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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 193: 185. METTERNICH TO HUMBOLDT.
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.

185.
METTERNICH TO HUMBOLDT.

Koenigswart, October 14th, 1856.

My old Friend!—I received gratefully the information on the stele which Herr Brugsch calls by my name, and I beg of you to hand over to the learned investigator the words you find inclosed. After my return to Vienna, I shall avail myself of the interpretation, already so instructive, of the monument, to point out the way to archæologists in which they may obtain copies, by an advertisement. I did not doubt that I could not do better than to address you for light on the scientific value of the present of Mehemed Ali, which for many years slept in my multifarious collections, and of which I was quite ignorant. May you and Herr Brugsch receive my most sincere thanks.

I have had the good fortune to find the King in excellent health, and in the usual kind disposition towards myself. Great recollections in long lives are a fine bond between man and man, the power of which is well tried when it has resisted the storms of time. It is more than half a century since my first intercourse with the young heir-apparent. What vicissitudes have occupied this long interval is matter of history. That they have never deprived me of the confidence of the two kings, father and son, is with me a source of pride—that is to say, of a sensation which the term peace of mind and heart would better characterize than the unsafe word that has escaped my pen.

You, three years my senior, have just celebrated your eighty-seventh birth-day. That you and I have understood “the art of living,” we may confess. That we shall do well to cultivate it still longer, is not to be denied.

With sincere friendship and esteem,
Metternich.