English undergraduates told me what philosophical and historical works were being most read in the universities of Great Britain; Bohemian students explained to me that in the German philosophical world Kant had quite outshone Hegel and put him in the background.
The lady members of an American family from Boston treated me quite maternally; the wife suggested almost at once, in the railway-carriage, that I should give her when we reached the hotel whatever linen or clothes I had that wanted repairs; she would be very pleased to mend them for me. The husband, who was very pious and good-natured, had all his pockets full of little hymn-books and in his memorandum book a quantity of newspaper cuttings of devotional verse, which he now and then read aloud enthusiastically.
But I also met with Americans of quite a different cast. A young student from Harvard University, who, for that matter, was not in love with the Germans and declared that the United States could with difficulty absorb and digest those who were settled there, surprised me with his view that in the future Bismarck would come to be regarded as no less a figure than Cavour. The admiration of contemporary educated thought was then centred around Cavour, whereas Bismarck had hitherto only encountered passionate aversion outside Germany, and even in Germany was the object of much hatred. This student roused me into thinking about Bismarck for myself.
Having lain down, all bathed in perspiration, during the ascent without a guide of a mountain in Switzerland, I was accosted by a woman, who feared I had come to some harm. I walked on up with her. She turned out to be a young peasant woman from Normandy, who lived half-way up the mountain. She had accompanied her husband to Switzerland, but cursed her lot, and was always longing to be back in France. When I remarked that it must be some consolation to live in so lovely a place, she interrupted me with the most violent protests. A beautiful place! This! The steep mountain, the bristly fir-trees and pine-trees, the snow on the top and the lake deep down below--anything uglier it would be hard to conceive. No fields, no pasture-land, no apple-trees! No indeed! If she had to mention a country that really was beautiful, it was Normandy. There was plenty of food for all there, you did not need to go either up or down hill; there, thank God, it was flat. Did I think stones beautiful, perhaps? She had not been down in the valley for five months, and higher than her house she had never been and would never go; no, thank you, not she! She let her husband fetch what they required for the house; she herself sat and fretted all through the Winter; life then was almost more than she could bear.
On one of the steamers on the Lake of Lucerne, I caught, for the first time, a glimpse of Berthold Auerbach, who was very much admired by my comrades in Copenhagen and by myself.
At the hotel table at Lucerne I made the acquaintance of a Dutch captain from Batavia, an acquaintance productive of much pleasure to me. Before the soup was brought round I had pulled out a letter I had just received, opened it and begun to read it. A voice by my side said in French:
"Happy man! You are reading a letter in a woman's writing!" With that our acquaintance was made.
The captain was a man of forty, who in the course of an active life had had many and varied experiences and met with prosperity, but was suffering from a feeling of great void. His society was exceedingly attractive to me, and he related to me the main events of his life; but after one day's association only, we were obliged to part. All through my trip I had a curious feeling of every farewell on the journey being in all human probability a farewell for life, but had not realised it painfully before. But when next day the brave captain, whose home was far away in another quarter of the globe, held his hand out to say good- bye, I was much affected. "Till we meet again" said the captain.
"And where?"
"Till we meet again all and everywhere, for we live an eternal life; till we meet again in time and space, or outside time and space!"