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Letters of Alexander von Humboldt to Varnhagen von Ense. / From 1827 to 1858. With extracts from Varnhagen's diaries, and letters of Varnhagen and others to Humboldt cover

Letters of Alexander von Humboldt to Varnhagen von Ense. / From 1827 to 1858. With extracts from Varnhagen's diaries, and letters of Varnhagen and others to Humboldt

Chapter 175: 167. HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.
By Alexander von Humboldt
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Essays, Letters & SpeechesGerman LiteratureHistory - Modern (1750+)

About This Book

A curated correspondence collects letters from Alexander von Humboldt to his friend and confidant Varnhagen von Ense, supplemented by diary excerpts and letters from other contemporaries. The missives blend personal friendship with professional exchange, discussing scientific observations, lectures, manuscripts, travels, and reactions to peers and events. Editorial apparatus preserves original phrasing and provides contextual notes and extracts that illuminate relationships and chronology. The selection highlights the writer’s methods of observation, precise descriptive habits, and modes of intellectual collaboration. Together the documents form a compact portrait of an engaged scholar whose private reflections and public endeavors intersect across a wide range of topics.

167.
HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.

Berlin, April 26th, 1855.

Revered Friend—A strange missionary experiment, enveloped in a somewhat idyllic ghost story, political and religious, in a style of singular “finish” and bombast, which I cannot refrain from showing to you. I take it to be the work of a male author.

The saturnalia of despotism and of flatteries, the wanton festival of oblivion (as if there was no history of 1813 and ’14), is now played out among the free insular people, a kind of monkey comedy. There is only this consolation which uplifts my spirit, that out of all this something will arise, which both parties do not at all intend. That is, le principe, which outlives us all. I am so cruel as to include you too. To my brother, Wilhelm, the Kassel book seems to have done good up there. In old attachment and reverence,

Your faithful
A. Humboldt.
Wednesday.

Be good enough to return the ghost story, by all means.

Note by Varnhagen to Humboldt’s Letter of April 26th, 1855.—A “stranger is emboldened to transmit words of power to the spirit.” “They are given to her with the order to repeat them.” In case Humboldt should answer, he is requested to send the letter with the chiffre A. W., to the store on the left of the house, at No. 120 Linden Street, and receive further details. A wanderer is described as sitting down to rest. Brother Wilhelm appears to brother Alexander and exhorts him to think of the kingdom of heaven, and how splendid it is up there, how misty on earth. As a token of identity, he reminds him of the eighteenth warm birth-day, “where they swore to love each other,” an oath which reaches beyond the portals of death, and which he now fulfils. It is a bombastic farrago, frequently repeating the word “finish,” which strikes the reader as eminently inappropriate.

Of the above-named direction Humboldt observes: “That it is the boarding-school of Frau von Wenkstern and Widow Poppe.”