Stranded, by want of floating or other capital, at Wittenberg, he enters
himself, with help from home, as a student there, but soon migrates again
to Berlin, which had been his goal when making his hegira from Leipzig.
In Berlin he remained three years, applying himself to his chosen calling
of author at all work, by doing whatever honest job offered
itself,--verse, criticism, or translation,--and profitably studious in a
very wide range of languages and their literature. Above all, he learned
the great secret, which his stalwart English contemporary, Johnson, also
acquired, of being able to "dine heartily" for threepence.
Meanwhile he continues in a kind of colonial dependence on the parsonage
at Camenz, the bonds gradually slackening, sometimes shaken a little
rudely, and always giving alarming hints of approaching and inevitable
autonomy. From the few home letters of Lessing which remain, (covering
the period before 1753, there are only eight in all,) we are able to
surmise that a pretty constant maternal cluck and shrill paternal warning
were kept up from the home coop. We find Lessing defending the morality
of the stage and his own private morals against charges and suspicions of
his parents, and even making the awful confession that he does not
consider the Christian religion itself as a thing "to be taken on trust,"
nor a Christian by mere tradition so valuable a member of society as "one
who has _prudently_ doubted, and by the way of examination has arrived at
conviction, or at least striven to arrive.
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