Pierce it, slay it, trample it under.

Is that what the insane heart is big with?
Throughout my night-watch I had been free of it, as one who walks meditating in cloisters on a sentence that once issued from divine lips.
There was no relief, save in those pencilled lines which gave honest laughter a chance; they stood like such a hasty levy of raw recruits raised for war, going through the goose-step, with pretty accurate shoulders, and feet of distracting degrees of extension, enough to craze a rhythmical drill-sergeant.

I exulted at the first reading, shuddered at the second, and at the third felt desperate, destroyed them and sat staring at vacancy as if I had now lost the power of speech.
At last I flung away idleness and came to a good resolution; and I carried it through.

I studied at a famous German university, not far from Hanover.

My father, after discussing my project with me from the point of view of amazement, settled himself in the University town, a place of hopeless dulness, where the stones of the streets and the houses seemed to have got their knotty problem to brood over, and never knew holiday.