145.HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.
Potsdam,November 1st, 1851.
Potsdam,November 1st, 1851.
Potsdam,November 1st, 1851.
Potsdam,November 1st, 1851.
You have given me an inexpressible pleasure, my dear, my noble friend, by your kind letter. I amheavily in your debt, and my long silence and apparent neglect might have provoked some suspicions of coolness or diversity on matters of opinion. With a man of your mind and goodness of heart I ought to have entertained no such apprehensions. Before I received your dear letter with Baader’s portrait, it was my intention to bring you personally the third volume of Kosmos (two parts in one), now finished with great difficulty, and which unfortunately is exclusively astronomical. I was certain of a kind reception, and your letter of the 24th of October, which had been left behind in my house at Berlin, confirmed my purpose. Ottilie von Goethe gives me cheering news in regard to your health. As usual you will combat her opinion. But what astonished me was, that the president of the council, usually cold as a glacier, was delighted with Ottilie, and is entirely disposed to gratify her wish for the appointment of Wolfgang, at the Prussian embassy at Rome. Was it necessary, however, for Wolfgang, after publishing a very able little work on Nature and Legislation, to go to press with a collection of poems, containing but rare gleams of imagination?
Written with the devotion of better days, in a time of gloom and feebleness, by
A. v. Humboldt.
A. v. Humboldt.
A. v. Humboldt.
A. v. Humboldt.
On the 24th of November, 1851, Varnhagen wrotein his diary: “Backbiters are busy with Humboldt. Littleness and mediocrity, conscious of their nothingness beside him, combine their envy and spite, and thereby hope to be something. The one comes to the other with smiles, and makes him the confidant of the dislike he entertains, and of the foibles and defects he claims to have detected. The other welcomes the suggestion, responds with similar remarks, they clasp each other’s hands, and are fast friends in enmity of the hero. Those who pretend to be the most faithful lend themselves to such intrigues. Singly they amount to nothing, but when lumped together they constitute a stumbling-block, which obstructs the light of day, interferes with what is good, and destroys life and spirits: such vermin tormented Goethe, and now they torment Humboldt. I know these fellows by experience; in Rahel’s time I have seen my fill of it! The brothers, the nieces, how glad they would be to make common cause with the most inferior beings, to place their united mediocrity above the genial power of heart and mind, by which even they were yet constantly lighted and warmed! Humboldt’s weak points are well known, he does nothing in secret, men see him as he is; but his greatness is unimpaired, the greatness of his mind and the equal greatness of his heart. And eighty years—what a bulwark! Who will dare assail it?”