[92] Frau Lepsius was the daughter of the celebrated composer, Klein, and many a friend of music will be glad to hear all that her aunts in Cologne related to Frau Elizabeth, regarding the early history of her father, when she visited them at Berlin in 1856. He was the son of a musician who died suddenly, and left his wife and children, the youngest only seven months old, without means. At that time Bernard Klein was twenty-one years old, and immediately announced that he should support his mother and brothers and sisters by giving music lessons. He did this faithfully and with serene confidence in better days to come. The mother always had to care for his clothes, for he paid no attention to his external appearance. He once visited a friend who complained that he had no coat. He gave him his own in entire faith that he had two, but when he got home he found that he had made a mistake, and must buy himself a new one. As a child he had wished to become a merchant, and not to learn music, but he was suddenly seized by a passion for music, and said to his mother: “Now if I had become a merchant, and were so rich that I could drive four horses, I would rather be a music teacher.” Not long after his father’s death he went to Paris with Begas for two years, and there studied music under Cherubini. In 1818 he went to Berlin. Ten years after, as a famous composer, he returned to Berlin, to be present at a great musical festival, at which his “Jephta” was performed with great applause.
[93] Frau von Bunsen, as I see by Hare’s biography, was at that time in Wildbad and Baden.
[94] Un noser, the good being, the Divinity as the author of all good, the Greek Agathodemon.
[95] Both daughters are long since married: Anna to Professor Valentiner, the astronomer, in Carlsruhe, Elizabeth to Pastor Siegel, who lived first in Tegel, afterwards in Neuenhagen near Berlin. Richard, the eldest son, is professor of geology and mineralogy at the Academy of Technology at Darmstadt, and married to the daughter of Ernest Curtius. Bernard, lecturer on chemistry at the Senkenberg Institute at Frankfort on the Main, is married to a daughter of Professor Pauli, the Göttingen historian, since deceased. Reinhold is a painter. The father had a beautiful studio built in the new house in Kleist street for his talented son, and Johannes, after first devoting himself to philosophical studies with the greatest success, has recently passed his theological examination.
[96] Charles Richard George Lepsius, born on the nineteenth of September, 1851.
[97] From the pamphlet written by father Lepsius on the occasion of the baptism of his oldest grandson Richard, entitled: “The ancestors of the Lepsius Family, Naumburg, 1851,” we see that the family of Lepsius was originally called Leps, and appears to be indebted for its name to the little village of Leps, in the Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau, the ancestral home of the family. It is derived perhaps from the Wendish Lipz, the linden-tree, which word must also be the root of the name of the city of Leipsic. The oldest authentic ancestor is the master tawer, George Leps, at Trebbin in the Mittelmark, who died in 1699. The grandson of this George was the first who changed the name Leps into Lepsius. His father, in addition to the tawer’s craft, carried on a trade in leather and wool, “and was well off, and held in respect and esteem by his fellow citizens.” At the baptism of his child, as if he designed him for a scholar, he bestowed upon him the Latin names, Petrus Christophorus. The latter it was who removed the family to Naumburg, and as Dr. jur. he was administrator of several courts, provost of the cathedral, etc. He died in 1793. He, the great grandfather of Richard Lepsius, like his grandfather and father, was a lawyer.
[98] From the post of ambassador to London.
[99] See page 38.
[100] In “Kurfürst” (Elector) the first syllable means “cure,” and the second “prince.”—Trans.
[101] A German expression for housewife.—Trans.