obert Owen had been over to America and had met Emerson, and very naturally caught it. When he returned home he gave young Tyndall a copy of Emerson's first book, the "Essay on Nature," published anonymously.
Tyndall read and re-read the book, and read it aloud to others and spoke of it as a "message from the gods."
He also read every word that Carlyle put in print. It was Carlyle who introduced him to German philosophy and German literature, and fired him with a desire to see for himself what Germany was doing.
Germany had still another mystic tie that drew him thitherward. It was at Marburg, Germany, that his illustrious namesake had published his translation of the Bible.
At Marburg there was a University, small, 't was true, but its simplicity and the cheapness of living there were recommendations. So to Marburg he went. Tyndall found lodgings in a little street called "Heretics' Row." Possibly there be people who think that Tyndall's taking a room in such a street was chance, too. Chance is natural law not understood.
Marburg is a very lovely little town that clings amid a forest of trees to the rocky hillside overlooking the River Lahn. Tyndall was very happy at Marburg, and at times very miserable. The beauty of the place appealed to him. He was a climber by nature, and the hills were a continual temptation.
But the language was new; and before this his work had all been of a practical kind. College seems small and trivial after you have been in the actual world of affairs. But Tyndall did not give up. He rose every morning at six, took his cold bath, dressed and ran up the hill half a mile and back. He breakfasted with the family, that he might talk German. Then he dived into differential calculus and philosophical abstrusities. He was not sent to college: he went. And he made college give up all it had. On the wall of his room, as a sort of ornamental frieze in charcoal, he wrote this from Emerson: "High knowledge and great strength are within the reach of every man who unflinchingly enacts his best."
Down in the town was a bronze bust of a man who wrote for it the following inscription: "This is the face of a man who has struggled energetically."
One might almost imagine that Hawthorne had received from Tyndall the hint which evolved itself into that fine story, "The Great Stone Face."
The bust just mentioned, attracted John Tyndall for another reason: Carlyle had written of the man it symboled: "Reader, to thee, thyself, even now, he has one counsel to give, the secret of his whole poetic alchemy. Think of living! Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the sons of earth, is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. It is thine own; it is all thou hast with which to front eternity. Work, then, even as he has done—like a star, unhasting and unresting."