rabelais, and was very partial to Claude Tillier, the French novelist of the provinces, whose Oncle Benjamin has given pleasure to so many German provincial families, by bringing before them, as Wolf said, the vision of their own little world, and helping them by his own jovial good humour to bear their troubles with a smiling face.  And so little Wolf, with hardly enough to eat, found the means of learning both French and English, in order better to appreciate the thoughts of foreign artists.