6.
HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.

Berlin, 26th of April, 1830.

I have just come home from Potsdam, and find your dear letter and your present, so very agreeable to me. The “Zinzendorf”[[5]] will delight me very, very much. He is an individual physiognomy like Lavater and Cardanus. The recent pietism, which began to break out at Halle, made me smile. I rejoice that you will kindly accept my “Cri de Pétersbourg”—it is a parody recited at Court—the forced work of two nights; an essay to flatter without self-degradation, to say how things should be. As you and your high-gifted wife, my ancient and kind friend, rejoice in anything agreeable that happens to me, I wish to say that the King sends me to the Emperor to attend the meeting of the Potentates. I shall probably go with the Crown-Prince, who will meet the Empress at Fischbach.

Yours,

A. Ht.

Zinzendorf’s letters to the Saviour were rather more legible.[[6]]

7.
HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.

Berlin, July 9th, 1830.

Please accept for yourself and your highminded and excellent lady my sincerest thanks for your new present, so agreeable to me.[[7]] I was not personally acquainted with the man whose eccentricities you have so æsthetically described. He was one of those who shine by their personal appearance; their lives are of greater effect than their writings. A man who boasts that his recollections go back to the first year of his life (how differently the Margravine judged things, when she says: “J’étais un enfant très précoce—à deux ans je savais parler, à trois ans je marchais!”); a man who owns a guardian angel in a black cloak, like Cardanus—who makes love to old maids, without being drunk, only in order to convert the same to virtue and reading; a man, to whom the fate of German professors under German princes appears more tragical than that of the Greeks—such a man cannot but be admired—as a curiosity! The “Kirchen-Zeitung” will never inscribe his name in the list of “the faithful,” and the Schimmelmanns will hardly thank you, my most honored friend, that the work recalls the Danish-Holstein saturnalia of sentimental demagogism.

I am very much gratified that you will take “Hardenberg” in hand. It is a difficult but satisfactory task, if you be careful to separate the epochs, and provided his life be judged without party hatred, which seems to have subsided at last, with regard to Hegel in the Academy.