At Göttingen, Humboldt found a friend among the eight hundred. At the house of Heyne he made the acquaintance of George Foster, Heyne's son-in-law, a man who exerted a remarkable and lasting influence over him. Foster was thirty-six; Humboldt, fifteen years his junior. He had been around the world with Captain Cook in his second voyage, and had published an able book upon the subject. He was skilled in chemistry, philosophy, literature, and politics, understood Latin, Greek, French, English, Dutch, and Italian, and was somewhat conversant with the Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Polish languages.
The influence of such a man can well be imagined. He became a guiding star to the young Göttingen student. If we could but estimate the value of right friendships in life! We flatter ourselves that we are too strong to be influenced, and yet we are greatly influenced for good or for evil by those with whom we associate. Humboldt always chose intellectual friends, and the natural result followed.
In the spring of 1790, he left Göttingen, and, with Foster and Van Genns, took a journey to the Lower Rhine, Holland, Belgium, England, and France, studying docks, mines, botanic gardens, manufactures, and churches, and visiting literary celebrities. Still the new friends did not take the place of the old, for he writes to Wegener: "I beseech you, dearest Wegener, by all the affection which you know I bear you, never to forget our brotherly love and friendship. You are infinitely more to me than I can ever be to you. I have now seen the most celebrated places in Germany, Holland, and England—but, believe me, I have in seeing them never been so happy as while sitting in Steinbart's arm-chair."
The influence of this journey was never lost. Sixty-eight years afterward, Humboldt said: "For the space of thirty years I have never known leisure but of an evening, and the half-century that I have spent in this ceaseless activity has been occupied in telling myself and others how much I owe my teacher and friend George Foster in the generalization of my views on nature, and in the strengthening and development of that which had already dawned in me, before those happy days of intimate friendship."
In the latter part of 1790, Humboldt went to Hamburg, to enter the School of Commerce. He wished to study political economy further, and to learn practical book-keeping. He wrote to a friend: "I am contented with my mode of life at Hamburg, but not happy, less happy even than at Göttingen, where the monotony of my existence was relieved by the society of one or two friends and the vicinity of some moss-grown mountains. I am, however, always contented when I feel that I am accomplishing the purpose I have in view.... My leisure hours are occupied with geology and botany.... In addition, I have begun to learn Danish and Swedish."
To Wegener he writes: "I have made considerable progress in general information, and I am beginning to be somewhat more satisfied with my attainments. I worked very hard at Göttingen, but all I have learned makes me feel only the more keenly how much remains still to know. My health suffered severely, but improved somewhat during my journey with Foster; yet even here I continue so closely occupied that I find it difficult to spare myself. There is an eager impulse within me, which often carries me, I fear, beyond the bounds of reason; and yet such impetuosity is always necessary to insure success."
The "eager impulse" was a sure indication of something to be accomplished by and by. Success does not come with half-hearted effort; it comes only through a force and persistence that will allow no barriers between us and the goal.
At Easter, 1791, Humboldt left Hamburg and hastened to the famous School of Mines at Freiberg, to study under the celebrated Werner. Here, as ever, he attached one ardent friend to himself, Freiesleben, a student in geology. Here every moment was occupied. He studied the works of the French chemists; Guyton de Moreau, Fourcroy, Lavoisier, and Berthollet. He was daily in the mines, from six o'clock till twelve. He crowded six lectures into each afternoon. He made a study of the vegetation of that lower world, from which the sunlight is ever excluded, and the results were used later in his comprehensive work, "Flora Subterranea Fribergensis." He wrote articles for several scientific journals. A busy life, indeed, for the young man of twenty-two!
His friend Freiesleben says of Humboldt at this time:—
"The salient points of his attractive character lay in his imperturbable good-nature, his benevolence and charity, his remarkable and unselfish amiability, his susceptibility of friendship and appreciation of nature; simplicity, candor, and the absence of all pretension characterized his whole being; he possessed conversational powers that made him always lively and entertaining, together with a degree of wit and humor that led him sometimes to waggishness. It was these admirable qualities which in later years enabled him to soften and attach to himself the untutored savages, among whom he dwelt for months at a time, which obtained for him in the civilized world admiration and sympathy wherever he went, and which gained for him, while a mere student, the esteem and devotion of all classes at Freiberg.