But the train is in motion, the trumpet has sounded, and we are off through the darkness, and along the slightly undulating flats, on our way to Berlin. We found ourselves in company with a pleasant Frenchman en route from the embassy in London to the embassy in Berlin; and before our most unanimous deliberations on the affairs of the East had come to a close, we found ourselves at the end of our journey, and by 10 P.M. had reached our quarters in the Hôtel de Russie.
Berlin, how many beauties and attractions dost thou present to the stranger who steps out for the first time from this hotel, and, walking a few yards, places himself in the centre of the Unter den Linden, with his back to the river and bridge. Leisurely he feasts his eyes as he turns, now to the right and now to the left, now gazing down the long vista which terminates at the Brandenburg gate, now turning towards the arsenal and the museum, and now farther round towards the cathedral and the royal palace. Architecture, sculpture, and the arts of decoration and design, all contribute their attractions; massing, grouping, and colouring, add their effects upon the intelligent eye, while the heart is touched by the mementoes of the past which here and there arrest his glance, the grateful homage to the departed which the monumental statuary exhibits, the love of country breathing from brief but frequent inscriptions, and over all the love and veneration of both king and people for the Great Frederick, the founder of the Prussian fortunes. Deeper than all the other sights which thus first arrest the stranger’s eye, the monument to Frederick and his times will touch and impress the sensitive stranger. On his war steed there he rides, the iron man, the observed of all eyes, surrounded, it is true, by the generals who rose to fame beneath his banner, but not less conspicuously by the statesmen who led his civil armies, by the poets and great writers whom he esteemed and imitated, by the advancers of science in his time, and by those who ornamented his reign through the decorations of the fine arts,—all here find their place side by side, attendant upon the great monarch, at once giving and receiving lustre. It is a monument to the age rather than to the man—or, we might rather say, to the man and his age; and the lover of abstract art, and the worshipper of modern progress, will equally admire the design and execution of this interesting monument. We were touched by a feature in the inscription, which others have no doubt noticed as well as ourselves. The words of the whole inscription are: “To Frederick the Great, Frederick-William III., 1850, completed by Frederick-William IV., 1851.” Two kings emulous of the distinction of dedicating this monument to their illustrious predecessor! This scarcely expresses more highly the mutual veneration of both father and son for the national hero whose blood they boast of, than it bespeaks their pride in the work of art it was their happiness to be able to dedicate to his memory. How many will admire and cherish in it the genius of art, who will deplore and condemn the genius of war to which the great hero offered his most ardent and most costly sacrifices!
Yet the most deadly haters of war cannot but acknowledge that there is something sublime in the special features of Frederick’s character, which the letters recently published have disclosed. Oppressed by the anxieties consequent upon military disasters, and apprehensive of further defeats, in which he sees the possibility of himself being taken prisoner, he writes to his minister, and prescribes the course to be taken for the safety of the royal family in such an eventuality. And then, speaking of his own possible position, and of the compulsion which might be exercised upon him as a prisoner, he commands them to attend to no instructions or orders he may issue while detained a prisoner, and no longer to be regarded as a free agent. He is of a great mind who knows, can anticipate, and provide against the special or possible weaknesses of his bodily nature. And so Frederick, dreading what impatience for liberty or personal suffering might possibly force from him in such circumstances, lays upon his servants, while free, his heaviest commands to regard him no more than one dead, should he happen to become a prisoner, and to consider not his state or condition or written orders then, but solely the tenor and substance of what he now writes, viewed in connection with the interests of his people and his country. How many men have lived to despise themselves for acts of weakness, of folly, or of vice, which in feeble hours they have committed! Here we have the philosophical hero providing for the possible contingency of such an hour of bodily weakness or mental imbecility casting its heavy shadows over him! There is in this trait something not only for descendants to be proud of, and for a people to venerate, but for strangers of other nations also to respect and admire.
The character of the society in Berlin is familiar to most travellers. To those who have access to diplomatic circles, the evening reunions in the hotels of the ambassadors are described as agreeable in a high degree. But of real Berlin hospitality in the houses of the Berlin aristocracy, or of the nobles whose domains are in the provinces, little is either to be seen or said. We had no leisure to seek an entrée to the houses of imperial and kingly representatives, then over head and ears in notes, rejoinders, protocols, and despatches, and teased every hour of the night by thundering couriers and impatient despatch-boxes. We had, indeed, occasion to experience, as we had long before done in St Petersburg, the kindness and affable attention of Lord Bloomfield, and were happy to find that his long residence abroad had not lessened his keen sympathy with English feeling, nor his contact with Prussian vacillation made him undecided as to the conduct and policy of England in the then approaching crisis.
