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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 184: 176. 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.

176.
HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.

Berlin, September 11th, 1856.

Knowing the warm interest you take, my dear friend, in the slavery question, and in what concerns myself, I send you the last letter of Gerolt, which was very long in coming, but which will certainly command your attention. Most unfortunately Buchanan will be the next President, and not Fremont, the traveller of great acquirements, who has four times travelled the land route to San Francisco, surveying the country over which he passed, to whom it is owing that California did become a free State. Do not return the letter, nor the enclosure. On the heels of this African absurdity comes another folly, of a more serious cast, though richly fraught with ridicule, not royalistic so much as aristocratically Bernese, and spiced with a little railroad speculation as to whether the route by the way of Neufchatel or that by way of Chaux de Fonds is to be preferred! And the heroic Count,[81] who executes the coup d’état à la Napoleon, whence did he derive his inspiration? From Berlin, while we have a minister at the Diet, whom at this day we pretend never to have recognised. How are these things to be reconciled? We shall have a similar fate with our three ultramarine possessions, the Jade, the Zollern, discovered by Columbus Stillfried, and Neufchatel. I feel for the Constantinopolitan Pourtalès, who finds himself involved in an awkward conflict between his dynasty (the Prussian earldom) and his official liberalism. It is fortunate that the mouth of the English Parliament is still closed.

Your faithful
A. v. Humboldt.