The saturnalia of despotism and of flatteries, the wanton festival of oblivion (as if there was no history of 1813 and ’14), is now played out among the free insular people, a kind of monkey comedy. There is only this consolation which uplifts my spirit, that out of all this something will arise, which both parties do not at all intend. That is, le principe, which outlives us all. I am so cruel as to include you too. To my brother, Wilhelm, the Kassel book seems to have done good up there. In old attachment and reverence,

Your faithful

A. Humboldt.

Wednesday.

Be good enough to return the ghost story, by all means.

Note by Varnhagen to Humboldt’s Letter of April 26th, 1855.—A “stranger is emboldened to transmit words of power to the spirit.” “They are given to her with the order to repeat them.” In case Humboldt should answer, he is requested to send the letter with the chiffre A. W., to the store on the left of the house, at No. 120 Linden Street, and receive further details. A wanderer is described as sitting down to rest. Brother Wilhelm appears to brother Alexander and exhorts him to think of the kingdom of heaven, and how splendid it is up there, how misty on earth. As a token of identity, he reminds him of the eighteenth warm birth-day, “where they swore to love each other,” an oath which reaches beyond the portals of death, and which he now fulfils. It is a bombastic farrago, frequently repeating the word “finish,” which strikes the reader as eminently inappropriate.

Of the above-named direction Humboldt observes: “That it is the boarding-school of Frau von Wenkstern and Widow Poppe.”

168.
HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.

Berlin, August 9th, 1855.

I had already heard with sorrow from the gifted Princess von Wittgenstein, that you, noble friend, suffered more than usually. Receive me with indulgence on Saturday, about 10 o’clock, in spite of my long absence, and of my inconvenient trilogy, Berlin, Tegel, and Potsdam. I shall then also bring you a few lines of thanks to your cousin, the Imperial Brazilian Chargé d’Affaires in Madrid. His history, founded upon archival monuments, seems to become of great importance; but what a strange missive without adding the first pages, and notes also without a beginning.[[75]] I doubt of my ever catching those commencements in my cosmic disorder. As I spent almost an hour alone with the Prince of Prussia yesterday, I shall be able to tell you something not uninteresting, although not at all decisive. The Prince, whom I take to be veracious, assures me of having always asserted, faithful to his principles, that war would probably have been avoided, if Prussia and Austria had from the first co-operated actively with the Western powers against Russia. They answered in St. Petersburg that the Emperor would not have yielded, but this the Prince doubted....