But Berlin boasts a scientific society, to which it was our pride and happiness to obtain an easy introduction. Every one is acquainted with some of the numerous names which adorn the list of scientific men who form the educational staff of the University of Berlin, or who hold official situations of various kinds in the Prussian capital. No city in Germany can boast of so many men of real eminence as illustrators and discoverers in the several walks of science; and nowhere will you find a pleasanter, franker, happier, more unpretending, jolly, and good-natured a set of evening companions, over a bottle of good Rhine wine and a petit souper, than these same distinguished philosophers!
One of the most agreeable of the evening meetings at which the stranger may have the fortune to meet the greater part of the men of science in Berlin, is that of the Geographical Society. The President is the distinguished Carl Ritter, who was in the chair when we attended, and around him were many whom we had come to see. But on turning over the leaves of the book of travels of our friend Professor Silliman, of which we have already spoken, we find an account of the meeting of the same Society at which he was present two years before, which appears so exact a photograph of the one at which we assisted that we shall not scruple to quote his words.
“Several papers were read on geographical subjects, and different gentlemen were called upon to elucidate particular topics. Their course is, not only to illustrate topography, but all allied themes, including the different branches of natural history and of meteorology that are connected with the country under consideration. In this manner the discussions become fruitful of instruction and entertainment, and the interest is greatly enhanced.
“A supper followed in the great room of the Society. Among the eminent men present whose fame was known to us at home were Professor Ehrenberg, the philosopher of the microscopic world; the two brothers Rose; Gustav, of mineralogy, and Heinrich, of analytical chemistry; Dove, the meteorologist and physicist; Magnus, of electro-magnetism; Poggendorff, the editor of the well-known journal which bears his name; Mitscherlich, of general and applied chemistry, besides many others almost equally distinguished. We received a warm welcome to Berlin, and throughout the evening the most kind and cordial treatment.”[[32]]
We, too, had the pleasure of eating and drinking with all these great men. We had the satisfaction also, among the papers read, to hear one by our friend Professor Ehrenberg, on microscopic forms of life which exist in the bottom of the Atlantic, under the enormous pressure of a thousand feet of water. They are found in a fine calcareous mud or chalk which covers the sea-bottom, and which was fished up from this and still greater depths by Lieutenant Maury, of the United States’ coast survey. Ehrenberg, as a scientific man, enjoys the singular distinction, we might almost say felicity, not only of having discovered a new world, but of living to see it very widely explored, and of having himself been, and still being, its chief investigator. His microscope and his pencil are as obedient to him as ever, eye and hand as piercing, as steady, and as truthful as ever; and, to all appearance, microscopic investigation, and the classification of microscopic life, must assume a new phase under the guidance of some new genius, before Ehrenberg cease both himself to steer, and mainly to man and work, the ship which he built, and rigged, and launched, and for so many years has guided on its voyage of discovery.
Among the curiosities of the microscopic world which Ehrenberg has investigated, we may notice in this place, as likely to interest our readers, his singular suggestion in relation to the foundations of the city of Berlin. This city stands in the midst of an infertile flat plain, through which the river Spree wends its slow way, passing through the centre of the city itself. Beneath the present “streets of palaces and walks of state” exists a deep bog of black peat, through which sinkings and borings in search of water have frequently been carried. This peat, at the depth of fifty feet below the surface, swarms at this moment with infusorial life. Countless myriads of microscopic animals, at this great depth, beneath the pressure of the superincumbent earth and streets, live and die in the usual course of microscopic life. They move among each other, and wriggle, to human sense, invisible; so that the whole mass of peaty matter is in a state of constant and usually insensible movement. But in Berlin the houses crack at times, and yawn and suffer unaccountable damage, even where the foundations seem to have been laid with care. And this, our philosopher has conjectured, may be owing to the changes and motions of his invisible world—the sum of the almost infinite insensible efforts of the tiny forms producing at times, when they conspire in the same direction, the sensible and visible movements of the surface by which the houses that stand upon it are deranged! The conjecture is curious, the cause a singular one, but who shall say that it is inadequate to the effect?