Her struggle for greater calmness and a more equable nature is touching, as is the loving humility with which she recognizes his superiority; and often does a phrase, an interjection, in the midst of matter-of-fact records, give expression to her true and tender love. She says: “It is grand in Richard, that he can take everything so naturally. It comes from his perfect honesty; if I could only educate myself up to him.” When her first little daughter was able to stand alone she wrote: “Richard and Anna, these names embrace my whole happiness, the fragrant blooming shower of blessings which Our Father in Heaven pours upon me from the abundant horn of plenty of His grace and love.”
The diaries are replete with such expressions. Especially neat and pointed are the little sketches of eminent men drawn by the young wife. Whoever was personally acquainted with Master Peter Cornelius, (he was a friend of my mother’s, and indeed once made a portrait of me as a boy), will admit that it would not be possible to depict his external appearance more neatly and pointedly than in the following words from the diary of Frau Lepsius. She writes: “A little, thick-set man, with a black peruke, piercing black eyes, wide, kindly mouth, and with thought upon his wrinkled brow.”
On the twenty-fifth of July, 1847, a daughter was granted to the young couple. She received the name of Isis Anna. Minister Jonas, the liberal-minded pastor of the household, found nothing wrong in the choice of the name of the heathen divinity Isis, but strange to say, Bunsen took serious exception to it, and gave expression to his disapproval in a letter. The happy father answered in the following letter, in which we see pleasantly manifested the joyous zest in life by which he was at that time animated.
“Our little Isis gives us infinite delight; she thrives splendidly. Her mamma has carried her point by giving her the name of Anna. I foresaw that I should furnish a subject for witticisms, in the name of Isis, to those people in Berlin who honor us with their attention. It is necessary to throw them a few crumbs of that sort from time to time, so that they may not devise something worse. I was as little able to find any serious scandal in it as was the excellent Jonas who administered the baptism. Scarcely any one keeps to the Calendar for the sake of the Calendar itself, and I should much prefer Friedhelm and Maxhelene, the children’s names recently given by Ranke, to the Fides, Spes and Charitas, or Titus, Ptolemeus, Sosthenes, Lot, Habakkuk, Methuselah, etc., of the Calendar. Yet Ranke comes very near to offending against the only limitation which I should admit; that of not choosing ludicrous names. Take Erica, Berenice, (that is Veronica,) or Emin, which is the name of young Wildenbruch, the elder brother of the talented poet Ernest von Wildenbruch; no one has anything against such names as these and innumerable others, though they too are as little in the Calendar, and have as little Christian precedent, as a hundred thousand ἁπαξ λεγόμευα from the birth of Christ to our time, in all Christian countries. Besides, Isis, to every one who knows the Egyptian goddess, is a very honorable name, which can only recall the author of all good, a faithful spouse and sister, the model and recognized prototype of all queens. What the Romans made of her need trouble us as little as their opinion of the image of Jehovah in the Jewish temple, and can as little cast suspicion upon her as can the Christianity of the Königsberg impostors upon the name of Christian. If, in another year, I have a boy to baptize I shall not be obliged to call him Apis, as Osiris is already received in the Christian Calendar, under a much more beautiful form as Onophrius.[94] But I will take care not to impose upon him the equally Christian name of the Typhon, “Set.” I should like to see any one who would not as utterly fail in any theory for the giving of Christian names, as did, not long since, the law forbidding the Jews to bear Christian names. But, on the other hand, I consider it very wise to give the clergy a certain freedom to exclude unsuitable, scandalous names of every kind, according to their own honest judgment.”
Little Anna was followed by a second girl, Elizabeth,[95] and the latter by four boys, to the delight of the grandfather in Naumburg. For although he had been blessed with six sons and three daughters, strangely enough, he had had bestowed upon him no other “Lepsius” grandchildren that those who sprung from the marriage of his son Richard.
After the christening of Anna the family spent some delightful weeks in lovely Ilsenburg. The winter was passed in cheerful sociability and quiet enjoyment of their first-born, till in February, 1848, all other interests were entirely overshadowed by the news of the revolution at Paris. Lepsius had already foreseen when in Paris the downfall of the citizen king Louis Philippe, and though he hoped that the next movement for freedom in France would be of benefit to the political development of Germany and Prussia, yet he feared that in those countries also violent uprisings of the people would be unavoidable.
Each day was filled with increasing anxiety, the danger approached more closely, and yet,—a notable sight—there was no break in the fulfillment of the husband’s duties, and everything held its accustomed course in the household, as well as in the social life of the capital. Apprehension was aroused for Vienna, on account of the dreadful Metternich administration; all ears were on the watch for every rumor. The Emperor of Russia was said to have been poisoned, Metternich to have been seized with an apoplectic fit in consequence of the news from Paris, and the Pope to have taken flight, and abandoned Rome. In spite of the tumult of the people on the streets during every evening of this remarkably beautiful month of March, anxiety for Berlin was dissipated, as in well informed circles they believed it certain that the King was inclined to make great concessions. At last political interests overcame all others, and the grave academical instructor Lepsius, in his private lectures conversed with his pupils on the events of the day, instead of discussing Egyptology. Then on the eighteenth of March the Berlin revolution broke out, in the midst of the concessions of the King, and the rejoicing of the populace. We are in possession of interesting information on the course of this revolution, from the husband as well as from the wife. In those days politics had such power over every true man that even Lepsius took part in them incidentally. When Abeken brought him a paper much needed just at that time, a good concise proclamation for the Prince of Prussia, whom Lepsius especially esteemed, he immediately carried it to the press which was working for him, and had the foreman print, post, and distribute it. He understood perfectly that the revolution indicated a great step forward in the political life of his Fatherland, and his wife says that the Kreuzzeitung people, in an underhand way, placed them in a false position. The Bismarck family had lived in the same house with the Lepsiuses, and once when popular songs of liberty and “Not yet, not yet, is Poland lost,” had been sung during a social evening at their rooms, Frau Elizabeth writes: “Thank God that the Bismarcks have left, or he would have got us into the Kreuzzeitung as Republicans.” How times and men change! These latter, fortunately, sometimes to better and greater.
In September, 1848, Lepsius went to Frankfort, and from his letters to his wife we know with what warm interest he there followed the parliamentary transactions in St. Paul’s Church. He had learned many things from the statesman Bunsen, and we have seen (page 122) how keenly he followed, from time to time, the course of ecclesiastical politics in Prussia. On the whole his political opinions agreed with those of his patron in London. He wished to be not only a scholar and father, but a citizen also, and in 1848, he held it right “that every one should at least follow some banner, and a bad one rather than none at all.”
In the beginning of the year 1849, the political situation threatened to make it intolerable for his father to remain in Naumburg, under the authority of the town commissioners of that place (he had resigned his public office in 1847). Therefore Richard wrote to him: “If you should actually resolve to leave Naumburg, here in Berlin you would certainly find much the greatest satisfaction for your higher intellectual pursuits and interests, which in themselves rank far above all political interests. Libraries, art collections, learned societies of every kind would be open to you, and in the more restricted circle of our own household, our relations and most intimate friends, you would once more find, as of old, peace, happiness and love, which have grown to be the greatest necessity of your life.”
In spite of the slight value which he allotted in these sentences to political interests, he yet followed the political development of his Fatherland to the last with warm sympathy. In 1849 he attributed the King’s change to a policy independent of Austria to Bunsen’s influence, and as events continued to shape themselves in a more and more gloomy fashion, he constantly insisted upon the necessity for a stronger exhibition of Prussian power, as due to the hegemony of Germany.